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Among the sundry curios associated with the spinning wheel are handsomely carved wood distaffs of boxwood, curiously turned spindles; and now and then a pewter vessel of circular form, puzzling in its identity, turns out to be the rim cup from the distaff of an old spinning wheel. Materials and Work. Old workboxes appear to be very numerous.
"The world has been to strong for me, I know," he said one day to Lydgate. "But then I am not a mighty man I shall never be a man of renown. The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes it easy work for the hero, as if the first resolves were enough. Another story says that he came to hold the distaff, and at last wore the Nessus shirt.
Her long dishevelled grey hair flew back from her uncovered head; the inebriating delight of gratified vengeance contended in her eyes with the fire of insanity; and she brandished the distaff which she held in her hand, as if she had been one of the Fatal Sisters, who spin and abridge the thread of human life.
By degrees he had made quite a collection of them all of Mary between a lily and a distaff, Mary carrying her child as if she were his elder sister, Mary crowned with roses, and Mary crowned with stars.
Inspired by the divine instinct of motherhood, the girl that can only creep to her mother's knees will caress a doll, that her tottling brother looks coldly upon. The infant Achilles breaks the thin disguise of his gown and sleeves by dropping the distaff, and grasping the sword. As maturity approaches, the sexes diverge.
Adam names the animals; his rib is extracted; Eve, a curiously forbidding woman, rather a Gauguinesque type, results; she is presented to Adam; they eat the fruit; they take to foliage; they are judged; the leaves become real garments; they are driven forth to toil, Adam with an axe and Eve with a distaff.
She had a jar, such as was then used for carrying water, poised upon her head, and she was leading a horse by means of a bridle hung over her arm. Her hands, being thus not required either for the horse or for the vessel, were employed in spinning, as she walked along, by means of a distaff and spindle. The attention of Darius was strongly attracted to the spectacle.
"Hercules throws the club aside and sits down at the distaff, when Omphale beckons, and the beautiful Esther and the daughter of Herodias " murmured Wilhelm indignantly. He felt sorely troubled, and longed for his quiet attic chamber beside the dove-cote. "Something unpleasant has happened to him in Delft," thought his father.
Arnkill now seized and split the distaff, which he had at first suspected, upon which Kalta tauntingly observed, that if their visits had been frequent that evening, they could not be said to be altogether ineffectual, since they had destroyed a distaff. They were accordingly returning completely baffled, when Geirrida met them, and upbraided them with carelessness in searching for their enemy.
Of another picture, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, of a young girl, life size, with a distaff, seated on a hillock, her head shaded by a great straw hat relieved against the sky, he told me that the only direct painting from nature on the canvas was in a bunch of grass in the foreground, which he had plucked in the fields and brought into his studio.
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