Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
Of music the Romans were passionately fond, but the music itself was of a description which perhaps would hardly commend itself to modern notions, particularly those of northern Europe. To these we may add for processions the straight trumpet and the curved horn, and, for more orgiastic occasions or celebrations, the panpipes, cymbals, and tambourine or kettledrum.
Then some, doffing the shooting-gear for a free-and-easy but scrupulously neat attire, repair to the ladies' sitting-room or the library for "kettledrum." On a low table is placed the tea equipage, and tea in beautiful little cups is being dispensed by fair hands. This is a very pleasant time in many houses, and particularly favorable to fun and flirtation.
Only the stones and the eternal west wind, that had seen them set up and still blew over them, could tell him anything he sought to know. "A Knight of Forlorn Hopes," mused the man. "So it is, so it is. The grasshopper, rattling his little kettledrum there, knows nearly as much of this hoary secret as I do; and the bird, that prunes his wing on the porphyry, and is gone again.
Some that are grown old and Amazonian, who have abandoned their fiddles and their lovers, take vigorously to the kettledrum; and one poor limping lady, who had been crossed in love, now makes an admirable figure on the bassoon. Good-night! I am quite exhausted with composing a chorus for these same Amazonians.
Sometimes the sound of the kettledrum, the song, and the clapping of hands, summon us at a later hour than usual to a dance. The performance is complicated, and, as usual with the trivialities easily learned in early youth, it is uncommonly difficult to a stranger. Each dance has its own song and measure, and, contrary to the custom of El Islam, the sexes perform together.
I hear the doleful strains of a tin whistle accompanied with a rub-a-dub-dub of a kettledrum that has known its best days, and whose sound is as doleful as that of the whistle. I know what is coming, and, though I have seen it many times, it has still a fascination for me, so I stand at my window and watch.
Look at our Parliament a hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of pigmy regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of suicides, and for pibroch by a European bleating of little children. We are still a million miles from civilization! For what is a civilized society? It can only be one in which the people are proud and happy!
Viola insisted on showing the use of her cozy, and making everybody stay to nurse's impromptu kettledrum, and herself put in the pinches of tea.
Betty was so dumfoundered with their impudence that she could not say a word. She did make haste with the dinner, though, and revealed her indignation only in her manner of putting the things on the table. As the boys left her, Robert contented himself with the single hint: 'Betty, Bodyfauld 's i' the perris o' Kettledrum. Min' ye that. Betty glowered and said nothing.
He then tendered a fiddle to me altogether beyond my compass but I offered to officiate on the kettledrum, the drummer being competent to something else. At a signal from our host away they all launched in full crash, and very melodious it was too, let me tell you, Aaron's instrument telling most famously. The next day we went to visit a tafia property in the neighbourhood.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking