"Falsetto" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wahr? ist es wahr?" carolled David, in lady-like falsetto, with comic exaggeration of ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... doctors call "a man of full habit." He ate largely, drank deeply, slept heavily, but, alas! he was a bachelor. There was no comfortable woman in the room at the back of his workshop to call in sweet falsetto, "Benjamin, come to dinner! Come at once: the steak's getting cold!" As he used to say, "This my domicile lacks the female touch—there's too much tobacco-ashes an' cobwebs about it: the women seem kind o' scared ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... these remarks was fighting the battle of the recoverers of our great seventeenth century writers against the devotees of "correctness," and that in the very same context he makes the unpardonable assertion that Gibbon's manner is "the worst of all," and that Tacitus "writes in falsetto as compared to Tully." This is to "fight a prize" in the old phrase, not to judge from the catholic and universal standpoint of impartial criticism; and in order to reduce Coleridge's assertions to that standard we must abate nearly as much from his praise of Taylor ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... a posture of amazed intentness and was pointing upward at the overhanging boughs of a tree above their heads. A squirrel was poised thereon, gazing down motionless. Then, suddenly—a frightful thing happened. The creature seemed to speak. A strange falsetto voice, such as might befit so eerie a chance, sounded on the air—loud, distinct, heard far up the slope, and electrifying the assemblage near at hand that was gathering about the stand and ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... seemed less room for us than ever, except in the hateful cabin. The boys sang monotonously "for wind," quite convinced that the next breeze would be due to their efforts. A fat old man sang all night long in falsetto in three notes; it was unbearably silly and irritating, yet one could hardly stop the poor devil and rob him of his only pleasure in that dark night. We felt damp, restless and sleepless, and tried in vain to find some ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... decided preference for certain kinds of music, and actually try to imitate it. Gross tells of a friend of his who had a dog with which he often gave performances. The dog would accompany his master, when he sang in falsetto, with howls that were unmistakably attempts at singing, and which readily adapted themselves to the pitch of the tone. This was a musical accomplishment of which he was ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... at the Moon!" he mimicked her in falsetto. "Only wanted to die like a little fool and make me that much more ashamed of you!" Then his voice went gruff ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... the criminologist in the best falsetto tone he could muster. Then he disconnected with a smile. This was turning the tables with a vengeance. But he knew that he must be getting away from the den before the possible investigation by Warren or his lieutenant. There were many things he would have liked to study ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... made no impression upon its brilliant coloring. When, at about noontime, I received it from them I was in the vestibule of my uncle's house, a place always kept tightly closed during the hours of intense heat. From the wing of the house I heard my cousin singing in the thin and plaintive falsetto of a mountaineer; he often sang in that manner, and when he did so his voice always gave me a feeling of unusual melancholy as it broke the stillness of the late September noons. He sang over and over ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... park!" he cried in a shrill falsetto, "or I'll send for the constable to turn you off. Bah! You came to steal. You're no nephew of mine; I disown you! You're a common cheat—a ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... man's limbs, except the King's, were drawn in tension. Then from the prostrate body of the witch-doctor, whose legs and arms were twisted as in agony, whose dribbling mouth was closed like a vise, came a ventriloquous falsetto: ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... comedians—the East End. After him appeared Sergeant Andrews, disguised in one of Eliza's discarded skirts, with a wisp of straw on his head to represent a lady's hair. Some vulgar song he sang in a shrill, falsetto voice that caused great dismay among the pigs, as yet unused to the vagaries ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... the family Caesar conceived that Mlle. Cadet was the most intelligent. She was a French country girl, very jovial, blond, with a turned-up nose, and on the whole insignificant looking. When she spoke, her voice had certain falsetto ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... are you, Mrs. Green?" he said in a high falsetto, meant to represent the feminine voice. "And how's the darling baby? Such a duck! I'm dying to see him again! Oh, Delia, darling! There you are! So glad you could come! What a perfect darling of a dress, my dear. I know whose heart you'll break in that! Oh, Mr. Thompson!"—here ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... high, shrill falsetto that startled them, "then wot for did YOU pick up that piece o' gold in the road this arternoon, and say nothin' of it to the men who followed ye? Ye did; I seed yer! And ye didn't say nothin' of it to anybody; and ye ain't sayin' nothin' of it now ter maw! and ye've got it in yer vest! ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... became aware that some one was standing behind his chair. Turning around suddenly, he saw a missionary well known in the city slums,—the Rev. Mr. Pease,—and asked in his highest, shrillest, most complaining falsetto, "Well, what do YOU want?" Mr. Pease, a kindly, gentle, apologetic man, said deprecatingly, "Well, Mr. Greeley, I have come for a little help. We are still trying to save souls in the Five Points." "Oh," said Mr. Greeley, "go ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... other, "keeping it, I should say. Just imagine!" he added, pointing to the vinegar on the plate from which Lucia had been eating her artichoke, "pickling that falsetto of hers!" ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... not more fortunate in my guess with her. It was a wedding chorus, which I was willing to wager was the Japanese "Miserere"; but this error may have its significance after all. To us, in short, the music was execrable. A falsetto, and a grinding, singsong falsetto at that—the most disagreeable sound I ever heard in music—is very common, and highly esteemed. The instruments resemble banjos, and there is a harsh kind of drum accompaniment; but there is one larger string instrument, the Japanese piano, upon which much older ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... sad cell" and "Paynim shores" and Newstead's "monastic dome." The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native shore," was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" in the "Border Minstrelsy," and introduces some romantic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and the little foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of the last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shook himself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in his natural voice.[2] "Lara" is a tale of feudal days, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Ben Griebler, his little shrewd eyes sparkling, his voice more squeakily falsetto than ever, surveyed the youngster before him ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... back-cloth, rendering selections from popular Pekin revues on the drum, cymbal and one-stringed fiddle. There were the actors apparelled in the gorgeous costumes of old Cathay strutting mechanically through their parts, the female impersonators squeaking in shrill falsetto and putting in a lot of subtle fan-work. And there was the ubiquitous property-man drifting in and out among the performers, setting his fantastic house in order. We were actually within a mile of the Vimy Ridge, but we might have been away ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... the pale and hinted at the uncomfortable future that awaited them. He ran over the various denominations one by one, and one by one showed them to be worshipers of idols and followers after strange gods. He sank hoarsely into the bass and quavered up into falsetto and a chorus of "Amens!" and "Hallelujahs!" ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... bases of comedy were largely subordinated to exaggerated pathos, and in the domestic melodrama the experiences of insignificant persons of the middle class were presented for sympathetic consideration in the same falsetto fashion. Both forms (indeed, they were one in spirit) were extreme products of the romantic return to sentiment and democratic feeling. Both were enormously popular and, crossing the Channel, like ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... so soon as they should have clambered aboard and swung the long boat to its davits. Presently the attention of every man was drawn from his dreaming or his gossiping to the northern bank of the river. There, screaming at them in a cracked falsetto and with skinny arms outstretched, stood a strange ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 'bout ship!" now resounded through the ship as it was repeated in the variety of basses of the boatswain and his mates, at either hatchway—one of the youngsters of the watch running down at the same time to acquaint the officers, in his shrill falsetto, with that which had been roared out loud enough to startle even the deaf purser. The first-lieutenant, followed by the master, brushed by him, and was up the ladder before his supererogatory communication ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was already transpiring. In his falsetto voice he fairly screamed: "It is the slave Turan who stole the woman Tara from your throne room, O-Tar. He desecrated the dead chief I-Mal and wears ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... kind of people an artist must work with!" He lifted his arms to heaven, calling upon the high gods for pity; then, with a sudden turn of fury, ran to the back of the stage and came mincing forward evidently intending saturnine mimicry, repeating the ingenue's speech in a mocking falsetto: "Now what are you two good people conspiring about?" After that he whirled upon her, demanding with ferocity: "You've got something you can think with in your head, haven't you, Missmiss? Then what do you ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... foolish geese," said Father Rowley rising. "I'm not going to sit through another act. Come along, Mark, come along, come along. I am not happy. I am not happy," he cried in an absurd falsetto. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... glasses began to swear in his high falsetto. His ear had caught the phonograph operator in another ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... abundance of fictitious emotion and spurious rhetoric. From beginning to end there is a painful strain that never relaxes, reminding us of singers who pitch their voices too high and have to render all the upper notes in falsetto. An attempt is made to employ poetical imagery, but it ludicrously fails. The heaven of the Book of Revelation, with its gold and silver and precious stones, is nothing but a magnified jeweller's shop, ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... that old woman I remember," said Honey Smith. There were bruises, mottled blue and black, all over Honey's body. There was a falsetto whistling to Honey's voice. "That Irish granny! She didn't say a word. Her mouth just opened until her jaw fell. Then the wave struck!" He paused. He tried to control the falsetto whistling. But it got away from him. ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... the Romeo of the tall young surgeon, singing falsetto like a fat German angel dressed in loose-fitting khaki, with his belt undone. There were charades in the tent. The boy from Barts' did remarkable imitations of a gamecock challenging a rival bird, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... relatives were still beginners—but likewise treated everything so derisively and possessed a heart so full of tricks and surprises that there was no dependence to be placed upon him. The eternal smile hovering around his temples and thick lips, and the mocking falsetto voice, impaired the good impression that might otherwise have been made by his nobly cut face and a pair of large hands, from which New Year's presents, benefit performances, and gratuities were continually ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... longing, he is not weary of work, he indulges in no hysterical raptures of desire. What an eloquent simplicity is in that quiet 'very far better!' It goes straight to one's heart, and says more than paragraphs of falsetto yearnings. There is nothing in such a wish to die, based on such a reason, that the most manly and wholesome piety need be ashamed of. It is a pattern for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in reply to a query. "It wasn't the wounds that made me faint. It was the exertion I made in the struggle. I was too weak. No; so little moisture was there in my system that I didn't bleed much. And the amazing thing, under the circumstances, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... wailing despairing love. And Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls, and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon full of obscure melancholy of a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... one salutary effect. It frightened Sally out of her feeble old wits, confirming, as it did, Dr. Guy's fable of the periodical fits of madness to which the young lady was prone. She related to her mistress, in shrill falsetto, what had occurred. ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... laugh and wax merry at my expense! How they would draw pictures of me in the book covers with long curls and petticoats! How they would address me as "Jemima," and talk to one another about me in a high falsetto voice! How they would fall into hysterics when they met me, and weep copiously, and ask me to lend them hairpins and parasols! I knew what it would be like only too well, and I quaked as ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... gelsomina, each neatly folded up in a vine-leaf to keep the scent in—three independent piano-organs and a brass band in the middle distance—an enthusiastic blind singer, a survival of Demodocus in the Odyssey, with a falsetto voice and no bridge to his nose keeping a group of listeners spellbound in the foreground with their favourite ballad, illustrated by a large sheet of oil paintings in eight tableaux, about the man who murdered his wife and mother ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... and his agent are the acme of politeness. The Chinese in the third class are good-natured and funny. Yesterday a Chinaman sat on the deck and sang something very mournful in a falsetto voice; as he did so his profile was funnier than any caricature. Everybody looked at him and laughed, while he took not the slightest notice. He sang falsetto and then began singing tenor. My God, what a voice! It was like the bleat of a sheep or a calf. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... this two-for-a-nickel old shack over your head and a bushel-basket of distillery stock that you can sell by the pound for old paper!" He threw the words in her face, the bull-bass voice seamed and cracked with falsetto. "Old paper, old rags, old iron, bottles, old clothes! You talk about your affairs! Who are you? Rothschild? You haven't ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... not Shakespeare's idea have been so to order things that the full strength of the man should not appear in the play, as it did not in fact, till after his fall? This view will both explain and justify the strange disguise—a sort of falsetto ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... was a mad act, and he instantly repented it. Never had there been another rifle shot so loud. It crashed like the report of a cannon. Mountain and valley gave it back in a multitude of echoes, and on the last dying echo came, not a single war whoop, but the shout of many, the fierce, insistent, falsetto yell that has sounded the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... took part, and also the women and girls, decked in their best, with ear-rings and armlets, and terrapin shells filled with pebbles fastened to the outside of their legs. They kept time with foot and voice; the men in deep tones, with short accents, the women in a shrill falsetto; while the clay drums, with heads of taut deer-hide, were beaten, the whistles blown, and the gourds and calabashes rattled, until the air resounded with ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... a ball. This person frequently entertains me with his amori, past, present, and future; he evidently thinks me very odd for having none to entertain him with in return; he points out to me the pretty (or ugly) servant-girls and dressmakers as we walk in the street, sighs deeply or sings in falsetto behind every tolerably young-looking woman, and has finally taken me to the house of the lady of his heart, a great black-mustachioed countess, with a voice like a fish-crier; here, he says, I shall meet all the best company in Urbania and some beautiful women—ah, too ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the booth-keeper stepped forward, and, half shutting his eyes, began singing in high falsetto. He had a fairly sweet and pleasant voice, though rather hoarse: he played with his voice like a woodlark, twisting and turning it in incessant roulades and trills up and down the scale, continually returning to the highest notes, which he held and ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... were apart' and not 'Yes! in the sea') I had paused over, but my instinct was to strike it out, and now your suggestion comes to confirm this instinct, I shall act upon it. The same with 'Second Best.' It is quite true there is a horrid falsetto in some stanzas of the 'Gipsy Child'—it was a very youthful production. I have re-written those stanzas, but am not quite satisfied with the poem even now. 'Shakespeare' I have re-written. 'Cruikshank' ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... lounge upon the grass, and the cigars, and the new fish stories, and the general invoice of the old ones, it was delectable to get back to the girls again, and in the old "best room" hear once more the lilt of the old songs and the stacattoed laughter of the piano mingling with the alto and falsetto voices of the Mills girls, and the gallant soprano of ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... suggests what he dares not express. This tottering, doddering, slobbering, sniffling old man is in love—he is about to wed a young, beautiful girl. He selects jewels for her—he makes remarks about what would become her beauty, jeers and laughs in cracked falsetto. In the animality of youth there is something pleasing—it is natural—but the vices of an old man, when they have become only ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... beauty, eh, my beauty!' said Marshall, in a queer high falsetto voice, that caused the other man to have convulsions ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... actors. There is no prompter and no call-boy. Stage footmen wait at the sides to carry in screens, small tables, and an odd chair or two, to represent houses, city walls, and so on, or hand cups of tea to the actors when their throats become dry from vociferous singing, which is always in falsetto. All this in the face of the audience. Dead people get up and walk off the stage; or while lying dead, contrive to alter their facial expression, and then get up and carry themselves off. There is no interval ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... his maker, should afflict us as the insufferable splendor of the face of Moses afflicted the Jews at Mount Sinai. His audible prayers were made kneeling with clasped hands and upturned face. His eyes were closed tightly, his features were painfully contracted, and his voice was a falsetto squeak. I fancy the Governor must have sighed at the performance. The doctor never troubled ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... we have the distinct trio, the golden yellow in the sky, the blue in the sea, and the red in the figures in the boats,—as in a vocal trio we have the only three possible musical sounds of the human voice, the soprano, the basso, and the falsetto of the child's voice. All these colors are distinctly asserted and perfectly harmonized in a most exquisite play of tints, but it is still no more like Nature than the trio in "I Puritani" is like conversation. Turner never dreamed of painting like Nature, and no sane ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his specialty to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge are the great social qualities, and what ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... no name!" the other protested in the falsetto she had adopted to suit her impersonation; "I am only the wise old woman who tells the future and the past and reads ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... shone like two angry meteors; but she merely bowed and laughed; and the laugh was echoed by the dwarf in his shrillest falsetto. ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... mother's kin. The other proved to be at once a rudder to guide him over the uncharted future of his life, and an outlet for the pent-up passion within him. His voice was totally untrained, and as yet it broke into all manner of distressing falsetto fragments. Nevertheless, it gave him a cause for living, and it enabled him, the descendant of a taciturn race, to give utterance to the doubts and questionings which accompanied his growth to manhood. Bereft of his mother and without ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... his sister's daughter, took her satchel, and asked how he could serve her. The girl replied in a thin falsetto voice, which she realized immediately didn't go with the scowl so well as a gruff tone would have done, that she had only twenty-five minutes to get the train for New York and must say good-by at once and take a ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... was pulled. The old man had a sickly hollow voice and an asthmatic quavering lisp. . . . The complete lack of dignity and decorum was emphasized by a very small boy who seconded the sacristan and whose head was hardly visible over the railing of the choir. The boy sang in a shrill falsetto and seemed to be trying to avoid singing in tune. Kunin stayed a little while, listened and went out for a smoke. He was disappointed, and looked at the ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... principle of life to maintain himself at the height which his courage warranted. His thickness of wit was never a bar to the success of his irony. For the irony of the ignorant Scot is rarely the outcome of intellectual qualities. It depends on a falsetto voice and the use of a recognized number of catchwords. "Dee-ee-ar me, dee-ee-ar me;" "Just so-a, just so-a;" "Im-phm!" "D'ye tell me that?" "Wonderful, serr, wonderful;" "Ah, well, may-ay-be, may-ay-be"—these ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... sings in the kitchen— Is love also her head turning? In falsetto she now screameth, That with rage my soul ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... This curled darling of the Bonegulch aristocrat-worshippers passed through Deadhorse yesterday, clean bust. Those who remember how the four-fingered editor of the Bonegulch "Palladium" pricked up his ears and lifted up his falsetto crow when this lovely specimen of the British snob first honored him by striking him for a $ will appreciate ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... the instructions she had received from him, her lips part in the musical utterance (the Colonel lowered his voice in a faint falsetto, presumably in fond imitation of his fair client) 'Kerree!' Instantly the night becomes resonant with the impassioned reply (the Colonel here lifted his voice in stentorian tones), 'Kerrow!' Again, as he passes, rises the soft 'Kerree!'; ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... imitating the Chinaman's high falsetto, and then striking imaginary strings of a ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... decided to show up again, Zenie?" Miss Susie clipped her words off short to everyone. She was a wisp of a woman with little hands as dry and yellow as parchment. Her voice had a quavering falsetto break in it and her laugh, when there was occasion, was dry and withery and short-lived like a piece ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... run away?" But Smerdyakov did not deign to reply. After a moment's silence the guitar tinkled again, and he sang again in the same falsetto: ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... itself down to work. It was not pleasant to think, and I tried not to think, what Mr. Jaffrey's condition would be if the weather did not mend its manners by noon; but so far from clearing off at noon, the storm increased in violence, and as night set in, the wind whistled in a spiteful falsetto key, and the rain lashed the old tavern as if it were a balky horse that refused to move on. The windows rattled in the worm-eaten frames, and the doors of remote rooms, where nobody ever went, slammed to in the maddest way. Now and then the tornado, sweeping down ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sighs changed into a wail, in which the other members of the camp joined, a penetrating falsetto cry which continued for two days, mingled with the strong man's expression of woe, a low, weird yet not inharmonious hum. For two days they chanted the virtues of the dead, told of her likes and dislikes, and of their grief, crouching ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... and repeated the same verse over and over. They got one or two of those sitting nearest to join in, but now sounded down by the door a light street song. Notes struggled against notes, words against words, guitar against whistle. The women's strong, trained voices contested with the boys' hoarse falsetto, with the men's growling bass. When the street song was almost conquered, they began to stamp and whistle down by the door. The Salvation Army song sank like a wounded warrior. The noise was terrifying. The women fell ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... motley of his tribe, had leaped cat-like upon the window sill and swept the room with his painted grin. In his hands he held a great bunch of variegated circus bills. Tossing a half-dozen of these at the feet of the all-absorbed spectators, he cried in high cracked falsetto: ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... listening to make sure that the constable and his wife were in the bedroom the other side of the flimsy wall, complied, and in a voice that rose gradually to a piercing falsetto told Mr. Grummit things that had been rankling in her mind for some months. She raked up misdemeanours that he had long since forgotten, and, not content with that, had a fling at the entire Grummit family, beginning with her mother-in-law and ending with ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... Under the vast bent brow one could hardly see his eyes, behind the blue glasses that seemed always ready to fall as he inclined too far his fat head with its timid and yet all-powerful glance. When he spoke in his falsetto voice, his chin dropped in a fold over his collar, and he had a steady gesture with the thumb and index finger of his right hand to retain the glasses from sliding down his ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... table. His pipe was still between his teeth, but he ceased to puff at it. It went out. The noise of the approaching horse was plainly audible in the room. Felix Matier suddenly laughed aloud, and then, half chanting the words in a cracked falsetto, quoted— ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... soldier astride one of the leaders swore and fumed in his saddle, and furiously jerked at the bridle. An officer screamed out an order so violently that his voice broke and ended the sentence in a falsetto shriek. ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... scarlet aprons, carry brooms and with slow and mystic movements sweep widely on either side with the intent of gathering up the wandering soul. Meanwhile crackers are fired to the weird sound of a minor, falsetto lilting. After a considerable journey over the countryside they return to prove the success of their venture. For this the clothes of the sick man must be reweighed to see whether the weight of the spirit has been added to that of the patient's garments. Should ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... hurry to start ran round in front of the car at the precise moment that the other ran round behind it, and they both banged loudly on each other's knockers. These knocks were not so precisely simultaneous as the shouts had been, and this led to mutual discovery, hailed with peals of falsetto laughter on the part of Captain Puffin and the more manly guffaws of the Major.... After that the Royce lumbered down the grass-grown cobbles of the street, and after a great deal of reversing ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... so little of her, the balance was made up for by the fact that there was so much of her husband. His large, rather flamboyant person, his big white face and curling brown beard, his loud voice and his falsetto laugh, his absolutely certain opinions, above all the fervency of his consciousness of being Lord Ashbridge and all which that implied, completely filled any place he happened to be in, so that a room ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... force it. In a short time he has a rigid throat, and the longer he sings the more rigid it becomes. By the time he decides to go to a teacher his voice is in such a condition that he must take his upper tones with a thick, throaty quality or with a light falsetto. Among female voices I have seen many that could sing nothing but a full tone in the upper register, and that only with an unsteady, ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... his stature, his limbs compose the least part of it. His hands and feet, forming some compensation by their ample proportions, with short, thick fins, vulgarly called a cobbler's thumb. His voice varying in cadence from a deep barytone, to a high falsetto, maintains throughout the distinctive characteristic of a Dublin accent and pronunciation, and he talks of the "Veel of Ovoca, and a beef-steek," with some price of intonation. What part of the Island he came originally from, or what may ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... of fewer than a score of rifles could be distinguished through the general uproar, and again that penetrating falsetto: ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... himself at home, and of being on good terms with everyone, wherever he was, made love to Mother Paumelle, in the drollest manner. The dropsical woman, who had retained her cheerfulness in spite of her misfortunes, answered him banteringly in a high falsetto voice which seemed to be assumed, and she laughed so heartily at her neighbor's jokes that her large stomach looked as if it were going to rise up and get on to the table. Little Herbon had seriously undertaken the task of making ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the pedlar repeated with playful modesty. "There is a young girl here," he went on in a high falsetto, "who, owing to the great strictness ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... could you keep ces dames waiting like this? It is shameful, shameful!" cried the woman, as she half shook the panting girl, in anger. "If ces dames will enter,"—her voice changing at once to a caressing falsetto, as the door flew open, opened by Augustine's trembling fingers—"they will find their rooms ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... on the snow with its head downwards by mistake, whereat it began to scream vociferously. This scream was accomplished by Davie Summers creeping below the stage and putting his mouth to a hole in the flooring close to which the baby's head lay. Davie's falsetto was uncommonly like to a child's voice, and the effect was quite startling. Of course Whackinta tried to soothe it, and failing in this she whipped it, which caused it to yell with tenfold violence. Thereafter losing all patience, she covered its face and ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... this subjective intellect may be—and it exists in very various degrees of perfection—it is never on the same level with the double intellect of genius; just as the open chest notes of the human voice, however high, are essentially different from the falsetto notes. These, like the two upper octaves of the flute and the harmonics of the violin, are produced by the column of air dividing itself into two vibrating halves, with a node between them; while the open chest notes of ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... entrance with laborious exaggeration of effect, dragging one foot after another, clutching at the palings of an imaginary fence, while pitching his voice at a feeble falsetto, he quavered: ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... grumble of inside passengers, cracking of whip and long strings of oaths from the driver, the coach lurched out of town and across a fat plain full of gurgle of irrigation ditches, shrilling of toads, falsetto rustle of broad leaves of the sugar cane. Occasionally the gleam of the soaring moon on banana leaves and a broad silver path on the sea. Landwards the hills like piles of ash in the moonlight, and far away a ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... once or twice to utter the word, but as many times broke down. At last in high falsetto he ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... Mujerados. Their method consisted in making a healthy man ride horseback constantly, until an irritable weakness of the reproductive organs ensued, and a paralytic impotence followed. The exhausted testes would then atrophy, and the voice ring falsetto, muscular tone and energy diminish, inclinations and habits become feminine. The Mujerado lost his position in society as a man, assumed female clothing, manners and customs, and to all intents and purposes was treated as a woman. Their large ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and social mal-adjustment. She sometimes says that she "feels so unnatural all the time." The writer has known the voice of a girl to change so much during three weeks of "service" that she could not recognize it when the girl returned to her home. It alternated between the high falsetto in which a shy child "speaks a piece" and the husky gulp with which the globus hystericus is swallowed. The alertness and bonhomie of the voice of the tenement-house child had totally disappeared. When such a girl leaves her employer, her reasons are often incoherent and totally ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... A high falsetto voice from the gathering' audience cried: 'Oh, ye bad boy, come here till I skelp ye!'