"Hugger-mugger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rather crossly, "why didn't you tell me, and I'd have tidied the room. It is all hugger-mugger, with ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... baskets full of squid which they were taking to wash in the fresh water of the fountains. Everywhere prodigious heaps of merchandise of every kind. Silks, minerals, baulks of timber, ingots of lead, carobs, rape-seed, liquorice, sugar cane, great piles of dutch cheeses. East and west hugger-mugger. ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... of the like injury, been of a more magnanimous and heroic spirit, who, in imitation and at the example of the children of Jacob revenging upon the Sichemites the rapt of their sister Dinah, having found the rascally ruffian in the association of his mystical mole-catcher closely and in hugger-mugger conferring, parleying, and coming with their daughters, for the suborning, corrupting, depraving, perverting, and enticing these innocent unexperienced maids unto filthy lewdnesses, have, without any further advisement on the matter, cut them instantly into ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... HUGGER-MUGGER. In its Shakspearian bearing may have meant secretly, or in a clandestine manner, but its nautical application is to express anything out of order or done ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... under our immediate eye, so that, like thrifty housekeepers, we could see where and how fast the money was going, we should be less likely to commit extravagances. At present, these things are managed in such a hugger-mugger way, that we know not what we pay for; the poor man is charged as much as the rich; and, while we are saving and scrimping at the spigot, the government is drawing off at the bung. If we could know that ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... had once contained—he would begin upon another. And woe to Mrs. Dixon or Thyrza if they attempted any cleaning in one of his rooms! The collections were for himself only, and for the few dealers or experts to whom he chose to show them. And the more hugger-mugger they were, the less he should be pestered to let people in to see them. Occasionally he would rush up to London to attend what he called a "high puff sale"—or to an auction in one of the northern towns, and as he always bought ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
