Handmaiden

“ And she would make answer unto him and she would say, Thine handmaiden, she is a stranger in the city,
28 Nevertheless, she hath received a warning concerning men, that they be wicked and full of naughtiness. ”

“ Thou knowest that this my handmaiden keepeth my counsel and therefore occupieth high place in my favour; and I have selected her to transact my affairs of importance. So let none be worthier in thy sight than she and acquaint her with thine affair; and be of good cheer, for on her account thou art safe from all fear, and there is no place shut upon thee but she shall open it to thee. She shall bring thee my messages to Ali bin Bakkar and thou shalt be our intermediary. ”

“ To the American eye there is, throughout the length and breadth of this foreign city, no more notable and striking object than the average German house-servant. It is not that she has passed my Spion a dozen times within the last hour,—for here she is messenger, porter, and commissionnaire, as well as housemaid and cook,—but that she is always a phenomenon to the American stranger, accustomed to be abused in his own country by his foreign Irish handmaiden. ”

“ It was with some trepidation that she tackled her astute handmaiden.
"Tibbie," she said, "I intend to fix one day a week — Wednesday, I think — in order to be at home to my friends. Every one does it, and it is really a very excel- lent plan. It prevents pur being unpre- pared for callers (as is too often the case with us, Tibbie) , and one can offer a cup of tea, as is usually done, without waiting for the kettle to boil first."
Tibbie had listened in silence. She had just brought up the tray with Catherine's frugal supper, and she stood contemplat- ing it with a grim expression. ”

“ Sometimes these are quite clearly seen to be moulded with the aid of human fingers, the nails only making a clear mark, but in other cases the finger furrows are prominently indented in regular patterns, which cannot, I think, be distinguished from those made by men of our own race and time. In the formal Japanese ceremony of social tea-drinking, or Cha-no-yu, pottery of this Archaic kind, with finger patterns indented in the clay, is highly esteemed. ”

“ Madeline does not look at him, but she feels that he is examining her—his eyes search her face, her figure, her hands. With an impulsive movement she turns slightly, interlaces her fingers, so as to hide from his searching gaze the third finger of her left hand ”

“ So you, who are untrained of touch, do not recognize a hand by the grasp; and so, too, any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and which my affection translates to my memory. I cannot describe hands under any class or type; there is no democracy of hands. Some hands tell me that they do everything with the maximum of bustle and noise. Other hands are fidgety and unadvised, with nervous, fussy fingers which indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of daily life. ”

“ Now, with the right hand pull up the left sleeve, but leave the handkerchief in the bend of the left arm, where it will be hidden by the folds of the sleeve, taking care, however, that the small piece of red silk protrudes from the closed right hand, deluding the spectators into the belief that the handkerchief is still in your hand—for do they not see the corner of it? Now, rub the hands together and roll the piece into a small pellet, and palm it between the bend of the thumb and first finger. Slap your hands together, and show both sides. ”

“ So, before all the decencies of Hendrik had recovered from the shock of the Hoop, she threw them into a new and worse "conniption" by an even more daring innovation upon their good, easy notions of her; for the next thing she did was—a basque and flounces. Thus it happened:—
Madeline had become quite another Madeline,—say a Magdalen, rather, —under the gentle discipline of her admirable angel. Her wonted distraction had subsided into a pensive sadness, which manifested itself in many a grateful, graceful tenderness toward that glorifier of the skimped delaine. ”

“ Lest the hands should be recognized as belonging to the mediums, they are kept in a constant shaking motion while in view; and to make the hands look large or small, they spread or press together the fingers. With that peculiar rapid motion imparted to them, four hands in the aperture will appear to be half-a-dozen. A lady’s flesh colored kid glove, nicely stuffed with cotton, is sometimes exhibited as a female hand—a critical observation of it never being allowed. It does [78] not take the medium long to draw the knots close to their wrists again. ”

“ The fingers of the hand have been so drawn out that they are longer than the forearm, and the middle finger is at least equal in length to the head and body, whilst the thumb has been converted into a hook by means of which the Bat can hang from any rough surface. Over these exaggerated finger-bones a broad web of skin has been stretched, and connected not only to the sides of the body but also to the hind legs as far as the ankle, and then nearly or quite to the tip of the slender tail. ”

“ The thumb of his left hand under her wrist, the fingers extended above it; the thumb of his right hand resting on the thumb of the left, the fingers lightly resting on the fingers of the left hand. As soon as the curtain was fastened he extended the fourth and index fingers of the left hand to the fullest extent and pressed hard upon the lady’s arm, relaxing at the same time the pressure of his second and third fingers. This movement exactly simulates the grasp of two hands, and enables the medium to take away his right hand altogether. ”

“ Did you ever see his left thumb? That the habit of the man was to sit with a glove on the left hand I am quite certain, and I believe he always did it. The case went on something like seventy days before we heard a word about the thumb, and the first we heard about it was in the re-examination of Mr. Baigent. It is remarkable the terms in which he introduced it, and the terms in which the charge is made, and the persons against whom it was made. “Attend to me carefully,” says Mr. Serjeant Ballantine; “were the photographs shown taken from the daguerreotype?” “Yes, they were.” ”

“ I have always been a noticer of hands. The key to character that other people seek in the eyes, the mouth, the modelling of the skull, I find in the curve of the nails, the cut of the finger-tips, the way the palm, rosy or sallow, smooth or seamed, swells up from its base. I remembered Mary Pask’s hand vividly because it was so like a caricature of herself ”

“ Take the needle on which the stitches are cast in the left hand, and another needle in the right hand--observe the position of the hands [291] (No. 289) . Hold the left-hand needle between the thumb and third finger, leaving the first finger free to move the points of the needles. (The wonderful sense of touch in the first or index finger is so delicate, that an experienced knitter can work without ever looking at her fingers, by the help of this touch only--in fact, knitting becomes a purely mechanical labour, and as such is most useful.) ”

“ In desperate excitement I began to work the cord between my wrists up and up between my palms until I could just reach it with my little finger, and by a supreme effort slipped it over my left hand. Great God, I was free! I could now move my hands, although they were still tightly tied together round the wrists. In frantic despair I began to tug and tear at the cords which bound them. ”

“ I call it more marvelous that a rugged half-breed should stop with uplifted chair at the pointing of a stump of an arm and, clasping his own throat until his fingers left their marks there, die of apoplexy, than that once—just once more and for their last time—a young man's fingers, alive or dead, should have the power to throttle a wild beast and save the Girl. ”

“ The bandages concealing them from view then fell off, and to my agonized sight were disclosed objects that struck me as strangely familiar. There is something about fingers, a marked individuality, I never forget. No two persons’ hands are alike. And in these fingers, in their excessive whiteness, round knuckles, and blue veins, I read a likeness whose prototype, struggle how I would, I could not recall. Gradually the hand moved upwards, and, reaching the throat, the fingers set to work at once to remove the wrappings. ”

“ At first--a finger only, then a hand, then a nebulous figure attached to the hand, without backbone, without consistency.
'Lastly, a complete form, with consistency and with backbone, but the latter in a gelatinous condition, and the entire figure overweighted by the hand, just as hand and figure were previously overweighted by the finger. Simultaneously with this compacting and consolidating of the figure, came your degeneration and loss of vital force and, in a word, of health. What you lose, that object acquires, and what it acquires, it gains by contact with you. ”

“ Elevate the index-finger and turn the hand hither and thither.—The "turning of the hand hither and thither" probably signifies more than the simple idea of man, and is used for "only one man" or "a man who is alone." The finger represents the male organ of generation, and among some tribes the finger is held erect or crooked downward, to indicate mature or declining age. ”

“ He tries wrenching the wrist with all his strength, and in every direction. The effort is idle, and ends only in the laceration of his skin.
With the right hand he can do nothing. He dare not remove it from the limb; he dare not even change its hold. ”

“ The real grip of a Fellow Craft Mason is given by putting the thumb on the joint of the second finger, where it joins the hand, and crooking your thumb so that each can stick the nail of his thumb into the joint of the other. ”

“ I have met thousands of persons who claimed that the rope trick as well as the handcuff trick was accomplished by folding the hand together or by making the wrist larger than the hand, but I have never met the man or woman who could make the hand smaller than the wrist. ”

“ At the extremity of the hands are five fingers, four of which are in a row, and some long and some short, so that when they take hold of anything, they may come equally together in the palm of the hand. The thumb, which is opposite to the four fingers, is shorter than any of them and stronger, that it may be a help to the whole and render them capable of retaining and grasping. ”

“ This enabled them to devote their hands to use in their quest for food and also more directly for purposes of attack and defense. The life in the trees had already developed the hand to some extent, and now the use of the hand and arm were constantly brought to bear in the daily life of the individual. With the free use of the hand it is not surprising that in the course of time our ancestors should have come to hold a stick in their hands, and, by swinging it, strike it against the earth or some other solid object much as an infant would do under similar circumstances. ”

“ A pallid or yellowish colour of the furrows marking the palm is indicative of disease.
Thumb.—The thumb deserves particular notice in treating of the hand. It is the presence of a thumb that imparts to the hand of the higher animals its character of superiority. It is the higher developement and greater mobility of the human hand that render it so much more perfect than that of the ape: “L’animal supérieur est dans la main, l’homme est dans la pouce,” says D’Arpentigny. ”

“ The number of the exceptionally dexterous right-handed, with an invincible instinctive preference for the use of that hand, though large in comparison with the no less dexterous left-handed, are nevertheless a minority. Habit, social usage, and education in all its forms, in the school, the drawing-room, the workshop, in all the arts of peace, and in nearly every operation of war, have so persistently fostered the development of the favourite hand that it is scarcely possible to arrive at any reliable statistics in proof of the initial proclivities of the large majority of conformists. ”

“ If the tendency in their practice to use the right hand is natural, that is to say, innate or congenital, then there need be no nice distinctions in affirming it. But on any clearly defined physiological deductions of right-handedness from the disposition of the organs of motion or circulation, or any other uniform relation of the internal organs and the great arteries of the upper limbs, left-handedness becomes mysterious, if not inexplicable, unless on the assumption of a corresponding reversal of organic structure ”

“ The candle, “our peculiar and household planet!” as Charles Lamb [Pg 136] designates it, has wellnigh become a thing of the past; but in the old days of candle-light the snuffers were among the most unmanageable of domestic implements to a left-handed man. They are so peculiarly adapted to the right hand that the impediment can only be overcome by the dexterous shift of inserting the left thumb and finger below instead of above. As to the right-handed adaptation of scissors, it is admitted by others, but I am unconscious of any difficulty that their alteration would remove. ”

“ Above the mean size, fingers with prominent joints, of an average length, and strong, thick, and bony, with a square tip; palm of a mean size, hollow, and tolerably firm; thumb large, with the muscular root strongly developed. This form of hand cannot exist without a strong, massive developement of the bony and muscular system. It is essentially the hand of man, as the sensitive is that of woman. ”