—and there was a general laugh, in which the hapless object ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... he said this, a mysterious falsetto voice, which seemed to come from behind the copper basins, repeated, in an acrid voice: ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... to sing comes he, knowing only the old refrains of the mountain, intones in an Arabic falsetto voice the complaint of the linen weaver; and then Ramuntcho, who had sung it the day before in the autumn twilight, sees again the darkened sky of yesterday, the clouds full of rain, the cart drawn by oxen going ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... the voice of the barber in a hoarse falsetto: "Kimberley! That's the place for good men I'm always saying. There's Billy the Red back home with a fortune. And ould Corlett—look at ould Corlett, the Ballabeg! Five years away at the diggings, and left a house ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... day," he complained in a thin, undependable falsetto. "Who'd have thought I'd live to see the time when a man would be afraid of his life on the way to the Cliff House. When I was a boy, Edwin, men and women and little babies used to come out here from San Francisco ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... air of a boy who scorns tears and girls, Job stood there; and, posing dramatically, sang in a falsetto voice: ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... with excitement, slammed and locked the door and pointed to a heavy sideboard. "Drag it here!" he shrieked in a high falsetto. "The street is crammed with men belonging to the Seventh Regiment, and they have a short way with Kings they don't like. The instant they see how they have been tricked they will be after you like a pack of wolves. I have sent a messenger for help. I dared not use one of your orderlies, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to them in falsetto voices. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and substantives, with never an "and" to string them together, is here. But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence—Baines, Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold's well-known substitutes for Cleon and Cinesias—there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in Friendship's Garland. "Bottles" and his company are ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... into a falsetto, and shrieking vile curses he threw the empty revolver over his shoulder and leaped to the ground. Mead's watchful eye caught the gleam of a steel blade in the sunlight. He dropped his burden upon the ground, ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... dogs from the farmyard were making angry answer. A very tall, old, white-headed man came, shading a candle, at the summons. He had been of great strength in his time, and of a handsome countenance; but now he was fallen away, his teeth were quite gone, and his voice when he spoke was broken and falsetto. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her remote progenitors, whose dust now mouldered in many churchyards. There was about her an amplitude of curve which, joined to a certain luxuriance of moulding, betrayed her sex even to a careless observer. And when she spoke, it was often with a fetishistic utterance in a monotheistic falsetto which almost had the effect of startling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... and rooms furnished and unfurnished, he had been accustomed to do many things for himself, and he had discovered that it saves time and temper to be methodical. He had arranged with the wife of the long-nosed Barrett, a stout Welsh woman with a falsetto voice, the Merionethshire accent of which long residence in London had not perceptibly modified, to come across the square each morning to prepare his breakfast, and also to "turn the place out" on Saturday mornings; and for the rest, he even welcomed a little housework as a relaxation ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... abounding in verve and daring imagery, but withal high-sounding, declamatory, and, at his worst, bombastic. There is a reminiscence in him of Klopstock's inflated rhetoric; and a certain dithyrambic ecstasy—a strained, high-keyed aria-style which sometimes breaks into falsetto. His great rival, Welhaven, was soberer, clearer, more gravely melodious. He sang in beautiful, tempered strains, along the middle octaves, never ranging high into the treble or deep into the base. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... still. So still that the shrill voice of a street-gamin, a boy from the Via Sacra, was audible throughout the vast enclosure from gallery to gallery. He yelled in his cutting falsetto: "Good for you, Sis!" ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... its mother could not help it. Behind every page and between the lines you see the fevered toss of human emotion and hot ambition—these women were rivals. There were digs and scratches, bandied epithets in falsetto, and sounds like a piccolo played by a man in distress, before all this; and these are not explained, so you have to fill them in with your imagination. But the Bernhardt is the bigger woman of the two. She goes her splendid pace alone, and all the other ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... bright, was pale beside the red, leaping flames of our pine logs and their red glow on our gear, ourselves, and Ring's truthful face. One of the young men sang a Latin student's song and two Negro melodies; the other "Sweet Spirit, hear my Prayer." "Jim" sang one of Moore's melodies in a singular falsetto, and all together sang, "The Star-spangled Banner" and "The Red, White, and Blue." Then "Jim" recited a very clever poem of his own composition, and told some fearful Indian stories. A group of small silver spruces ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... him more frequently, and then she brought him a hymn-book, so as to utilize his voice. Then he might be seen