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The Lepchas use no spinning wheel, but a spindle and distaff; their loom, which is Tibetan is a very complicated one framed of bamboo; it is worked by hand, without beam treddle, or shuttle. The water, which is sea-green in colour, had a temperature of 53.5 degrees at 4 p.m., and 51.7 degrees the following morning; its current was very powerful.
"Then, I pray you, tell to me and Maude your fair story of the Lyonesse." "With a very good will." "Then, prithee, set about it," said Constance, ensconcing herself in the big chair. "Sit thou on that stool, Maude." The old lady took her distaff, now ready, and sat down, smiling at the impatience of the capricious child.
The mellow sunlight fell through the window upon old Ursela, as she sat in the warmth with her distaff in her hands while Otto lay close to her feet upon a bear skin, silently thinking over the strange story of a brave knight and a fiery dragon that she had just told him. Suddenly Ursela broke the silence.
Mothers of families sit about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while their raven- haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the covert insects that haunt the tangles of the children's locks. Within doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking for an instant.
"Though we live in indolent Ionia, we still believe Hesiod's maxim, that industry is the guardian of virtue," rejoined Anaxagoras. "Philothea plies her distaff as busily as Lachesis spinning the thread of mortal life."
May the evil demon Zernebock tear me limb from limb, if I leave my own cell ere I have spun out the hemp on my distaff!" "Answer it to our lord, then, old housefiend," said the man, and retired; leaving Rebecca in company with the old woman, upon whose presence she had been thus unwillingly forced.
Drawing from these premises certain corollaries, he resolved to ask her favours as a simple woman. Then he determined to kill everybody the husband, the wife, or himself rather than lose the distaff whereon to spin one hour of joy. Indeed, he was so mad with love, that he believed life to be but a small stake in the game of love, since one single day of it was worth a thousand lives.
They were the Fates, deities whose duty it was to thread the days of all mortals who appeared on earth, were it but for an instant. Clotho, the spinner of the thread of life, was the eldest of the three. She held in her hand a distaff, wound with black and white woollen yarn, with which were sparingly intermixed strands of silk and gold.
You should have seen her on her black palfrey, with her purple robe, and her falcon on her finger! At any rate, though she be dead, she never wasted time grieving while you, madam, do nothing else than work at your distaff, or gaze at the sky from your window, or weep what a life! What a sad existence!"
I have nothing to cover me now, poor creature that I am! cried the young woman, and transformed herself first into a distaff, then into a wooden beetle, then into a spindle, and into all imaginable shapes. But all these shapes the King's son went on destroying till she stood before him in human form again.
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