sitting up in bed, for he was beginning to be able to move, singing the praises of the Almighty and of Mary, in a falsetto voice, while the kind, stout sister stood by him and beat time with her finger. When he could walk, the Superior offered to keep him for some time longer to sing in chapel, to serve at Mass and to fulfill the duties of sacristan, and he accepted. For a whole month he might be seen in his ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of falsetto, Constance, and speak seriously to each other. I have come to you for help in this crisis of our lives. Sit down. (Gives her ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... become a mark for their amusement; more than once I caught them exchanging looks, or regarding me from the corners of their eyes in such fashion as set my ears a-tingling. The Captain was possessed of a peculiarly high-pitched, falsetto laugh, which, recurring at frequent intervals (and for no reason as I could see), annoyed me almost beyond bearing. But I paid no heed, staring straight before me and meditating upon a course of action which had been in my head for days past—a plan whereby Jack's duel might be prevented ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... sagacious animal would have been foolishly vain or ostentatiously prodigal. It was a contralto of great compass and profundity—reaching from low G to high C—perhaps a trifle stronger in the lower register, and not altogether free from a nasal falsetto in the upper. Daring and brilliant as it was in the middle notes, it was perhaps more musically remarkable for its great sustaining power. The element of surprise always entered into the hearer's enjoyment; long after any ordinary strain of ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... song died down into a hum. But soon a quavering falsetto was heard formulating a new motive, expressing a new thought. Other voices joined the leader's; a minor refrain swept up and down the line; and abruptly the climax swelled out in a diapason descending far into the bass. So that every ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... give a display of their harmonious powers. They did, but hardly in the expected fashion. One man demanded in a growling bass that the "Home Fires be kept Burning," while another bade farewell to Leicester Square in a high falsetto. The giggling Towers caught the idea instantly, and a confused medley of hymns, music-hall ditties, and patriotic songs in every key, from the deepest bellowing bass to the shrillest wailing treble, arose from the Towers' ranks, mixed with whistles and cat-calls and Corporal ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... and other beverages peculiar to the season introduced, than Master Simon was called on for a good old Christmas song. He bethought himself for a moment, and then, with a sparkle of the eye, and a voice that was by no means bad, excepting that it ran occasionally into a falsetto, like the notes of a split reed, he quavered forth ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... first cousin to the Swiss jodel, and is undoubtedly the origin of the skips of the augmented and (to a lesser degree) diminished intervals to be found in the music of many nations. It consists of the trick of alternating chest tones with falsetto. It is a kind of quirk in the voice which pleases children and primitive folk alike, a simple thing which has ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... arise, hop out of bed fully clothed and partake of cookies and wine passed by the black dwarf, Selena. This small creature, after fulfilling her part in the social amenities, seated herself upon a small stool, joined in the conversation, and when amused (which was often) broke into a high falsetto laugh. In the last years of these two ladies she gained a most unholy influence over her charges and took cruel advantage ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... want—he can have her." He was shaking now in every limb. Escape was almost his. He knew he could not be done away with. "I'll give her to him!" He staggered toward Lopez, "I will! I swear I will!" he screamed, his words reaching a high falsetto. ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... that evening and heard Tacius—a portly gentleman in a ball dress and a yellow wig, who after squeaking five-sixths of a love song in a timid falsetto which might pass for a woman's voice, roared out the balance like a bull. He brought down ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... splendid evening they spent, dining on chicken and palm-oil chop, rice pudding and sweet potatoes. Hamilton sang, "Who wouldn't be a soldier in the Army?" and—by request—in his shaky falsetto baritone, "My heart is in the Highlands"; and Lieut. Tibbetts gave a lifelike imitation of Frank Tinney, which convulsed, not alone his superior officer, but some two-and-forty men of the Houssas who were unauthorized spectators through ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... had no dinner. Tea was passed by the servants continually, as were little bowls of "samshu"—a liquor distilled from rice. During the dinner, the sing-song girls played on the native two-stringed fiddles, and sang in falsetto voices a selection of music, which was undoubtedly very fine if judged by the Chinese standard, but which ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... varying with the motion of the windlass. This requires a clear voice, strong lungs, and much practice, to be done well. This fellow had a very peculiar, wild sort of note, breaking occasionally into a falsetto. The sailors thought that it was too high, and not enough of the boatswain hoarseness about it; but to me it had a great charm. The harbor was perfectly still, and his voice rang among the hills as though it could have been heard for miles. Toward sundown, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Banditti, but the Banditti were not on their usual hunting-ground. An ominous silence answered the accustomed war-cry, uttered in an unsteady falsetto, and the ruins had a more than usually dejected look, as though they had suddenly lost all hope of themselves. He called again, and this time, like an earth-sprite, Frances Wilmot rose up from a sheltered corner and waved to him. She had ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... She said," he went on, screwing up his nose and speaking in a falsetto to express the intensity of his scorn—"she said she ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... woman scrambled up on the stone, and stood there, her scanty and patched garments fluttering in the bitter breeze, as, with face sharpened with want, and eyes fierce with misery, she began, in a querulous, 'scornful falsetto: ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... would flush like a bride. She liked a musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto. Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his becoming what ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... steps so nearly simultaneous the movement was like a leap—and he had the wrist of the other's armed hand in his grip. Words can convey no idea of the outburst attending the assault—it was the hoarse inarticulate falsetto of a dumb man signalizing a triumph. If the reader can think of a tiger standing over him, its breath on his cheek, its roar in his ears, something approximate to the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... everyone, wherever he was, made love to Mother Paumelle, in the drollest manner. The dropsical woman, who had retained her cheerfulness in spite of her misfortunes, answered him banteringly in a high falsetto voice which appeared as if it were put on, and she laughed so heartily at her neighbor's jokes, that her large stomach looked as if it were going to rise up and get onto the table. Little Herbon had seriously ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... simple hall at Castle Dare with which Macleod was familiar, but a grand apartment, filled with old armor, and pictures, and cabinets, and showing glimpses of a balcony and fair gardens beyond. There were two figures in this hall, and they spoke—in the high and curious falsetto of the stage. Macleod paid no more heed to them than if they had been marionettes. For one thing, he could not follow their speech very well; but, in any case, what interest could he have in listening ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... were broken. In the shallow water of the ford down at the river splashed a horse's hoofs and she heard a voice singing in the weird falsetto of mountain minstrelsy an old ballade which, like much else of the life there, was a heritage from ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... watched the departure of the girl, and before she was half-way across the clearing the little woman appeared in the doorway, commanding, begging, pleading in shrill falsetto, not to be left alone. Hearing the cries, the girl quickened her pace, and without so much as a backward glance passed swiftly down the steep ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... in ecstasy). Eh, lass, yer du keep us old 'uns in order. (He bursts into a falsetto chuckle, loses the note, blushes and buries his ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... course you could, Mr. Barmby,' sounded Jessica's voice, in an unsteady falsetto, whilst her eyes were turned upon the floor. 'You would have thought nothing of this matriculation, which ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... lovelier of face and figure than ever before; but in her beautiful dark eyes only the direct intelligence of a child answered his gaze of inquiry; and her voice, too, had become soft and hesitating, and the infantile falsetto sounded in it at ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the benefits for actors. It was indeed a delight: loads of incense were burned, there were plenty of Latin chants, large quantities of holy water were expended, and Padre Irene, out of regard for his old friend, sang the Dies Irae in a falsetto voice from the choir, while the neighbors suffered real ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... he had scarcely a rival; and whether in singing a simple ballad, in oratorio, or in the grandest dramatic music, the largeness and nobility of his style were matched by a voice which in its prime was almost peerless. His compass extended over nineteen notes, and his falsetto from D to A was so perfect that it was difficult to tell where the natural voice ended. When Weber composed his opera "Oberon" for the English stage in 1826, Braham was the ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... sizzling turkey, the big brothers and the little girl voted for the heads of Sassy and of a certain mysterious young rooster who, though disturbing, had never been definitely singled out, since, on hearing his falsetto crow and looking about for him, the family invariably came upon the insolent pullet, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... white jackets began to whistle the song and someone on the boat deck sang it in a high falsetto. Someone behind Marcella was holding a piece of white ribbon that went right across the water to the tender; as the boat's speed accelerated the frail thread snapped and the girl in whose hand it was clasped, a very thin, anaemic looking girl, gave ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the floor. A tear trickled from his eye. His voice had risen, and crumbled to a weakling falsetto, and ceased. He was an old, old man about to be bereft of a son ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... exemplified by the sopranists, because the aim of this music was mere enjoyment of the senses, without any regard for genuine depth of feeling—as is also shown by the fact that the voice of young manhood, the tenor voice, was hardly used at all at this period, and later only in a sopranistic way, as falsetto. Now, the spirit of modern music, under the undisputed leadership of German genius, especially Beethoven, has succeeded in first rising to the true dignity of art, by bringing within the sphere of its incomparable expressiveness, not only ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... steep slope was extremely strange from below. The whole scene was so remarkable, that it required some effort to realise the fact that I was not in a dream. Christian stood at the top invisible, jodeling in a most unearthly manner, and developing an astonishing falsetto power, only interrupting his performance to assure me that he was not coming down again; so I was obliged to measure the breadth of the fall by myself. I chose a part where the ice was not very steep, and where occasional points ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... remarkable flexibility of voice, excellent breath control, and a rather surprising quality of tone and accuracy of intonation. As a demonstration of flexibility, about the middle of the first movement, he takes the quarter note B-natural in falsetto and immediately drops into the waver a tenth below, at the same time assuming his natural voice. The falsetto tone is indicated in the transcription by a tiny circle above the note. All of the wavered tones, as well as the falsetto at the beginning and the turn at the end are ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... the merest apology for a forehead. This facial peculiarity had won for him the nickname of Cejas (Eyebrows), by which he was known to his intimates. He spent most of his time strumming on a wretched old cracked guitar, and singing amorous ballads in a lugubrious, whining falsetto, which reminded me not a little of that hungry, complaining gull I had met at the estancia in Durazno. For, though poor Epifanio had an absorbing passion for music, Nature had unkindly withheld from him the power to express it ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson |
