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More "Homespun" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Pa was 'Melia and Iaaac Little and, far as I knows, dey was borned and bred in dat same county. Pa, he was sold away from Ma when I was still a baby. Ma's job was to weave all de cloth for de white folks. I have wore many a dress made out of de homespun what she wove. Dere was 17 of us chillun, and I can't 'member de names of but two of 'em now—dey was John and Sarah. John was Ma's onliest son; all de rest of de other 16 of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... there was not only sorrow, but anger. When even Hutchinson had protested against the Stamp Act, it can be seen how the Whigs would feel. Non-importation agreements were widely signed, and people accustomed to silks and laces prepared to go into homespun. But the act, passed in February, 1765, was not to go into effect until November. Before that date, much could ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... elements of empire. We see the tinned roofs, spires and crosses of quaint churches, hospitals and convents, narrow streets winding among the rocks, black-robed priests and {2} sombre nuns, habitans in homespun from the neighbouring villages, modest gambrel-roofed houses of the past crowded almost out of sight by obtrusive lofty structures of the present, the massive buildings of the famous seminary and university which bear the name of ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... absorbed in the war that there was no chance for new ones to spring up. Carriages, wagons, and farm implements went to decay, or could only be rudely patched up by the rough mechanics of the plantation. The stringent blockade shut out foreign goods, and the people were generally clothed in homespun. In many houses the floors were bare because the carpets had been cut up to make blankets for the soldiers. Ladies made their own shoes of such materials as they could find. They braided their own hats. They showed a wonderful ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... falling upon her face, the ranger was able to see it quite plainly. She had lost the cute little homemade cap in the flurry, and her luxuriant hair hung loosely about her shoulder. She was neatly clad in homespun, though the dress, the stockings, and the shoes were of ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... of some rough homespun, a curious shade of Russian blue, the color of her own eyes. Her hair, which had turned far whiter in the past year, was partly concealed under a small lace cap such as the Russian peasant woman often wears. Then, although she did not seem able to ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... as they say—and his figure was square and clumsy. He was not a good-looking boy— there's no denying it!—and yet I liked him; he looked very sensible and straightforward, and there was a vigorous ring in his voice. He had nothing to boast of in his attire; it consisted simply of a homespun shirt and patched trousers. The face of the third, Ilyusha, was rather uninteresting; it was a long face, with short-sighted eyes and a hook nose; it expressed a kind of dull, fretful uneasiness; his tightly- drawn lips ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... of the embargo attempted to rally the home spirit of the people in order to support the measure. President Jefferson ordered sufficient dark-blue cloth from Colonel Humphreys to make himself a coat, saying: "Homespun is become the spirit of the times. My idea is that we shall encourage home manufactures to the extent of our own consumption of everything of which we raise the raw material." The Legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... central point might he seen wending from the woods, in every direction of the compass, flaxen-headed boys and girls, clad in homespun, brushing away the early dews, as they hied to the place, where the Hibernian, clothed in his brief authority, sometimes perpetrated applications of birch without rhyme or reason; but much oftener ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... near the platform could be distinguished the tall forms of Jonathan Zane, Major McColloch and Wetzel, all, as usual, dressed in their hunting costumes and carrying long rifles. The other men had made more or less effort to improve their appearance. Bright homespun shirts and scarfs had replaced the everyday buckskin garments. Major McColloch was talking to Colonel Zane. The genial faces of both reflected the pleasure they felt in the enjoyment of the younger people. Jonathan Zane stood near the door. Moody and silent he watched the dance. Wetzel leaned ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... the only mode of securing genuine freedom. If our daring logicians would grant that every man should have liberty to lead his life as he chooses, so long as he hurts neither himself nor any other individual nor the State, then one might follow their argument; but a plain homespun proposal like that of mine is not enough for your advanced thinker. In England he says, "Let us have deliverance from all restrictions;" in Russia he says, "Anarchy is the only cure for existing evils." For ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... smooth mountain on one side and the sea on the other, and Brandon in front of me, partly covered with clouds. As far as I could see there were little groups of people on their way to the chapel at Ballyferriter, the men in homespun and the women wearing blue cloaks, or, more often, black shawls twisted over their heads. This procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on this gray day of autumn, seemed to wring me ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... either end. A loom was in the shed-room, and at it was seated on the bench in front, as a lady sits at an organ, the mistress of the house, fair but faded, in a cap and a short gown and red quilted petticoat, giving some instruction, touching an intricate weave, to a negro woman, neatly arrayed in homespun, with a gayly turbaned head, evidently an expert herself, from the bland and smiling manner and many self-sufficient and capable nods with which she perceived and appropriated the knotty points ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... agreed to sleep by watches, knowing the sort of people we had to deal with. It was my watch, when voices were heard as of men landing and pulling up a canoe or boat. Presently three men came into the wigwam, railing-men, dressed in gray Canada homespun and heavy Scotch bonnets. The light of the fire outside flashed on their faces, as they stooped to enter the elm-bark tent, and in the foremost I recognized the hideous Rupe Falardeau, Junior. This man ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... so called, is composed of rather homespun material, to say the least, of it. There may be some fifty individuals dubbed with the title of marquis, and as many more with that of count, most of whom have acquired their wealth and position by carrying on extensive sugar plantations. These ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... white woman wearing a homespun dress and slat-bonnet, came down the road from the other side of the creek, and lifting her skirts slightly, waded with bare feet across the shallow stream. Reaching the clay-bank she stooped and gathered from ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... tale, Then rising took down from its nail The sword that hung there, dim with dust, And cleaving to its sheath with rust, And said, "This sword was in the fight." The Poet seized it, and exclaimed, "It is the sword of a good knight, Though homespun was his coat-of-mail; What matter if it be not named Joyeuse, Colada, Durindale, Excalibar, or Aroundight, Or other name the books record? Your ancestor, who bore this sword As Colonel of the Volunteers, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... that every farm had its spinning wheel and that clothes were made of the homespun woollens, but neither historian nor poet has ever pictured a New England shepherd with the shepherd's pipe. Imagination has not so ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... infancy can be deemed uncouth, she was an uncouth little atom of humanity. Her blue checked homespun dress, graced with big horn buttons, descended almost to her feet. Her straight, awkwardly cropped hair was of a nondescript shade pleasantly called "tow." As she came into the light of the fire, she lifted wide black ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... found excuse of business or pleasure to come and watch the advent of the trains. The chief use of the station platform seemed to be for these loungers; the chief use of the bar at the hotel was to slake their thirst, although they were not on the whole an intemperate lot. They stood about in homespun clothes and smoked. A lazy, but honest set of humble-minded French papists were the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... was over. The Boy picked up the two big white cats, Melindy and Jim, and placed them in the arms of old Billy Smith, where they settled themselves, looking about with an air of sleepy wisdom. From smallest kittenhood the smell of a homespun shirt had stood to them for every kind of gentleness and shelter, so they saw no reason to find fault with the arms of Billy Smith. By this time old Butters, the woodchuck, disturbed at the scattering of the Family, had retired in a huff to the depths ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and high-heeled shoes, and all made of the very finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped up to him, and smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a minuet. And he danced it perfectly,—poor little August in his thick, clumsy shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were duly honored, for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never scolded him at all, and danced so divinely herself to the stately measures the spinet was playing ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... cloak for him, and the linen for her child that she had been purchasing. I tell you, sir, the babe must have no linen but the finest fabric of Cambrai—yes, and even carnation-coloured ribbons—though, for herself, I saw the homespun she was sewing. As she mused over what she could throw back, I asked if she had no other gauds to make up the price, and she said, almost within herself, "They are my child's, not mine." Then remembering that I had been buying the hair of the peasant maidens, she suddenly offered me her tresses. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had been pretty well shot over already since the twelfth of August, but the two had a very pleasant day, for all that, a couple of days later. They went but with a keeper and half a dozen beaters—Frank in an old homespun suit of Jack's, and his own powerful boots, and made a very tolerable bag. There was one dramatic moment, Jack told me, when they found that luncheon had been laid at a high point on the hills from which the great gray mass of Merefield and the shimmer of the ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... cold on most nights, lentils on Fridays, collops and eggs on Saturdays, and a pigeon by way of addition on Sundays, consumed three-fourths of his income; the remainder of it supplied him with a cloak of fine cloth, velvet breeches, with slippers of the same for holidays, and a suit of the best homespun, in which he adorned himself on week-days. His family consisted of a housekeeper above forty, a niece not quite twenty, and a lad who served him both in the field and at home, who could saddle the horse or handle the pruning-hook. The age of our gentleman bordered ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of living—what does it amount to? How important is it? Does it matter whether we missionaries sleep on spring beds, or those made of boards (I prefer the latter myself!), whether we eat with chopsticks, or fingers, or forks; whether we wear silk or homespun; whether we sit on chairs or on the floor? Does it matter whether we are poor or rich? Does it matter whether we eat rice or potatoes? Does it matter whether we live in the way to which we are accustomed, or adopt the way of living of ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... magistrates in the world, I should think some distinction between the magistrates of the national government and those of the state governments proper." A distinction might be proper enough if there were to be any titles whatever; but certainly they were the wiser who preferred good homespun to threadbare old clothes. Had rags of that sort been made a legal uniform, it is almost appalling to reflect upon the absurdities to which the national fondness for titles would ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... at first not very much inclined to be sociable with them. Not only did they seem to have no shoes and stockings, but their entire clothing was usually limited to a battered straw hat, an unbleached cotton shirt, and a pair of rough homespun trousers; and the city boy was inclined to look upon the country lads with some contempt, until his Aunt Martha cured him effectually one day by a remark ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... little wind-rocked pappose swings from the branch of a tree. It can hardly be told whether it is a joy or a pain, after such a momentary vision, to gaze around in the broad daylight of reality and see stone fences, white houses, potato-fields, and men doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and homespun pantaloons. But this is nonsense. The Old Manse is ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the other, Jane's chamber, and a room which she usually kept locked. He had heard her there at night sometimes, for he slept above it, and once or twice had seen the door open in the daytime, and looked in. It held, he saw, better furniture than the rest of the house: a homespun carpet of soft, grave colors, thick drab curtains, a bedstead, one or two bookcases, filled and locked, of which Jane made as little use, he was sure, as she could of the fowling-piece and patent fishing-rod which he saw in one corner. There were no shams, no cheap makeshifts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... heroine rise, to grace the British scene: Here, as in life, she breathes her genuine flame, She asks, What bosom has not felt the same? Asks of the British youth—is silence there? She dares to ask it of the British fair. To-night our homespun author would be true, At once to nature, history, and you. 20 Well pleased to give our neighbours due applause, He owns their learning, but disdains their laws; Not to his patient touch, or happy flame, 'Tis to his British heart he trusts for fame. If France excel him in one freeborn thought, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... Robert, "the feckless body," stands in a rather apprehensive attitude before the old lady. He is a huge man of about forty-five. He is clean-shaven, and he has humorous grey eyes and dark hair. Despite his homespun attire, he looks more like a leader of men than a driver ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... woman, with a complexion burned perfectly red by the sun, and hair of an exact tow-color, braided up from her forehead in front and from her neck behind. These tails, meeting on the top of her head, were fastened with a small tin comb. Her dress was of checkered homespun, a "very tight fit," and, as she wore no ruff or handkerchief around her neck, she looked as if just prepared for execution. She was evidently awestruck at the sight of visitors, and seemed inclined to take her departure at once; but the boy, not so easily intimidated, would not ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... of a bristly red beard and mustache; on one side of his head was a round cap with a knob at the top, such as Scottish laborers sometimes wear; his coat was of a nondescript form, and made of a gray Scotch plaid, with the fringes hanging all about it; he wore pantaloons of coarse homespun, and hob-nailed shoes; and to complete his equipment, a little black pipe was stuck in one corner of his mouth. In this curious attire, I recognized Captain C. of the British army, who, with his brother, and Mr. R., an English gentleman, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... was provided for visiters, and for such of his own family as returned occasionally to his roof, and had been accustomed to this refreshment elsewhere; but neither he nor his wife ever partook of it. The raiment worn by his family was comely and decent, but as simple as their diet; the homespun materials were made up into apparel by their own hands. At the time of the decease of this thrifty pair, their cottage contained a large store of webs of woollen and linen cloth, woven from thread of their own spinning. And it is remarkable that the pew in the chapel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... with a sigh, A little tremulous, a little shy, But, with the tenderest accents, ask'd his guide A question which might touch both love and pride. "This morning, Jennet, why did you delay, "And talk to that strange clown upon your way, "Our homespun gardener? how can you bear "His screech-owl tones upon your perfect ear? "I cannot like that man, yet know not why, "He's surely quite as old again as I; "He's ignorant, and cannot be your choice, "And ugly too, I'm certain, by his voice, "Besides, he call'd you pretty."—"Well, ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... morning the news of the capture had spread to the farthest limits of the county. A much larger number of people than usual came to town that Saturday,—bearded men in straw hats and blue homespun shirts, and butternut trousers of great amplitude of material and vagueness of outline; women in homespun frocks and slat-bonnets, with faces as expressionless as the dreary sandhills which gave ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... far from prepossessing looking, to say the least. His garments were of dingy homespun, and his beard gave him the appearance of a tramp. But of course Phil realized that he must belong to the settlement toward which they were gradually drawing closer with every mile passed over. And if so surely Tony ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... younger, and they are childless. The husband is an active, well-built man with light, almost golden hair, rather coarse in texture, and with a pointed beard of the same hue. He has fine, clean-cut, muscular hands, and he wears, as I see him, a rough, rather shabby suit of light, homespun cloth. The wife is of fair complexion, a beautiful woman, with brown hair, and dressed, I think, in a very simple and rather peculiar dress. They are people of high principle, wealthy, and with cultivated tastes. They care for music and books and art. The husband has no profession. ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... forest, for his bronzed countenance bore traces of care and toil, while his rugged, yet well-formed hands conveyed the impression of the unceasing war he had waged against the gigantic trees of this Western land. He was habited in a hunting-frock of grey homespun, reaching about half way down to his knee, and trimmed with a full fringe of a somewhat darker hue. His trowsers were of the same material, and both were girt around his loins by a common belt of black leather, fastened by a plain white buckle, into which was thrust a sheath ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... ridges, and their creek-bottom marshes and sloughs—in the day's journey from Corinth to the bluffs of the Tennessee. They saw them, not empty, nor fearlessly crossed by the quail, the wild turkey, the fox, or the unhunted deer, nor travelled alone by the homespun "citizen" or by scouts or foragers, but slowly overflowed by a great gray, silent, tangled, armed host—cavalry, infantry, ordnance trains, batteries, battery wagons and ambulances: Saw Hilary Kincaid and all his heroes and their guns, and all the "big generals" and their smart escorts and ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... service with a gravity that would move some people to the same sort of laughter and wonder that is excited by the human doings of a trained chimpanzee. But Craig—the wild man, the arch foe of effeteness, the apostle of the simple life of yarn sock and tallowed boot and homespun pants and hairy jaw—Craig accepted the service with heartfelt thanks in his shaking voice ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... instantly and with her light deft fingers soon disembarrassed him of the homely garment. When it was taken off a noticeable transformation was effected in his appearance. Clad in plain dark homespun, which was fashioned into a suit somewhat resembling the doublet and hose of olden times, his tall thin figure had a distinctly aristocratic look and bearing which was lacking when clothed in the labourer's ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... Springs, Creek Nation, sent a communication, by request, to President Jackson in which he said, ... "From my own observation, I am induced to believe that a number of reservations have been paid for at some nominal price, and the principal consideration has been whisky and homespun" ... (p. 104). Gen. J. W. A. Sandford, sent by President Jackson to the Creek country to investigate the charges of fraud, wrote, on March 1, 1834, to the War Department, ... "It is but very recently that the Indian has been invested with ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... trace of hostile feeling in the countenance, words, or manner of any prisoner there. Almost to a man, they were simple, bumpkin-like fellows, dressed in homespun clothes, with faces singularly vacant of meaning, but sufficiently good-humored: a breed of men, in short, such as I did not suppose to exist in this country, although I have seen their like in some other parts of the world. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to gather into Boston. Tan, lanky, awkward fellows came in squads, and companies, and regiments, swaggering along, dressed in their brown homespun clothes and blue yarn stockings. They stooped as if they still had hold of the plough-handles, and marched without any time or tune. Hither they came, from the cornfields, from the clearing in the forest, from the blacksmith's forge, from ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stockings, and long gloves, and French cambric underclothes, and chiffon nightgowns like those Yvonne wears (but they aren't decent: still that doesn't matter so long as you're not married, and they are so pretty)! And a homespun tailor-made suit with a seam down the back and open tails: and—and—one of those real Panamas that you can pull through a wedding ring: and—oh! dear, I am greedy! It must be because I never have any clothes at all that I'm always wanting some. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... kept open through it all. It was the typical Hotel de la Gare of these little old towns—a bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the proprietor and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, a few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between heavy homespun sheets and under a feather bed. They were used to change, and the mere coming of armies could not be permitted ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... President, his graceful six feet in all the magnificence of black velvet and white satin, his queue in a black silk bag, stood beside his lady, who was as brave as himself in a gown of violet brocade over an immense hoop. Poor dame, she would far rather have been at Mount Vernon in homespun, for all this pomp and circumstance bored and isolated her. She hedged herself about with the etiquette which her exalted position demanded, and froze the social aspirant of insufficient pretensions, but her traditions and her propensities were ever at ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... truest-hearted, the clearest-headed, the purest-minded, the most helpful-handed, the most willing-footed—in short, the best and the nicest little backwoods damsel that ever wore linsey-woolsey frocks and homemade shoes in winter, and homespun cotton frocks and nothing at all on her feet in summer. But I see that, in this list, I had well nigh forgotten the most popular of all superlatives—"prettiest." So accustomed am I to squaring my estimate of beauty by the good, old adage, "he ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... of dawn they were on the march again, passing all day through the desolate flat country, where the women ran weeping to the doorways, and waved empty hands as they went by. Once a girl in a homespun dress, with a spray of apple blossoms in her black hair, brought out a wooden bucket filled with buttermilk and ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... remind us of the nineteenth century; and, as we looked out upon the river in the morning sunlight, we could almost fancy that the centuries between us and that ever-to-be-famous June morning of 1215 had been drawn aside, and that we, English yeomen's sons in homespun cloth, with dirk at belt, were waiting there to witness the writing of that stupendous page of history, the meaning whereof was to be translated to the common people some four hundred and odd years later by one Oliver Cromwell, who had deeply ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... were early risers, and long before sunrise three of them, clad in gray homespun frocks and broad-brimmed hats, appeared. They greeted ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the aristocratic habits of dueling, hunting, swaggering and carousing, he was essentially a man of the people. Nothing was so utterly foreign to him as any form of libertinism; even his eccentricities were of the hardy, homespun sort. He was absolutely free from social vanity; he detested court festivities; he set no store by orders or decorations; the only two among the innumerable ones conferred upon him which he is said to have highly valued were the Prussian order ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... costumes had been worked out for the various classes. They were adapted both to the purse and to the pursuit. They were fitting—that is, silk was not worn in huts or homespun in palaces; slippers were for carriages and sabots for streets. The garments of a class were founded on good sound principles on the whole—but they marked the class. Democracy sought to destroy outward distinctions. The proscribed costumes ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... well, came over from Wales or Holland a good while ago, and died when their time came. Some of them may have had fine equipage and caparisoned postillion, but the most of them were only footmen. My father started in life belonging to the aristocracy of hard knuckles and homespun, but had this high honor that no one could despise. He was the son of a father who loved God, and kept His commandments. What is the House of Hapsburg or Stuarts, compared with being son of the Lord God Almighty? Two eyes, two hands, and ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... the mother after her into the house. The room was without light, excepting from the open door; the bare, rough-hewn floor and table were spotless. One chair, a bench and an old chest of drawers was the only furniture besides the large bed with its neat, homespun blue counterpane. The hearth of the huge fireplace was swept clean, and although the middle of May, a good fire was burning. The teacher, sitting on the bench behind the table, let the little boy play with her watch, her purse, her rings, until in ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... started on my travels—in a customary suit of plain gray homespun, with worsted hose, knit for me by Mistress Pennyquick, a pair of stout shoes, a round hat, and a stout staff in my hand. I carried a few extra garments in a knapsack strapped to my back, and my few guineas were safely stowed in a wallet beneath ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... village school, Wedded a maid of homespun habit; He was stubborn as a mule, She was playful as ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... comfortable exchange for the darkness and bleak blast of the hill. Kindly and repeatedly was he welcomed by the venerable old dame, the mistress of the family, who, dressed in her coif and pinners, her close and decent gown of homespun wool, but with a large gold necklace and ear-rings, looked, what she really was, the lady as well as the farmer's wife, while, seated in her chair of wicker, by the corner of the great chimney, she directed the evening occupations ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... and they were left in darkness. Presuming it proper to dismiss his auditors, he proposed a parting prayer, and immediately every head was uncovered and bowed in reverence, while, with outstretched hands, that sincere old man in the homespun garb thus addressed the throne ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... burlap. [Science of textures] histology. Adj. structural, organic; anatomic, anatomical. textural, textile; fine grained, coarse grained; fine, delicate, subtile, gossamery, filmy, silky, satiny; coarse; homespun. rough, gritty; smooth. smooth as silk, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Roderick McRae," cried the young lady with the black eyes. "I remember when he used to go to school in a grey homespun suit with the hay sticking all over it. He's the son of old Angus McRae who used to bring our cabbage and lettuce to the ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... got," said Aunt Edy; and they spread out on the table garments of worsted and silk and muslin and lace and tarlatan and calico and homespun, just whatever their little hands had ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... a man came into the room, all dusty and sunburnt, a typical man of Aragon, dry and wrinkled, burnt like a son of Sahara. His clothing, like his face, was dust-coloured. He wore knee-breeches of homespun, brown stockings, a handkerchief that had once been coloured bound round his head, with the knot over his left ear. He was startlingly rough and wild in appearance, but his features, on examination, were refined, ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... people will cry shame on you, when, as they say, you are pampering up your sailors, in such manner as will cause discontent among all others in the port, while your wife and daughters are walking about in homespun!" ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... on these trips, made by the friendly Indians who often visited the little settlement, and her mother had made her a short skirt of tanned deerskin, such as little Indian girls sometimes wear, and with her blue blouse of homespun flannel, and round cap with a partridge wing on one side, Anna looked like a real little daughter of the woods as she trotted sturdily along beside her ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... to set about manufacturing woollens, cottons, etc., for themselves, the materials for which they had in great abundance of their own production. Ladies and gentlemen of the wealthiest and most fashionable classes of society appeared in homespun; and merchants pledged themselves to order no more goods from England, and to countermand the orders they ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... Salaberry's Voltigeurs, they were untrained in war; and their muskets and fowling-pieces were much inferior to the rifles of the regulars. Their victory, it must be said, reflected great credit upon them; although their losses had been twice as great as those of the soldiers,[1] these peasants in homespun had stood their ground with a courage and steadiness which would have honoured old campaigners. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about some of their leaders. Papineau and O'Callaghan were present in St Denis when the attack began; but before the morning was well advanced, ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... won respect for the lucidity of his statements and his conciliatory address. It soon became evident that the Stamp Act could not be enforced. No one could be compelled to buy stamps or pay tariff taxes if he preferred to withdraw from all business transactions, wear homespun, do without British manufactures, and even refrain from eating lamb that flocks of sheep might be increased and the wool used for ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... chairs on the floor,—every one seemed eager to make room for the newcomer. Helmsley, startled in a manner by his appearance, looked at him with involuntary and undisguised admiration. Such a picturesque figure of a man he had seldom or never seen, yet the fellow was clad in the roughest, raggedest homespun, the only striking and curious note of colour about him being a knitted crimson waistcoat, which instead of being buttoned was tied together with two or three tags of green ribbon. He stood for a moment watching ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... a trailing, clinging black skirt which her aunt had sent her a year ago and which she had never been permitted to wear. It transformed her into a woman. She had cast aside her waist of dark plum-coloured homespun and wrapped a silken shawl about herself until only her beautiful arms and shoulders were left bare. Her hair, glossy and brown, with burnished red lights where the rays of the dull autumn sun struck on it through the window, was heaped high on her head and held in place by a fillet of pearl beads. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that Ichabod arrived at the castle of the Heer Van Tassel, which he found thronged with the pride and flower of the adjacent country—old farmers, a spare leathern-faced race, in homespun coats and breeches, blue stockings, huge shoes, and magnificent pewter buckles; their brisk withered little dames, in close crimped caps, long-waisted shortgowns, homespun petticoats, with scissors and pincushions and gay calico pockets hanging ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... actions, and even looks, adapted to the infinite variety and combinations of persons, places, and things. It is a mode, not a substance; for what is good-breeding at St. James's, would pass for foppery or banter in a remote village; and the homespun civility of that village would be ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... are remarkable for high-relief and sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the homespun-robed chief of the Republic ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and gave out coats and sacks of coarse linen and homespun to Mrs. Pepper to make; and it was the fear of losing the work that had made the ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... with a clean cloth of the finest of homespun, and everything set out with the same nicety as if the meal had been spread in the dining-room. The old lady, who had sought to please her son by putting on her best cap for the occasion, but who had ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... bed stirred uneasily and suddenly became fully awake, after the way of those who are fluttering very near death. She was still young, and the little face among the coarse homespun blankets looked almost childish. Heavy masses of black hair lay on the pillow, and the depth of its darkness increased the pallor of her brow. But the cheeks were flushed, and the deep hazel eyes were burning with a slow ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... introduced to the landlord, who soon showed, by the conduct of himself and his family, that he was taught to consider our hero as a curiosity. They treated him with exemplary kindness, however. The landlord, though a rough homespun man, bred up in low life, manifested, not only tenderness and humanity, but a degree of delicacy that could not have been expected. A grown up young man, a son of his, the very evening he arrived, took ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... casements in a way that would have prevented a town-bred child from sleeping, and up in those bare rooms there was cold enough to pinch you black and blue; but Elsie and Duncan had never thought much of that, for they had been accustomed to it from babyhood, and only threw on their thick homespun garments in greater haste. ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and these females were remarkably ill- favoured; their complexions hardened, wrinkled, and bronzed, from the effects of hard toil, and the extremes of heat and cold. I heard the hum of spinning-wheels from many of the houses, for these industrious women spin their household linen, and the gray homespun in which the men are clothed. The furniture is antique, and made of oak, and looks as if it had been handed down from generation to generation. The men, largely assisted by the females, cultivate small plots of ground, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... started to feel a great warm hand on my shoulder, and a loud, cheery voice saith, 'Dolly Jennings, whither away so fast thou canst not see an old friend?' I looked up, and there was dear old Farmer Ingham, in his thick boots and country homespun; but I declare to you, child, that in my trouble his face was to me as that of an angel of God. I brake down, and sobbed aloud. 'Come, come, now!' saith he, comfortably; 'not so bad as that, is it? ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... a front name like Percey I'm takin' a chance on. Percey! Listens like one of the silky-haired kind that wears heliotrope silk socks, don't it? But, say, what finally shows up is a wide, heavy built gent with a big, homespun sort of face, crispy brown hair a little long over the ears, and the steadiest pair of bright brown eyes I ever saw. Nothing fancy or frail about Percey J. Sturgis. He's solid and substantial, ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... embarrassment, "I—I'm afraid I can't pay you that money. But you know that big flock of sheep down in the back pasture? Well, tell you what we'll do. Over at Beaverton I've got an uncle who's a tailor. I can give you a suit of full cloth of homespun and call it square," and though the boy wanted the money for fifty things he had to take the ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... order. The frosts of nearly forty winters had whitened over her brows, yet she had the manner and elasticity of a girl of eighteen, and a face so full of sweetness and gentleness that it seemed as if God had ordained it for man's love. Angeline's dress was usually of plain blue homespun, woven by her own hands, and with her cap and apron of snowy whiteness she presented a picture of neatness and comeliness ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... daughter. Her mother was a very dear wife to me, but she was taken away from us when the child was young, and the child became precious as the apple of my eye to me, for she was all I had left to love. For her sake entirely I married as second wife a homespun woman who had been kind as a mother to her. In due time the question of her education came on, and I said, 'I will educate the maid well, if I live upon bread to do it.' Of her possible marriage I could not bear to think, for it seemed like a death ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... bare Common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People still lived who regretted the unhappy separation from the mother island. . . The hooks were to be seen from which swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive redcoats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... the cheap Panama, and swung theatrically round on his heel. Between him and the saloon-door there was a solid barricade of heavy Dutch bodies, in moleskin, tan-cord, and greasy homespun, topped by lowering Dutch faces. Brawny right hands that could have choked the reedy crow out of the little bantam gamecock, clenched in the baggy pockets of old shooting-jackets. Others gripped leaded sjamboks, and others crept to hip-pockets, where German army revolvers were. The bar-keeper ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... thereon The pious peasants faring towards the church, And scarce refrained from greeting them like friends Dearly beloved, after long absence met. How more than fair the sunburnt wenches looked, In their rough, homespun gowns and coifs demure, After the beauty of bare, rosy limbs, And odorous, loose hair! He noted not Suspicious glances on his garb uncouth, His air extravagant and face distraught, With bursts of laughter from the red-cheeked boys, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... long to explore the woods again In my own aboriginal way, As before I knew how culture could frown On a hoydenish gait and a homespun gown Or dreamed that the strata of proud "upper-ten" ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... difference I noticed about her, however; that she was clothed in garments such as I had never seen her wear before. They were close fitting, save for a flowing cape, and made of some grey material, not unlike a coarse homespun or even asbestos cloth. Still they became her very well, and when I remarked upon them, all she answered was that part of our road would be rough. Even her feet were shod with high buskins ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... neatest-gloved man I knew. "Armstrong of Oregon" was a rough figure enough; but how well he knew how to bring out the kindly traits in that rude lumberman's character! how true to Nature is that sketch of a gentleman in homespun! And even Jake Shamberlain, the Mormon mail-carrier, a rollicking, untidy rover, fond of whiskey, and doubtless not too scrupulous in a "trade," has yet, in Winthrop's story, qualities which draw ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the door was opened wide, And the King's name a voice long silent cried, And Phoebus on the very threshold trod, And yet in nothing liker to a god Than when he ruled Admetus' herds, for he Still wore the homespun coat men used to see Among the heifers in the summer morn, And round about him hung the herdsman's horn, And in his hand he bore the herdsman's spear And cornel bow, the prowling dog-wolfs fear, Though ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... of hospital clothing sent from Conway, Mass., contained a pair of socks knit by a lady ninety-seven years old, who declared herself ready and anxious to do all she could. A homespun blanket bore the inscription, "This blanket was carried by Milly Aldrich, who is ninety-three years old, down hill and up hill, one and a-half miles, to be given to ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... generation after generation had come to live in this Quaker dwelling, he was brought up in simple, useful ways, and was early given his full share of the duties about the farm. No matter how sharply the cold of the harsh New England winter pierced his homespun clothes, the snow must be shoveled from the paths, firewood must be brought, the stalls in the barn must be littered, and, worst task of all for him, seven cows must be milked. Yet there was plenty of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and battered chest of drawers which had crossed the salt ocean and the plains and been pierced by a bullet in the fight with the Indians at Little Meadow. Almost, it seemed, she could visualize the women who had kept their pretties and their family homespun in its drawers—the women of those wandering generations who were grandmothers and greater great grandmothers of her own mother. Well, she sighed, it was a good stock to be born of, a hard-working, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... earned the ill-will of the Glen for ever by criticising the doctor's dress, but indeed it would have filled any townsman with amazement. Black he wore once a year, on Sacrament Sunday, and, if possible, at a funeral; topcoat or waterproof never. His jacket and waistcoat were rough homespun of Glen Urtach wool, which threw off the wet like a duck's back, and below he was clad in shepherd's tartan trousers, which disappeared into unpolished riding boots. His shirt was grey flannel, and he was uncertain about a collar, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... the loyal Democrats came together to the great Convention, and with them came Satan also. Bands of ill-favored men, in bushy hair, bad whiskey, and seedy homespun, staggered from the railway-stations, and hung about the street-corners. A reader of Dante or Swedenborg would have taken them for delegates from the lower regions, had not their clothing been plainly perishable, while the devils wear everlasting garments. They had come, they announced, to make ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... were different. They came to spend the summer with him, and they brought fancies and notions from their far-away city life, which made a somewhat incongruous mixture with the elemental simplicity of their grandfather's house. All this appeared now. The old farmer's plain strong features, his homespun dress and his bowl of milk, were at one end of the table, where he presided heartily over the fried ham and eggs. Look where you would beside, and you saw ruffled chintzes and little fly-away breakfast-caps, and fingers with jewels on them. Miss Euphemia had her tresses ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... packing-box, and surrounded, as all country dwellings at the South are, by a broad, open piazza. Our summons was answered by its owner, a well-to-do, substantial, middle-aged planter, wearing the ordinary homespun of the district, but evidently of a station in life much above the common 'corn-crackers' I had seen at the country meeting-house. The Colonel was an acquaintance, and greeting us with great cordiality, our host led the way directly to the sitting-room. There we found a bright, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... her soup pot in partial exchange for her labor. The luxuries of life on the island were air and water, and the glories of evening and morning. People who could buy them got such gorgeous clothes as were brought by the Company. But usually Jenieve felt happy enough when she put on her best red homespun bodice and petticoat for mass or to go to dances. She did wish for shoes. The ladies at the fort had shoes, with heels which clicked when they danced. Jenieve could dance better, but she always felt their eyes on her moccasins, and came to regard shoes ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... boy—his long bright curls were cut off, his face and hands were stained with a brown liquid to make him look sunburnt, as if he was used to work in the fields, and his rich velvet apparel was changed for coarse homespun woollen cloth. But he cared not what they put him on—his only thought was that he was going away from his beloved mother, perhaps never to see her more. He clasped his arms round her neck and clung to her sobbing, as if his heart ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... to think of those rows of sober-faced Puritan boys seated on the narrow, steep pulpit stairs, clad in knee-breeches and homespun flapped coats, and with round, cropped heads, miniature likenesses in dress and countenance (if not in deportment) of their grave, stern, God-fearing fathers. Though they were of the sedate Puritan blood, they were boys, and they wriggled and ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... preceptress for youth. If the Cattarina wrote him billets-doux, I fear Aunt Bernstein would have bade him accept the invitations: but the lad had brought with him from his colonial home a stock of modesty which he still wore along with the honest homespun linen. Libertinism was rare in those thinly-peopled regions from which he came. The vices of great cities were scarce known or practised in the rough towns of the American continent. Harry Warrington blushed like a girl at the daring talk of his new European associates: even Aunt Bernstein's ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... social service are carried on,—district nursing, classes in sanitation and hygiene, social clubs and entertainments for people of all ages, and a department of fireside industries, through which is created an outside market for the beautiful coverlets, blankets and homespun, woven by the mountain women, as well as for ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... than ordnance would that is charged with amomum, musk, civet and ambergreece." It was surely a mock-modesty which led Nash to fear that such ghost-stories as these would appear to his readers duller than Holland cheese and more tiresome than homespun. To 1594, too, belongs the tragedy of "Dido," probably left incomplete by Marlowe, and finished by Nash, who shows himself here an adept in that swelling bombast of bragging blank verse of which he affected to disapprove. A new edition of "Christ's ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... lilies in her hand would do their part to stimulate. She submitted to this possibility, and waited for his coming, which began to seem unreasonably delayed. The door opened at last, and a tall, powerfully framed man of thirty-five or forty, dressed in an ill-fitting suit of gray Canada homespun appeared. He moved with a slow, pondering step, and carried his shaggy head bent downwards from shoulders slightly rounded. His dark beard was already grizzled, and she saw that his mustache was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the slumbrous, dreamy way that sees all and reveals nothing. Instinctively I started up, with wild thoughts thronging to my lips. At the same moment Mr. Sutherland did the most chivalrous thing I have seen in homespun or broadcloth. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... who had drawn unlucky numbers in the last conscription, and were on their way to a famous French garrison town where much of the raw military material is worked up into soldiery. At the station they had been sitting about, in their threadbare homespun blue garments, with their poor little bundles under their arms, covered with dust and clay, and the various soils of France; sad enough at heart, most of them, but putting a good face upon it, and slapping their ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... watched her interrogatively the colour faded from her face. The relief of hearing that homespun plan had chilled her blood, and she was faint for an instant with the sickness of hearty youth that only knows it feels odd to itself and concludes the strangeness is of the soul. But she did not answer, for Anne was at ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... I watched the yard gate with eager eyes. No dragoons appeared, and in a short time madam and Jane were back in the house-place. Jane had done her work well. The great lady was now a fine country serving-wench, her shapeliness obscured in a homespun gown that fitted only where it touched, her feet in huge, rough boots, her yellow hair plastered back off her forehead and bunched into one of Jane's 'granny caps,' and indeed totally hidden by the large flap thereof, which in Jane's case served the purpose of "keepin' the draf out'n 'er neck-hole" ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... master spirit, And supplied domestic comfort. Lawyers, doctors, merchants, traders, Preachers, artisans, and idlers, From afar and near flocked hither; And the "continental coppers" Were in speedy circulation. Spinning, weaving, sewing, knitting, Filled the women's dextrous fingers, And the homespun and the linsey Were the choice and boasted fabrics, Furnished strong and useful garments, In the day of early settlers. Social gatherings were frequent, 'Round log fires and tallow candles, And the quaint old invitations To some public house or "tavern," Call a smile ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... head against Mr. Cobb's homespun knee and recounted the history of her trouble. Tragic as that history seemed to her passionate and undisciplined mind, she told it truthfully and ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a far more enduring service in helping me to see that one does not need towns and libraries to grow the fine flower of wholesome cultured womanhood. Here, beside that lake, whose lady has been made immortal by the hand of Scott, you showed me that God grows ladies still who wear homespun and live in cottages, and are all the wiser and sweeter for the bright seclusion of their lives. In a town, you and your family, endowed only with such means as you found sufficient for existence, would have been despondent drudges, you yourself perhaps working ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... them with some curiosity. They did not look in the least like the ordinary run of Lindsay people. The boy, in particular, had a distinctly foreign appearance, in spite of the gingham shirt and homespun trousers, which seemed to be the regulation, work-a-day outfit for the Lindsay farmer lads. He had a lithe, supple body, with sloping shoulders, and a lean, satiny brown throat above his open shirt collar. His head was covered with thick, silky, black curls, and the hand that hung down by the side ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... protest against slavery by abstaining as far as possible from slave-made products; and together they made maple, to take the place of cane sugar, and used nothing but linen and woolen clothing (largely homespun)."[15] This later Quaker, possessed of the spirit of the community of his fathers, shows his inner conflict with the ideals of a competitive age in the expression "so far as possible." It was not as practicable in 1855 to "abstain from slave-made products," ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... fragment as we possess it there are certain passages which pass beyond any legitimate idealization of the actual world in which Jonson chose to lay his scene, and which contrast jarringly and irreconcilably with the coarser threads of homespun. Thus Aeglamour, in so far as it is possible to form an opinion, keeps too much of the artificial Arcadianism of the Italians about him, and is hardly of a piece with the rest of the personae. The same may be said of the name at least of Earine; of her character ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... people agreed to wear homespun instead of English cloths, and to stop eating mutton in order to have more sheep to produce wool for this homespun, thus showing a willingness to give up for the cause some of the luxuries which they had ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... fancy for being left with no other protection than a half-disciplined rabble, who, ready as they might be to act against their troublesome countrymen, had no more respect for a lawn sleeve than for a homespun jerkin. A few troops of regular cavalry were therefore retained, and one regiment of Foot Guards. The former were commanded by Athole, the latter by Linlithgow. Towards the end of 1677 a fresh troop of cavalry ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... who are not indigenous to the soil, are more roughly clothed and more careless in manner than the same order of passengers between New York and Boston. Of those who enter and leave at way-stations, the men are clad in that yellow, homespun material known as "butternut." The casual observer inclines to the opinion that there are no good bathing-places where these men reside. They are inquisitive, ignorant, unkempt, but generally civil. The women are the reverse of attractive, ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... circumstance he conjectured that Orestes had been there. We have then an allusion to the means which Aeschylus had employed to bring about the recognition, namely, the resemblance of the hair, the prints of feet, as well as the homespun-robe, with a condemnation of them as insufficient and absurd. The probability of this part of the drama of Aeschylus may, perhaps, admit of being cleared up, at all events one is ready to overlook it; but an express reference ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... intend to dwell no longer with her, Since that the bastinado drove me thence. These silken girls are all too fine for me: My master shall report of those in hell, Whilst I go range amongst the country-maids, To see, if homespun lasses milder be Than my curs'd dame and Lacy's wanton wife. Thus therefore will I live betwixt two shapes; When as I list, in this transform'd disguise, I'll fright the country-people as they pass; And sometimes turn me to some other form, And so delude them with ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... work in the past fifty years has been rapid. The grandmothers of the women of this generation carded wool and used spinning wheels within the memory of workers of less than middle age. One old woman who died not many years ago told how she used to bake in an oven out-of-doors and had dyed homespun with butternut. The soap cauldron stood on the levelled stump of what had been once a forest tree. Candles were moulded in iron moulds. Household industries were carried on expertly in the homes of pioneers by the women ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... weaver and tailor. The waggon he drives is his handiwork; so is the harness; the home-spun cloth of his suit is made by his wife from the wool of his own sheep: it is an excellent fabric but, alas, the young people now prefer the machine-made cottons and cloths of commerce and will no longer wear homespun. Sometimes the habitant makes his own boots, the excellent bottes sauvages of the country. The women make not only home-spun cloth, but linen, straw hats, gloves, candles, soap. When there are maple trees, the habitant provides his ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... to the language of their childhood in their dying hours. Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,—but it lay there under all their culture. That is one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly those of the Hebrew ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... invisible. Being a well-bred man he had not (like another recent ducal visitor) come to the dinner in a shooting-jacket; but his evening clothes were so shabby and baggy, and he wore them with such an air of their being homespun, that (with his stooping way of sitting, and the vast beard spreading over his shirt-front) he hardly gave the appearance of being in dinner attire. He was short, round-shouldered, sunburnt, with a thick nose, small ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... a ruled border in red ink, and in the centre in schoolboy copper plate, Mr. Dma Nath. "Give salaam," said the civilian, and there entered in haste a slender youth, clad in a closely fitting coat of grey homespun, tight trousers, patent-leather shoes, and a small black velvet cap. His thin cheek twitched, and his eyes wandered restlessly, for the young man was evidently nervous and uncomfortable, though striving to assume ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... in the same way as modern sewing machines are made for hand or treadle, and sometimes a combination of both methods. The very general use of the spinning wheel is accounted for by the fact that this useful machine was met with in every cottage in the days when homespun yarns and wools were prepared by hand, and they were also found in the mansion and the palace, where they served to amuse ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... shop came the loomhouse, where Scip, the little fat weaver, threw the shuttles and beat up the homespun cloth from morning till night; there, too, were the warping-bars, the winding-blades, and the little quilling-wheel, at which a boy or girl would fill the quills to be in readiness for the shuttles. Scip was an odd figure, with his short legs, and his woolly hair combed out until his head ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... Englanders in homespun looked at one another with trepidation on their features. The red coat was not assuring, but they kept their peace and breathed hard, praying that the enemy had not captured the convention through strategy. Mr. Randolph's ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... upon them furiously. When Susan happened to glance at him, his head was bent so low and his straw hat was tilted so far forward that she could not see his face. She observed that he was dressed attractively in an extremely light summer suit of homespun; his hands were large and strong and ruddy—the hands of an artist, in good health. Her glance returned to the magazine. After a few minutes she looked up. She was startled to find that the man was giving her a curious, searching inspection—and that he was Brent, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... like so few, good illustrations of Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and quality, is still the same as his own. The designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as quaint, and almost as apposite as Bunyan's; and text and pictures make but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned story. To do justice to the designs, it will be necessary to say, for the hundredth time, a word or two about the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... English rustic life. The little wood engravings which he turned out in such great number were records of typical scenes and episodes, but the artist could also give them social and moral overtones. Such an approach has attracted numerous admirers who have held him in esteem as an undoubted homespun genius. The fact that he had no formal training as a wood engraver, and actually never had a lesson in drawing, made his native inspiration seem all ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... their long ears and half-inquisitive, half- frightened looks; the true denizens of the forest, (I saw at once,) filling a vacuum which now first I discovered had not been filled for me, —moose-men, wood-eaters, the word is said to mean,—clad in a sort of Vermont gray, or homespun. Our Nimrod, owing to the retrograde movement, was now the farthest from the game; but being warned of its neighborhood, he hastily stood up, and, while we ducked, fired over our heads one barrel at the foremost, which alone he saw, though he did not know what kind of creature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... have passed for Italians, and their dress was more European than Chinese in cut. On their heads they wore the Tam o' Shanter-like cap of black stuff, common among these people, bound on with their long braids, and their coats were of the usual felt. Their skirts, homespun, were made with what we used to call a Spanish flounce. According to Baber, the Lolo petticoat is of great significance. No one may go among the independent Lolos safely save in the guardianship of a member of the tribe, and a woman is as ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... American custom, was dressed in its clothes—a suit of light grey homespun, such as is to be bought everywhere from French-Canadian weavers. When they had lifted the body and put it in the box, they stopped involuntarily to look, before the girl laid a handkerchief upon the face. There lay a stalwart, grey-haired man—dead. Perhaps he had sinned deeply ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... was a square, ruddy-faced man of sixty, with neatly trimmed, snow-white whiskers. He had on a soft Alpine hat of pearl gray, a modishly cut gray homespun suit, a tie in which glimmered an opal pin, wore tan gloves, and had slung over one shoulder by a narrow black ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... frame, thin legs, and plump hands. The strangulation cravat at his throat was of the kind which every marquis wears in all the portraits which adorn eighteenth century literature; it is common alike to Saint-Preux and to Lovelace, to the elegant Montesquieu's heroes and to Diderot's homespun characters (see the first editions of ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... and also contrasted Lawyer Wilson's appearance with that of her father; the former, well dressed in the style of a gentleman of the time, in broadcloth, with fine linen, and a tall silk hat carefully placed on the floor of the pew; while Deacon Baxter wore homespun made of wool from his own sheep, spun and woven, dyed and finished, at the fulling-mill in the village, and carried a battered felt hat that had been a matter of ridicule these dozen years. (The Deacon would be buried in two coats, Jed Morrill always ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... interpretation." After a long simile drawn from the hunting field he concludes, "No more do I conceive my course herein to be faulty though I do not affect to follow my author so close as to tread upon his heels." John Vicars, who professes to have robed Virgil in "a homespun English gray-coat plain," says of his manner, "I have aimed at these three things, perspicuity of the matter, fidelity to the author, and facility or smoothness to recreate thee my reader. Now if any critical or curious wit tax me with a Frustra fit per plura &c. and blame my not curious confinement ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... comfortable room, with strings of red peppers hanging from the ceiling, and boards of sliced apples drying on upturned flour barrels near the door. The bright homespun carpet left a strip of bare plank by the stove, and on this stood two hampers of black walnuts ready for storing. A few coloured prints, culled from garden magazines, were tacked on the wall, and these, without exception, represented blossoms of a miraculous splendour and size. ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... face, of a highbred and strongly marked type, emphasised by age, had the hawk-like contour, that is supposed to betoken extreme acquisitiveness. His faded eyes were turned toward a woman, dressed in a homespun frock and a muslin cap, who sat bolt upright, in a straight-backed chair, at the other end of the piazza, with her hands folded on her lap, looking fixedly toward her vis-a-vis. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to the ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... yes, Abe," she added, "you have some rights. We've been good friends all these years, and you've been all right out here. You said some nice things about me just now, and I liked it, even if it was as if you'd learned it out of a book. I've got no po'try in me; I'm plain homespun. I'm a sapling, I'm not any prairie-flower, but I like when I like, and I like a lot when I like. I'm a bit of hickory, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... man. He has fewer horses and fewer servants, but he has still more than he requires, and his mode of life has undergone no perceptible alteration. Maria Petrovna complains that she is no longer supplied with eggs, chickens, and homespun linen by the peasants, and that everything is three times as dear as it used to be; but somehow the larder is still full, and abundance reigns in ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... hinder you no more with my chat," said his hostess, with kindly good humor, and slipped away upstairs. She lighted a great wood fire in the bedroom, and laid the bed and the blankets all round it, and opened the window, and took the homespun linen sheets out of a press, and made the room very tidy. Then she went down again, and the moment Henry saw her, he said "I feel your kindness, miss, but I don't know your name, nor where in the world I am." His hostess smiled. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... heads. Henrietta Blaisdell, a fat, shapeless girl with a freckled face, whose father owned more pine timber than any other man in the county, wore black silk, and was regarded with something like awe by the less fortunate ones in calico and homespun. Drusy was handsomer than ever, in a soft woollen gown of dull blue, with a red rose in the masses of her black hair and another at her throat. The schoolmistress, a pretty blonde, who was also a belle, wore white muslin, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... pillow-covers of all patterns, crocheted lace and knitted lace and lace made every other way. There was painting on china and satin and velvet and silk and every other known fabric, and the walls were hung with homespun blankets, ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... who was not unaccustomed to ghostly sights, for they were his heritage, raised himself in bed, and knowing no fear looked steadily. What he saw thrown into relief against the shadows was the figure of a hillman of the west, and one that in an instant he knew. The Covenanter was dressed in rough homespun hodden gray, stained heavily with the black of the peat holes in which he had been hiding, and torn here and there where the rocks had caught him as he was crawling for shelter. Of middle age, with hair hanging over his ears ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... were homespun-clad mountain children. A high-shouldered, elderly man sat at a table near the deep fireplace, where a huge backlog was smouldering. Through the cobwebbed window-panes the mists ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Squire's re-election to his great office, when everything was lovely and "the goose hung high," he was surrounded by a large crowd of his fellow citizens, and Thomas Jefferson, in his palmiest days, never looked grander than did the Squire on this occasion. He was attired in his best suit of homespun, the choicest product of his wife's dye pot. His immense vest with its broad luminous stripes, checked the rotundity of his ample stomach like the lines of latitude and longitude, and resembled a half finished map of the United States. His blue jeans coat covered his body ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... have rehearsed a scene in which she would be called upon to soothe a stricken woman and speak comfort to a breaking heart. She had supposed that love was the same the world over, whether it went in silk brocade or coarse homespun. She had apt phrases ready to meet the expected, plenty of well-prepared sympathy to bestow, but she had no answer for this quiet, ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... only the neat little schooner, "Brilliant," with divers small fishing-boats, but also a snug farm, adjoining the brown house, together with some fresh, juicy pasture-lots on neighboring islands, where he raised mutton, unsurpassed even by the English South-down, and wool, which furnished homespun to clothe his family on all ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... level, curious gaze upon him, and Jean had never met one just like it. Her eyes were rather a wide oval in shape, clear and steady, with shadows of thought in their amber-brown depths. They seemed to look through Jean, and his gaze dropped first. Then it was he saw her ragged homespun skirt and a few inches of brown, bare ankles, strong and round, and crude worn-out moccasins that failed to hide the shapeliness, of her feet. Suddenly she drew back her stockingless ankles and ill-shod little feet. When ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... cream. Everybody knitted socks. Ladies, negro women, girls, and even little boys, learned to knit. Each tried to get ahead as to number and quality. Ladies' stockings were also knitted of all grades from stout and thick to gossamer or open-work, etc. Homespun dresses were proudly worn, and it became a matter of constant experiment and great pride to improve the quality and vary colors. Warp and woof were finely spun, and beautiful combinations of colors ventured upon, although older heads eschewed ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... penknives with white handles, A bunch of quills, and pound of candles, A lexicon compiled by COLE, A pewter spoon, and earthen bowl, A hammer, and two homespun towels, For which I yearn with tender bowels, Since I no longer can control them, I leave to those sly ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... at Mechi's, therefore, to confront a tribunal (not the official but the popular) already prepared for its condemnation. Before it stood John Bull, burly, dogged and determined not to be humbugged—his judgment made up and his sentence ready to be recorded. Nothing disconcerted, the brown, rough, homespun Yankee in charge jumped on the box, starting the team at a smart walk, setting the blades of the machine in lively operation, and commenced raking off the grain in sheaf-piles ready for binding,—cutting a breadth of nine or ten feet cleanly and carefully as fast as a span ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... an old man in a long white beard, leathery, sun-tanned face and hooked nose, clasped the bars with both hands, gazing at us intently. I recognized his kind the moment I looked at him. He was like my Jonathan Gordon, my old fisherman who lived up in the Franconia Notch. His coarse, homespun clothes, dyed brown with walnut-shells, slouch hat crowning his shock of gray hair, and hickory shirt open at the throat, only heightened the resemblance; especially the hat canted over one eye. Why he wore the hat in such a place I could not ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... saw a number of canvas-covered wagons drawn up in front of the cabins; the vehicles were dusty and the wheels encrusted with yellow mud. The grizzled frontiersman who had smiled at Nell stood leaning on his gun, talking to three men, whose travel-stained and worn homespun clothes suggested a long and toilsome journey. There was the bustle of excitement incident to the arrival of strangers; to the quick exchange of greetings, the unloading of wagons and unharnessing of horses ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... has given me a list of things he found most useful. Two rough homespun or serge suits: riding breeches, which are absolutely indispensable; riding boots laced up the centre, and large, as they are continually getting wet; flannel shirts; thick worsted stockings; a warm ulster, ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... she permitted no one but herself to open. Here she treasured all the things she had inherited from her mother, and of these she was especially careful. Here lay a couple of old-time peasant dresses, of red homespun cloth, with short bodice and plaited shirt, and a pearl-bedecked breast pin. There were starched white-linen head-dresses, and heavy silver ornaments and chains. Folks don't care to go about dressed like that in these days, and several times his mother had thought of getting ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... orderlies passed through the door of No. 16 and lowered the stretcher, the old man put down his carpet sack and grimly watched the nurse uncover the patient. Under the worn homespun coverlet, stained with the dull dyes of barks and berries, lay an emaciated figure, just as it had been brought into the hospital. One long coarse garment covered it, and the bare feet with their prominent ankle bones and the large work-hardened hands might have belonged to either ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... that once when he had not been angry. It was on a day when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was going out of the door. The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without a ferrule. Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high forehead, narrow, sallow, ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... explore the woods again In my own aboriginal way, As before I knew how culture could frown On a hoydenish gait and a homespun gown Or dreamed that the strata of proud "upper-ten" Would smile at ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... leaves us nothing to relate, which may interest a mind surrounded by such buoyant scenes as yours. No matter; I will still tell you the charming though homespun news, that our crops of wheat have been abundant and of superior quality; that very great though partial drought has destroyed the crops of hay to the north, and corn to the south; that the late rains may recover the tobacco to a middling ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... was a great clamour, and I found that "The Battle of the Books" had begun raging anew. Two figures entered in lively dispute. One was dressed in plain homespun and the other wore a scholar's gown over a suit of motley. I gathered from their conversation that they were Cotton Mather and William Shakspere. Mather insisted that the witches in "Macbeth" should be caught and hanged. Shakspere replied that the witches had already suffered enough at the hands ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... secured and the stocking of it becomes a pleasant duty. Into it are laid the girl's discarded infant clothes; patchwork quilts and comfortables pieced by herself or by some fond grandmother or mother or aunt; homespun sheets and towels that have been handed down from other generations; ginghams, linens and minor household articles that might be useful in her own home. When the girl leaves the old nest for one of her own building ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... uneducated, and not the educated classes, we would prefer vivid popular terms to the artificial creations of scientists. We shall often do better by inquiring, for instance, not what name the inventor gave to his new machine, but what it is called by the workmen who handle it; and in adopting their homespun terms and giving them literary currency, we shall help to preserve the living and popular character ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... the midst of a strange, wild scene: his clothes, originally of some homespun cloth, now patched so freely with dressed deerskin as to leave little of the original material; moccasins on his feet, a beaver cap upon his head, his leather belt stuck round with hunting knives, and the pistol to be used at close quarters should ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Port y Vullin. Here at the Lague lived ADAM FATSISTER, the Deputy Governor, who had been selected for that post because he owned five hundred hungry acres, six hungrier sons, a face like an angel's in homespun, a flaccid figure, and a shrewd-faced wife, named RUTH. Hither came STIFFUN, to beg shelter. The footman opened the door to him, but would have closed it had not ADAM, with a lusty old oath, bidden him to let the man in. Hereupon STIFFUN's face softened, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... marvel! Wulfric, my son, you have grown from boy to man since last we met; and you come in helm and mail shirt and on horseback, instead of in blue homespun and fur cap, with an oar blister on ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... was her name, received us with that mixture of respect and ease, which shewed she was accustomed to converse with her superiors. She was dressed in a blue homespun gown, (the sleeves of which were drawn up to her elbows and the lower part tucked through her pocket-hole,) a black stuff petticoat, black stockings and shoes with the soles more than half an inch thick. She wore also, a large white apron, and a neat and by ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Grant could not deny that he seemed improved,—rather perhaps that the setting of fine clothes, cleanliness, and the absence of petty worries, made his characteristics respectable. That which is ill breeding in homespun, is apt to become mere eccentricity in purple and fine linen; Grant felt that Harcourt jarred on him less than he did before, and was grateful without superciliousness. Harcourt, relieved to find that ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... herself. Down came the coach-and-four, and forth from it came Lady Belamour in a magnificent hoop, the first seen in those parts, managing it with a grace that made her an overwhelming spectacle, in contrast with Betty, in her close-fitting dark-grey homespun, plain white muslin apron, cap, kerchief, and ruggles, scrupulously neat and fresh, but unadorned. The visit was graciously designed for "good cousin Harry," but his daughter was obliged, not unwillingly, though quite truly, to declare him far too ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dressed in the picturesque utility garb of buckskin, homespun, and "hickory" which stamped the pioneer of his day, a big man lay at full length: a large man even here, where the law of the fittest reigned supreme. A stubbly growth of beard covered his face, giving it the ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... gabled house, in a garden where the autumn flowers hung their heads under the heavy dew. There was a paddock behind the house where a cow was feeding, and a gate led through a yard to the back door, and thither the boy was turning when he noticed a little girl in homespun frock and sun-bonnet leaning over the garden gate, looking up rather wistfully at the shuttered windows of the house. She gave a great start as the boy came behind her and laid his ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... every farm had its spinning wheel and that clothes were made of the homespun woollens, but neither historian nor poet has ever pictured a New England shepherd with the shepherd's pipe. Imagination has not so far ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... knew where he was, for beneath the battered white felt and homespun clothes of a river boatman no one recognised the ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... Kosmaroff sat down and ate, while Wanda waited on him, and Prince Bukaty poured out wine for this rough man in the homespun clothing and heavy boots of the Vistula raftsman, who yet had the manner of a gentleman and that quiet air of self-possession in all societies which is not to be learned in schools nor yet acquired ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... in spick an' span clean clothes come Sund'ys. Ever'body wore homespun clo'es den. De mistis an' de res' o' de ladies in de Big House made mos' of 'em. De cullud wimmins wore some kin' o' dress wid white aprons an' de mens wore overalls an' homespun pants an' shirts. Course, all de time us gits han'-me-downs from ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... throw oil upon the troubled waters,—low, languid, and full of pacifying intonations. She was a tall, thin woman, clad in a blue-checked homespun dress, and seated before a great hand-loom, as a lady sits before a piano or an organ. The creak of the treadle, and the thump, thump of the batten, punctuated, as it were, ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Dalgas was prophet, prince, and friend of the people. In the crowds that flocked about his bier homespun elbowed gold lace in the grief of a common loss. Boughs of the fragrant spruce decked his coffin, the gift of the heath to the memory of ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... lucidity of his statements and his conciliatory address. It soon became evident that the Stamp Act could not be enforced. No one could be compelled to buy stamps or pay tariff taxes if he preferred to withdraw from all business transactions, wear homespun, do without British manufactures, and even refrain from eating lamb that flocks of sheep might be increased and the wool ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... of a highbred and strongly marked type, emphasised by age, had the hawk-like contour, that is supposed to betoken extreme acquisitiveness. His faded eyes were turned toward a woman, dressed in a homespun frock and a muslin cap, who sat bolt upright, in a straight-backed chair, at the other end of the piazza, with her hands folded on her lap, looking fixedly toward her vis-a-vis. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to the colonel, and when the old man rose, it was not to step forward ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... acute observer might have imagined that the passionate plaint was directed at him. If so it passed harmlessly over his broad shoulders. In his immaculate evening dress he looked strangely out of place there. Enid had escaped the prevailing dilapidation, but her gown of grey homespun was severe as the ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... won't hinder you no more with my chat," said his hostess, with kindly good humor, and slipped away upstairs. She lighted a great wood fire in the bedroom, and laid the bed and the blankets all round it, and opened the window, and took the homespun linen sheets out of a press, and made the room very tidy. Then she went down again, and the moment Henry saw her, he said "I feel your kindness, miss, but I don't know your name, nor where in the world I am." His hostess smiled. "That is no secret. I'm Martha Dence—at your service: and ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... a tall, gaunt young man, dressed in a suit of blue homespun, consisting of a roundabout jacket, waistcoat, and breeches which came to within about three inches of his feet. The latter were encased in rawhide boots, into the tops of which, most of the time, his pantaloons were stuffed. He wore a soft felt ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... the mountain cattle and to see the red cow's picturesque head and crumpled horns thrust over the sassafras bushes, or to hear the brindle's clanking bell. It was certainly less unexpected to Cynthia when a young mountaineer, clad in brown jean trousers and a checked homespun shirt, emerged upon the rocky slope. He still wore his blacksmith's leather apron, and his powerful corded hammer-arm was bare beneath his tightly-rolled sleeve. He was tall and heavily built; his sunburned face was square, with a ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... them through the thickening gloom, very slowly; leaning on a stick. As he drew nearer, they observed that he was pale and worn, and that his anxious eyes were deeply sunken in his head. His dress of homespun blue hung about him in rags; his feet and head were bare. He sat down on a stump half-way, and beckoned them to come to him. When they complied, he put his hand upon his side as if in pain, and while he fetched his breath ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... van Rensburg, and he runs through this Government report like a scarlet thread through gray homespun. It is around his influence that the uprising of Sept. 15 is built. It is under his roof that all manner of lurid conspiracies are hatched. Not only do his words carry with the crowds that gather before his house to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... left to tell secrets. When he was sure we were alone he took from his trunk a long, flat box. Inside was the most wonderful shirt I have ever seen; it looked like a cross between a nightshirt and a shirt-waist. It was of homespun linen. The bosom was ruffled and tucked, all done by hand,—such tiny stitches, such patience and skill. Then he handed me an old daguerreotype. I unfastened the little golden hook and inside was a face good to see and to remember. It was dim, yet clear in outline, just ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... sorts of apologies for not being at home to receive you. He will be home before dinner. Here is mamma,' as Lady Palliser came sailing out, in a forty-guinea gown from Jay, all glitter of bugles, and sheen of satin, putting Mrs. Wendover's homespun travelling dress to shame. There was a dinner-gown with the luggage, but a gown which, in comparison with Lady Palliser's satin and jet, would be like the cloudy countenance of Luna on a November night, as compared with the glory of Sol on a midsummer morning. But then, happily, Mrs. Wendover ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Dalica, so many years Weaned from the bosom of thy native land, Returnest back and seekest true repose. Oh, what more pleasant than the short-breathed sigh When laying down your burden at the gate, And dizzy with long wandering, you embrace The cool and quiet of a homespun bed." "Alas," said Dalica, "though all commend This choice, and many meet with no control, Yet none pursue it! Age by Care oppressed Feels for the couch, and drops into the grave. The tranquil scene lies further still from Youth: Frenzied Ambition and desponding Love Consume Youth's ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... took America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with something of its own ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... other cities he had known—their homespun kindliness, their human gamut of rough charity, friendly curses, garrulous curiosity and easily estimated credulity or indifference. This city of Manhattan gave him no clue; it was walled against him. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Lawyer Wilson's appearance with that of her father; the former, well dressed in the style of a gentleman of the time, in broadcloth, with fine linen, and a tall silk hat carefully placed on the floor of the pew; while Deacon Baxter wore homespun made of wool from his own sheep, spun and woven, dyed and finished, at the fulling-mill in the village, and carried a battered felt hat that had been a matter of ridicule these dozen years. (The Deacon would be buried in two coats, Jed Morrill always said, ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to throw money into the gutter in one way, you can in another; and people will cry shame on you, when, as they say, you are pampering up your sailors, in such manner as will cause discontent among all others in the port, while your wife and daughters are walking about in homespun!" ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... old man in a long white beard, leathery, sun-tanned face and hooked nose, clasped the bars with both hands, gazing at us intently. I recognized his kind the moment I looked at him. He was like my Jonathan Gordon, my old fisherman who lived up in the Franconia Notch. His coarse, homespun clothes, dyed brown with walnut-shells, slouch hat crowning his shock of gray hair, and hickory shirt open at the throat, only heightened the resemblance; especially the hat canted over one eye. Why he wore the hat in such a place I could not understand, unless to be ready for departure ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Ladies, negro women, girls, and even little boys, learned to knit. Each tried to get ahead as to number and quality. Ladies' stockings were also knitted of all grades from stout and thick to gossamer or open-work, etc. Homespun dresses were proudly worn, and it became a matter of constant experiment and great pride to improve the quality and vary colors. Warp and woof were finely spun, and beautiful combinations of colors ventured ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... perfumed the air than ordnance would that is charged with amomum, musk, civet and ambergreece." It was surely a mock-modesty which led Nash to fear that such ghost-stories as these would appear to his readers duller than Holland cheese and more tiresome than homespun. To 1594, too, belongs the tragedy of "Dido," probably left incomplete by Marlowe, and finished by Nash, who shows himself here an adept in that swelling bombast of bragging blank verse of which he affected to disapprove. ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... peasants whose villages bordered on the nobles' estates. Dostoyevsky, though not of this landed-proprietor school, still dealt with the nobility, albeit with its waifs and strays. None of these masters more than touched the Russian merchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping and mean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities or the homely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves sprang, yet gifted with a rough force and determination not often found ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... and homespun vestments spread, Than if cerulean sapphires at her ears Shone pendent, or a precious diamond cross Heaved gently on ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... mud. Mammy said dat atter de slaves had done got through wid deir day's work and finished eatin' supper, dey all had to git busy workin' wid cotton. Some carded bats, some spinned and some weaved cloth. I knows you is done seen dis here checkidy cotton homespun—dat's what dey weaved for our dresses. Dem dresses was made tight and long, and dey made 'em right on de body so as not to waste none of de cloth. All slaves had was homespun clothes ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... unwary. Half an hour afterward, there was a yell from the vicinity of the fan, and I knew that the key had found Rory. The engine driver shut off at once, and I made for the fan, whipping out my pocket knife as I went. The key had snatched the sleeve of the young fellow's homespun linen shirt, midway between elbow and shoulder, twitching the strong fabric into a knot, and burrowing into the soft meat of his arm. Already the fan was pulled up, while the belt slipped and smoked on the drum pulley above. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... was very meek, and when Michaelmas Day came the Kyrkegrim pulled a preacher's gown over his homespun coat, and laid his round hat on the desk by the iron-clamped Bible, ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... mouthful of schooling but what I got at home. It's all homespun. I make no boast of scholarship; but as for navigating, or for finding my way about the 'arth, I'll turn my back on no man, unless it be to leave him behind. Now we have people with us that think a great ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... one letter, and it was for the postmaster. The long-legged youth who carried the mail tarried an hour to talk, for there was no hurry; and in a little while the male population of the village had assembled to help. As a general thing, they were dressed in homespun "jeans," blue or yellow—here were no other varieties of it; all wore one suspender and sometimes two—yarn ones knitted at home,—some wore vests, but few wore coats. Such coats and vests as did appear, however, were ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictory qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did not Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed his country suit of homespun for the habit of the Court, he found ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... responsibility of forming a cabinet, was equally novel. Such a check on reckless criticism was sadly needed. Of the process by which Thomson achieved his ends even his fullest biography gives little information. There must have been endless conferences of homespun, honest farmers like Willson, men of breeding like {42} Robinson, brilliant lawyers like Sullivan, plain soldiers like MacNab, with the little, sickly, understanding governor of the brilliant eyes, ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... rich burgomaster's daughter Hilda van Gleck, with her costly furs and loose-fitting velvet sack; and, nearby, a pretty peasant girl, Annie Bouman, jauntily attired in a coarse scarlet jacket and a blue skirt just short enough to display the gray homespun hose to advantage. Then there was the proud Rychie Korbes, whose father, Mynheer van Korbes, was one of the leading men of Amsterdam; and, flocking closely around her, Carl Schummel, Peter and Ludwig van Holp, Jacob Poot, and a very small ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... hand of his liege lady. Then when he had risen she gave him down the armour piece by piece, dusting each with her kerchief with a sort of reverent action, as one might touch the face of the dead. In Sholto's hands it proved indeed light almost as woven cloth of homespun from Dame Barbara's loom, and flexible as the spun silk of Lyons which the great wear ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... As for the restrictions upon domestic industry, they were not severely felt among a people devoted, in the country to agriculture, and in the towns to local traffic and shipping, and the American farmer who wore homespun attire, did not realize the harshness or appreciate the purpose of the statute which prohibited the export of wool, or woolen manufactures. As for the Southern planter, the question of fostering domestic manufactures never ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... glad of the chance thus afforded him to see more of the young girl. Presently a coarse but ample meal was set before him; and the girl came from behind the screen, to serve the wine. She was now reclad, in a rough but cleanly robe of homespun; and her long, loose hair had been neatly combed and smoothed. As she bent forward to fill his cup, Tomotada was amazed to perceive that she was incomparably more beautiful than any woman whom he had ever before seen; and there ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... Cuba, so called, is composed of rather homespun material, to say the least, of it. There may be some fifty individuals dubbed with the title of marquis, and as many more with that of count, most of whom have acquired their wealth and position by carrying on extensive sugar plantations. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... Burns: men rude and rough Pressed round to hear the praise of one Whose heart was made of manly, simple, stuff, As homespun as their own. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... tolerable fineness, hardening them by exposure to a slow steady degree of heat, till she was able to work with them, and even mend her clothes with tolerable expertness. By degrees, Catharine contrived to cover the whole outer surface of her homespun woollen frock with squirrel and mink, musk-rat and woodchuck skins. A curious piece of fur patchwork of many hues and textures it presented to the eye,—a coat of many colours, it is true; but it kept the wearer warm, and Catharine was not a little proud of her ingenuity and ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... household furniture showed themselves over her head from within the wagon, and strapped on behind was a coop of fowls, from which came a melancholy cackle, as if the hens and chickens were weary of their long journey. A man dressed in butternut-colored homespun drove the oxen, and a boy about ten years old trudged behind the driver. In the darkness behind these tramped a small herd of cows and oxen driven by two other men, and a lad about the age of Oscar Bryant. ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... walls. The inevitable cradle, consecrated to the service of two, three, or four generations, pounded monotonously to and fro upon the uneven floor, and by the low-set window the thrifty housewife wove her flaxen homespun in a venerable loom. Saints, in pictures of fervid tints, looked down serenely from low, unplastered walls, while from the rafters of the ceiling were hung the weapons of the family arsenal—flint-lock muskets and hilted hunting-knives, and sometimes ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... profusely decked with flowers and bright colors. They offer a charming spectacle, particularly to a stranger lately arrived from Malaysia. The Filipinas are very beautifully formed. They have luxuriant black hair, and large dark eyes; the upper part of their bodies is clad in a homespun but often costly material of transparent fineness and snow-white purity; and, from their waist downwards, they are wrapped in a brightly-striped cloth (saya), which falls in broad folds, and which, as far as the knee, is so tightly compressed with a dark shawl (lapis), closely drawn around ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Jean, starting like a whipped dog. He took his red cap from under his arm, sighing, and slouched away from the bluff edge, the coarse homespun which he wore revealing knots and joints ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... turn mistook white men for their own people. The whole 10 family went barefoot in the summer, but in winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin and buckskin leggins or trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and flax called linsey-woolsey, 15 and out of this the dresses of his wife and daughters were made. The wool was shorn from the sheep, which were so scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except by the wolves, which were very fond of mutton but had no ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... following morning the news of the capture had spread to the farthest limits of the county. A much larger number of people than usual came to town that Saturday,—bearded men in straw hats and blue homespun shirts, and butternut trousers of great amplitude of material and vagueness of outline; women in homespun frocks and slat-bonnets, with faces as expressionless as the dreary sandhills which ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... had aforetime walked in fine linen and purple, and precious stones, were clad in homespun and went to indigenous parties; When the Mississippi was blockaded by the Preble and Vincennes, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... more adapted for amateur dramatics than for a musicale. Two waistcoats and a Norfolk jacket mean well, but are not adapted to the purpose. Exemplary light overcoat, but still not quite the thing. Double-breasted reefer and Canada homespun trousers; admirably fitted for a sea-voyage and camping out. Armload of semi-detached waistcoats and pantaloons; very suggestive, but not instantly available. Pajamas not at all the thing. Elderly pair of doeskin trousers and low-cut ...
— Evening Dress - Farce • W. D. Howells
... pasture field by the bridge a man was plowing. He was an elderly man, sturdy and stolid of figure, and clad in blue homespun. There was nothing clerical in his garb or manner, yet he was the vicar and school-master of the parish. His low-crowned hat was drawn deep over his slumberous gray eyes. The mobile mouth beneath completed the expression of gentleness and easy good-nature. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... what is it about Elinor? Do I want to become to her what Frederic is to Lucy? Do I want to make her "Mrs. Poor'us"? Do I want to drag her down and keep her plodding all her days, clad in a homespun gown, and she fit to be a lady in her silks and satins? What is it I would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... regions, while the type and costume of the people have undergone a change, for they are darker and broader in feature than the people of Lower Egypt, and the prevailing colour of their clothing is a dark brown, the natural colour of their sheep, from whose wool their heavy homespun cloth is made. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... the landlord, who soon showed, by the conduct of himself and his family, that he was taught to consider our hero as a curiosity. They treated him with exemplary kindness, however. The landlord, though a rough homespun man, bred up in low life, manifested, not only tenderness and humanity, but a degree of delicacy that could not have been expected. A grown up young man, a son of his, the very evening he arrived, took the liberty, upon the wagoner's report, of asking our adventurer to sing ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... evidently, been long a denizen of the forest, for his bronzed countenance bore traces of care and toil, while his rugged, yet well-formed hands conveyed the impression of the unceasing war he had waged against the gigantic trees of this Western land. He was habited in a hunting-frock of grey homespun, reaching about half way down to his knee, and trimmed with a full fringe of a somewhat darker hue. His trowsers were of the same material, and both were girt around his loins by a common belt of black leather, fastened by a plain white buckle, into ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... very rapidly at a few out of the many literary forces of our day in which we may see the various reactions from Carlyle. First, there was the Early Victorian time, the eighteenth century in homespun. It was not great and pompous like that century, but it lived by formality, propriety, and conventionality. It was horribly shocked when George Eliot published Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede in 1858 and 1859. Outwardly it was eminently respectable, and its respectability ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... quotation and illustration staggered me. It is true, that his thought was not always clothed in the best language, and often appeared in the slouching, slangy undress of the place and period, yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me with its precision and fitness. Considerably softened toward him, I tried him with other literature. But vainly. Beyond a few of the lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing. Under the influence and enthusiasm ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... warmly with a homespun blanket, and, accompanied by Dan, made her way down the ladder. She found her husband putting fresh logs on the fire and stirring the coals to a blaze, while the Captain hung his coat on the corner of the mantel-shelf ...
— The Puritan Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... confront a tribunal (not the official but the popular) already prepared for its condemnation. Before it stood John Bull, burly, dogged and determined not to be humbugged—his judgment made up and his sentence ready to be recorded. Nothing disconcerted, the brown, rough, homespun Yankee in charge jumped on the box, starting the team at a smart walk, setting the blades of the machine in lively operation, and commenced raking off the grain in sheaf-piles ready for binding,—cutting a breadth of nine or ten feet cleanly and carefully as fast as a span of ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... ran away to do her bidding, as he always did. He had no clothes besides the worn suit of homespun which he was then wearing, except one other of buckskin, gayly fringed on the sleeves and on the outer seam of the breeches. This had been his pride till of late. But he now took it down from its peg behind ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... together with the warm cloak for him, and the linen for her child that she had been purchasing. I tell you, sir, the babe must have no linen but the finest fabric of Cambrai—yes, and even carnation-coloured ribbons—though, for herself, I saw the homespun she was sewing. As she mused over what she could throw back, I asked if she had no other gauds to make up the price, and she said, almost within herself, "They are my child's, not mine." Then remembering that I had been buying the hair of the peasant maidens, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mean time, betook himself to the big telescope. Right enough: Per was sitting aft, and he saw Madeleine jump down into the boat. On the forward thwart there sat a male creature, dressed in homespun, with a ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... bought his clothes in England; but it was from necessity more than choice. "If there be any homespun Cloths in Philadelphia which are tolerably fine, that you can come reasonably at," he said to his Philadelphia agent in 1784, "I would be obliged to you to send me patterns of some of the best kinds—I should prefer that which is mixed in the grain, because it will not so ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... a trace of hostile feeling in the countenance, words, or manner of any prisoner there. Almost to a man, they were simple, bumpkin-like fellows, dressed in homespun clothes, with faces singularly vacant of meaning, but sufficiently good-humored: a breed of men, in short, such as I did not suppose to exist in this country, although I have seen their like in some other parts of the world. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... realm where all iniquities flourished, and to whom, by the further and richer providence of God, a means of escape was now offered. He would no more have thought of declining the proposed service, even though the poor girl were dressed in homespun and clattered in sabots, than he would have closed his ear to the cry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... was, in her homespun dress and her rough shoes and with a cap on her head, but for all her mean clothing she was as pretty and fine as a flower, and the King was not slow to see it. Still he wanted to make sure for himself that she was as clever as her messages ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... I intend to dwell no longer with her, Since that the bastinado drove me thence. These silken girls are all too fine for me: My master shall report of those in hell, Whilst I go range amongst the country-maids, To see, if homespun lasses milder be Than my curs'd dame and Lacy's wanton wife. Thus therefore will I live betwixt two shapes; When as I list, in this transform'd disguise, I'll fright the country-people as they pass; And sometimes turn me to some other form, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... alone for giving the lasting colour to her web; I'll engage, neighbour Homespun, provided you furnish the proper fit, there'll not be a better dress'd lad on the island than my own mother's son! But, sin' you cannot be a general good-man, you'll have the comfort of knowing there'll be no more fighting without you. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... other, like bunks, on short strong lengths of sapling stuck into the wall. For mattresses, armfuls of mountain hay. The people, a man, his wife and two or three children, dressed winter and summer in heavy brown homespun woollen and sheepskins. For all furniture, a home-made bench, black with age and smoke. The food, day in, day out, coarse yellow meal, boiled thick in water and poured out to cool upon the black bench, divided into portions ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to take one herself; we had not been far afield to gather herbs and pleasures for many days now, but a little later she had silently vanished. I found my luncheon ready on the table in the little entry, wrapped in its shining old homespun napkin, and as if by way of special consolation, there was a stone bottle of Mrs. Todd's best spruce beer, with a long piece of cod line wound round it by which it could be lowered for coolness into ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... it was because she wore her dresses so long and her hair so high. She had a pretty new frock—a rich warm brown ground, with little flowers in green and yellow and a kind of dull red sprinkled all over it. It had come from New York, and was called delaine. She had discarded her homespun woolen. And, oh, how stylishly pretty she was, quite like the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... an odious duty had probably banished the smirk of self-satisfaction that dwelt there at other times.[276] Nevertheless, he had manly and estimable qualities. The congregation of peasants, clad in rough homespun, turned their sunburned faces upon him, anxious and intent; and Winslow "delivered them by interpreters the King's orders in the following words," which, retouched in ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... be depended on where he was likely to be a material loser. A particularly "fluent" man, accomplished in gestures such as form an ingredient in all French conversation, he was in Zotique's Sunday afternoons a zestful contestant. His clothes were of homespun, dyed a raw, light blue, and he was proud of his choice of ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... army began to gather into Boston. Tan, lanky, awkward fellows came in squads, and companies, and regiments, swaggering along, dressed in their brown homespun clothes and blue yarn stockings. They stooped as if they still had hold of the plough-handles, and marched without any time or tune. Hither they came, from the cornfields, from the clearing in the forest, from the blacksmith's ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... homespun a background the magnificence of the Ambersons was as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral. Major Amberson bought two hundred acres of land at the end of National Avenue; and through this tract he built broad streets and cross-streets; paved them ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... railroad which made larger markets available, made possible the growth of our large cities and the opening up of new lands distant from markets. The railroad and manufacturing by power machinery put an end to the "age of homespun," and made it more profitable for the farmer to sell his products and to purchase his manufactured goods in exchange. The railroad, and the markets which it made available, changed the village center from a place of local barter ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... as courtesans did in certain parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. The badge in Japan was a spirally twisted pyramidal cap of linen, about a foot and a half high. The materials of which clothing were made varied from rich Chinese brocade to coarse homespun, but, in general, the use of brocade was forbidden except to persons who had received it as a gift from the Court in Kyoto or Kamakura. Historical mention is first made of badges during the war of the Minamoto and the Taira. Their use was originally confined to purposes ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... journey, but upon important business, and their wives never; by which Providence they enjoyed and improved their estates in the country, and kept good hospitality in their house, brought up their children well, and were beloved by their neighbours." This will appear a very coarse homespun happiness, and these must seem very gross virtues to our artificial feelings; yet this assuredly created a national character; made a patriot of every country gentleman; and, finally, produced in the civil wars some of the most sublime and original characters ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... 'pears ter me az her way air a mighty good way. An' it ain't comical that she likes it." . . . . . . . The song grew momentarily more distinct: among the leaves there were fugitive glimpses of blue and white, and at last Clarsie appeared, walking lightly along the log, clad in her checked homespun dress, and with a ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... square, ruddy-faced man of sixty, with neatly trimmed, snow-white whiskers. He had on a soft Alpine hat of pearl gray, a modishly cut gray homespun suit, a tie in which glimmered an opal pin, wore tan gloves, and had slung over one shoulder by a narrow black strap ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the two, between the mother and daughter, appeared to be as strong and their relations as complete, as if one were not clad in homespun and the other in Worth gowns. There was no shame, that was easily seen, on either side; each apparently was full of pride in the other; their living apart was entirely due to the old mere's preference for a life on the cliffs, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... log cabins and rubble-walled houses around the plaza and the old church. Some of them, mostly the young men, were carrying rifles, but the majority were unarmed. About half of them were women, in short deerskin skirts or homespun dresses. There were a number of children, the younger ones ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... retort delicate without doubt," says Frank. "Beware of the homespun brothers, dear. If they come into the dance, you'll see who's an ass. Think now, if they only applied (say) a quarter as much talent as I have applied to the question of what Mr. Archie does with his evening hours, and ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cried the young lady with the black eyes. "I remember when he used to go to school in a grey homespun suit with the hay sticking all over it. He's the son of old Angus McRae who used to bring our cabbage and ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... waiting, a white woman wearing a homespun dress and slat-bonnet, came down the road from the other side of the creek, and lifting her skirts slightly, waded with bare feet across the shallow stream. Reaching the clay-bank she stooped and gathered from it, with the aid of a convenient stick, a quantity of the clay which she ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... into the parlor, already shadowed into twilight: a neat, compact little person, dressed in soft gray homespun, with a pale pink bow on her throat, and another in her cap—a pretty little fabric of lace and cambric, which, being now the fashion, her girls had at last condescended to let her wear. She had on a black silk apron, with pockets, into one of which she ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... went, or clad in ruder hide, Or homespun russet void of foreign pride. But thou can'st mask in garish gaudery, To suit a fool's far-fetched livery. A French head joined to neck Italian, Thy thighs from Germany and breast from Spain. An Englishman in none, a fool in all, Many in one, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... husband is an active, well-built man with light, almost golden hair, rather coarse in texture, and with a pointed beard of the same hue. He has fine, clean-cut, muscular hands, and he wears, as I see him, a rough, rather shabby suit of light, homespun cloth. The wife is of fair complexion, a beautiful woman, with brown hair, and dressed, I think, in a very simple and rather peculiar dress. They are people of high principle, wealthy, and with cultivated tastes. They ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... strong creature with a broad, kind face, burned and seamed and hardened by life in the open. Yet it was a face that appealed to him by its look of simple, trusting earnestness. Her dress was of stout, gray homespun, her shoes were coarse and heavy, and she was bareheaded, her gray, straggling hair half caught into a clumsy knot at the back of her head. She turned out to pass him without looking up, but he ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... the water, and my arms up to the elbows, then came out dripping and wiped it off on a homespun linen towel which the old man had given me when I left the house. As I stood rubbing my arms on the good linen, Ump and Jud came down from the stable and stopped to dip a drink in the long gourd that hung by the spring. They were ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... near the wall where grated windows admitted sunshine, and their hymn to Labor was the only sound that broke the brooding silence. The room was scrupulously clean and tidy, and the inmates, wearing the regulation uniform of blue-striped homespun, appeared comparatively neat; but sordid, sullen, repulsively coarse and brutish were many of the countenances bent over the daily task, and now and then swift, furtive glances from downcast eyes betrayed close ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the embargo attempted to rally the home spirit of the people in order to support the measure. President Jefferson ordered sufficient dark-blue cloth from Colonel Humphreys to make himself a coat, saying: "Homespun is become the spirit of the times. My idea is that we shall encourage home manufactures to the extent of our own consumption of everything of which we raise the raw material." The Legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, Vermont, and Ohio fixed a day, after which no imported clothing ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... four-post, mahogany bedstead with white, dimity curtains, and with a full, high, feather bed and bolsters and pillows heaped up, and covered—the bed with a homemade, blue-and-white counterpane, and the bolster and pillows by cases of homespun white linen. ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... just going in at the door, I was sorely started to feel a great warm hand on my shoulder, and a loud, cheery voice saith, 'Dolly Jennings, whither away so fast thou canst not see an old friend?' I looked up, and there was dear old Farmer Ingham, in his thick boots and country homespun; but I declare to you, child, that in my trouble his face was to me as that of an angel of God. I brake down, and sobbed aloud. 'Come, come, now!' saith he, comfortably; 'not so bad as that, is it? I've been seeking thee these four ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... Monk was large and bland, with a pale, puffy, and unsmiling face, and only betrayed his irony with a slow wink when he was sure you were not deceived. He knew much about the gentry around, those bored and weary youths in check coats, riding breeches, and large pipes, and the young ladies in pale homespun costumes who had rude and familiar words to all they judged were their equals, and were accompanied invariably by ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... people heard Him gladly"; no wonder they "all hung upon Him listening"; or that they "came early in the morning to Him in the temple to hear Him"! Yet, even in the eyes of the multitude the plain homespun of Christ's speech was shot with gleams of more than earthly lustre. There mingled—to use another figure—with the sweet music of those simple sayings a new deep note their ears had never heard before: "the multitudes ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... horses there were! As far as Pasha could see in either direction the line extended. Never before had he seen so many horses at one time. And men! The fields and woods were full of them; some in brown butternut, some in homespun gray, and many in clothes having no uniformity of color at all. "Mars" Clayton was dressed better than most, for on his butternut coat were shiny shoulder-straps, and it was closed with shiny buttons. Pasha took little pride in this. He knew his master for a cruel and heartless rider, and for ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle, a listening woman at his side. Coming from the vegetarian. Only weggebobbles and fruit. Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it's ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of the whole family was peculiar. The man himself wore a hunting-shirt and leggings of tanned deerskin, and not unlike that of our own hunters. The boys were similarly attired, but we could see that they had a sort of homespun linen garment underneath. The female part of the family were dressed in clothes, part of which were of the same homespun, and part of a fine skin, that of the fawn, dressed to the softness of a glove. Several hats were lying about; and we noticed that they were curiously ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... them in denying ourselves the drinking of foreign tea." Even the children felt the thrill of revolt and joined in patriotic demonstrations—and a year or two later the entire graduating class at Harvard, to encourage home manufactures, took their degrees in homespun. ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... types. Here was the English merchant and man of business, looking and dressing just as he would at home. Names over the shop doors were for the most part Dutch, as was the appearance of the majority of the white men in the streets. Dutch farmers in broad hats and homespun garments, mounted on rough ponies, clattered along through the streets. The manual work was for the most part done by swarthy natives, while among the crowd were numbers of Malays, with dark olive skins, small eyes, ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... this time produced its effect upon the dancers. The trappers and teamsters had become noisy and riotous. The leperos, who now half-filled the room, stimulated by wine, jealousy, old hatreds, and the dance, began to look more savage and sulky. The fringed hunting-shirts and brown homespun frocks found favour with the dark-eyed majas of Mexico, partly out of a respect for, and a fear of, courage, which is often at the bottom of a love ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... things you promised us?' 'Why,' they say, 'we'd a had 'em all for you, but for that etarnal Council, they nullified all we did.' The country will come to no good till them chaps show their respect for it, by covering their bottoms with homespun. If a man is so tarnation lazy he won't work, and in course has no money, why he says it's all owin' to the banks, they won't discount, there's no money, they've ruined the Province. If there bean't ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... (well guarded) who had drawn unlucky numbers in the last conscription, and were on their way to a famous French garrison town where much of the raw military material is worked up into soldiery. At the station they had been sitting about, in their threadbare homespun blue garments, with their poor little bundles under their arms, covered with dust and clay, and the various soils of France; sad enough at heart, most of them, but putting a good face upon it, and slapping their breasts and singing choruses on the smallest ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... whole annual expenditures of which did not exceed $2,500,000, being about sixty cents per head of the population. Not a single steam engine had yet been built or erected on the American continent; and the people were clad in homespun, and were characterized by the simple virtues and habits which are usually associated with that primitive garb. I need not tell you what the country now is, and what the habits and the garments of its people now are, or that the expenditure, ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... followed with an exemplary docility quite foreign to his independent spirit. He was subdued by the novelty of his surroundings,—the hillocky, sloping pastures, and the shadowy solemnity of the forest. Moreover, he perceived, in his dim way, a kind of mastery in this heavy-booted, homespun-clad, tobacco-chewing, grave-eyed man from the backwoods, and for a long time he felt none of his usual pugnacity. But by and by the craving for freedom began to stir in his breast, and the blood of his hill-roving ancestors thrilled toward the wild pastures. The glances which, ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... table stood in one corner of the room, a mahogany gateleg occupied the centre, its beauty largely concealed by a cover of yellow and white checked homespun linen, upon which rested a glass oil lamp with a green paper shade, a wide glass dish filled with pictures, an old leather-bound album with heavy brass clasps and hinges. A rag carpet, covered in places with hooked ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... bought foreign goods and drained the state of specie to pay for them, while they drank Madeira wine and dressed their wives in fine velvets and laces. So said the farmers; and city ladies, far kinder than these railers deemed them, formed clubs, of which the members pledged themselves to wear homespun,—a poor palliative for the deep-seated ills of the time. In such mood were many of the villagers when in the summer of 1786 they were overtaken by the craze for paper money. At the meeting of the legislature in May, a petition came in from Bristol County, praying for an issue of paper. ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... wear homespun dresses. I have spun a many a yard and wove it. Did you ever see a loom? I used to have a wheel, and my children tore it up some way or 'nother. I still have the cards. We done our own knittin' and spun our own thread and knitted ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... see how they would come staving upon their tackies; belted round with their powderhorns and shotbags, with rifles in hand, and their humble homespun streaming in the air. The finely curling smile brightened in the face of Marion; and his eye beamed that laughing joy, with which a father meets his thoughtless boy, returning dirty and beaten by blackguards, from whose dangerous company he had sought in vain a ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... equipped with ax and sickle and flail, with spinning wheel and iron kettle, lived a life almost equally primitive and self-contained. He and his good wife grew the wheat, the corn, and the potatoes, made the soap and the candles, the maple sugar and the "yarbs," the deerskin shoes and the homespun-cloth that met their needs. They had little to buy and little to sell. In spite of the preference which Great Britain gave Canadian grain, in return for the preference exacted on British manufactured goods, practically no wheat was exported until the close of this period. The barrels ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... we drank tea. Such a spread at this meal is never beheld in the old country. Around my cup of tea were seven different kinds of choice dainties at the same time. This is their way, and it is done with few words but warm welcome. The homespun, well-worn coat and well-patched shoes of our aged host were all forgotten when listening to his intelligent remarks on men and things; and though seventy-eight years of age, every faculty of head and heart seemed to keep pace with the times. He was a Wesleyan ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... put it back with the other similar-appearing balls and see if he can again discover it. An outfit for training his tactile sense can be made in any home by collecting duplicate pieces of cloth having different textures; such as velvet, rough woolen tweeds or homespun, silk, satin, cambric, muslin, etc., and pasting one set on cards. Also by stretching on a wooden frame, strings of varying sizes, weaves, and twists, and having a bunch of duplicates from which he can select, by sight and touch alone, ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... burned perfectly red by the sun, and hair of an exact tow-color, braided up from her forehead in front and from her neck behind. These tails, meeting on the top of her head, were fastened with a small tin comb. Her dress was of checkered homespun, a "very tight fit," and, as she wore no ruff or handkerchief around her neck, she looked as if just prepared for execution. She was evidently awestruck at the sight of visitors, and seemed inclined to take her departure at once; but the ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... wasn't much of an editor, even as editors go. The one useful quality he had was a homespun, ingratiating air which put nervous young geniuses at their ease, so that they could give a reasonably coherent verbal picture of what their books were about. This often saved Stein, Fine & Bryans a lot of reading of unpublishable manuscripts. At least, ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... is the harness; the home-spun cloth of his suit is made by his wife from the wool of his own sheep: it is an excellent fabric but, alas, the young people now prefer the machine-made cottons and cloths of commerce and will no longer wear homespun. Sometimes the habitant makes his own boots, the excellent bottes sauvages of the country. The women make not only home-spun cloth, but linen, straw hats, gloves, candles, soap. When there are maple trees, the habitant provides his own sugar; he makes even the buckets in which ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... the island, had been planned by the man who stood in the centre. Many openings under the eaves gaped windowless; but the congregation, sheltered from a July sun, enjoyed freely the lake air, bringing fragrance from their own fields and gardens. They seemed a bovine, honest people, in homespun and hickory; and youth, bright-eyed and fresh-cheeked, was not lacking. They sat on benches arranged in circles around a central platform which held the Prophet's chair and table. This was his simple plan for making his ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... December 17, 1807. Like all the other children who generation after generation had come to live in this Quaker dwelling, he was brought up in simple, useful ways, and was early given his full share of the duties about the farm. No matter how sharply the cold of the harsh New England winter pierced his homespun clothes, the snow must be shoveled from the paths, firewood must be brought, the stalls in the barn must be littered, and, worst task of all for him, seven cows must be milked. Yet there was plenty of fun to be had, too. When the snow ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... pulpit were men whom I had left in the gamesome frolic of their youth, but who had succeeded to the sanctity of station of which they once had stood so much in awe. What most struck my eye was the change in the female part of the congregation. Instead of the primitive garbs of homespun manufacture and antique Dutch fashion, I beheld French sleeves, French capes, and French collars, and a fearful-fluttering of ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... native-made cloth. The blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar and twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time. His wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore homespun linsey-woolsey. The new house was referred to as the Crystal Palace. When John and Jane Clemens attended balls—there were continuous balls during the holidays—they were considered ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of an exact tow-color, braided up from her forehead in front and from her neck behind. These tails, meeting on the top of her head, were fastened with a small tin comb. Her dress was of checkered homespun, a "very tight fit," and, as she wore no ruff or handkerchief around her neck, she looked as if just prepared for execution. She was evidently awestruck at the sight of visitors, and seemed inclined to take ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... But the bishops and their clergy had demurred. They had little fancy for being left with no other protection than a half-disciplined rabble, who, ready as they might be to act against their troublesome countrymen, had no more respect for a lawn sleeve than for a homespun jerkin. A few troops of regular cavalry were therefore retained, and one regiment of Foot Guards. The former were commanded by Athole, the latter by Linlithgow. Towards the end of 1677 a fresh troop ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... the army began to gather into Boston. Tan, lanky, awkward fellows came in squads, and companies, and regiments, swaggering along, dressed in their brown homespun clothes and blue yarn stockings. They stooped as if they still had hold of the plough-handles, and marched without any time or tune. Hither they came, from the cornfields, from the clearing in the forest, from the blacksmith's forge, from the carpenter's workshop, and from the shoemaker's seat. They ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... looking at; there certainly was an immense water power here; but that, after all, they would go twice as far to see the noble stone works of Lockport, where the Grand Canal is locked down a descent of sixty feet. They were succeeded by a young fellow, in a homespun cotton dress, with a staff in his hand, and a pack over his shoulders. He advanced close to the edge of the rock, where his attention, at first wavering among the different components of the scene, finally ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... thought, in that enchanted region which, to those who have lingered there, comes to have so much more colour and substance than the painted curtain hanging before it. The Professor's particular veil of Maia was a narrow strip of homespun woven in a monotonous pattern; but he had only to lift it to step ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... black velveteen sleeveless jackets, bright red shirt-sleeves, gay-coloured green, blue, and red skirts, and thick leather boots. The old women, dressed more quietly, stood behind them, with white kerchiefs, homespun coats, old-fashioned skirts of dark home-spun material, and shoes on their feet. Gaily-dressed children, their hair well oiled, went in and ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... self-confident man. Remembering how his first appearance had fluttered this dovecote and awakened a severe suspicion in the minds of the two principals, he had discarded his usual fashionable attire and elegantly fitting garments for a rough, homespun suit, supposed to represent a homely agriculturist, but which had the effect of transforming him into an adorable Strephon, infinitely more dangerous in his rustic shepherd-like simplicity. He had also shaved off his silken mustache for the same prudential reasons, but had only succeeded ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... unintelligible sailing-orders; but just at that moment, as luck would have it, another cyclist flew past—the first soul I had seen on the road that morning. He was a man with the loose-knit air of a shop assistant, badly got up in a rather loud and obtrusive tourist suit of brown homespun, with baggy knickerbockers and thin thread stockings. I judged him a gentleman on the cheap at sight. "Very Stylish; this Suit Complete, only thirty-seven and sixpence!" The landlady glanced out at him with a friendly nod. He turned and smiled at ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... clumsy. He was not a good-looking boy— there's no denying it!—and yet I liked him; he looked very sensible and straightforward, and there was a vigorous ring in his voice. He had nothing to boast of in his attire; it consisted simply of a homespun shirt and patched trousers. The face of the third, Ilyusha, was rather uninteresting; it was a long face, with short-sighted eyes and a hook nose; it expressed a kind of dull, fretful uneasiness; his tightly- drawn lips seemed rigid; his contracted brow never relaxed; he seemed continually ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... of quotation and illustration staggered me. It is true, that his thought was not always clothed in the best language, and often appeared in the slouching, slangy undress of the place and period, yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me with its precision and fitness. Considerably softened toward him, I tried him with other literature. But vainly. Beyond a few of the lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing. Under the influence and enthusiasm ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... away! 440 Such my pursuits, and such my joys of yore, Such were my mates, but now my mates no more. Placed out of Envy's walk, (for Envy, sure, Would never haunt the cottage of the poor, Would never stoop to wound my homespun lays) With some few friends, and some small share of praise, Beneath oppression, undisturb'd by strife, In peace I trod the humble vale of life. Farewell, these scenes of ease, this tranquil state; Welcome the troubles which on empire ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... a jacket of black and white homespun is extremely appropriate. It is smart when worn with a waistcoat of white flannel, white shirt and collar and gayly figured tie of silk foulard. Trousers of white flannel would complete this excellent costume for the elderly man, and with a panama hat that ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... a vest made of soft reindeer skin to put on over my underwear, and two sets of thick underwear of homespun, for these are much warmer than those that ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... his jerkin and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt of coarse homespun fabric, in order to give his thick muscular arms unimpeded play in wielding the hammer and turning the mass of glowing metal on the anvil. He wore woollen breeches and hose, both of which had been fashioned by the fingers of his buxom mother, Herfrida. A ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... helping themselves to tea at the table. On the hearth, with his back to the fire, stood a great, burly man with a short, grizzled beard and tumbled gray hair, rather bald, dressed in a rough suit of light-brown homespun, with huge shooting boots, whom I saw at once to be my host. The talk stopped as I entered, and I was aware that I was being scrutinised with some curiosity. Father Payne did not move, but extended a hand, which I advanced and shook, and said: "Very ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they quite outrival, Plain barnyard Spuytenduyvil, By peacock Riverdale, Which thinks all else it conquers, And over homespun Yonkers Spreads out its flaunting tail! There's new-named Mount St. Vincent, Where each dear little inn'cent Is taught the Popish rites,— Well, ain't it queer, wherever These saints possess the river ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... any musical accomplishments, and that I was one of that unfortunate number. I asked him to get the ladies to sing for me, and to this they acceded quite readily. One girl, with a fair soprano, who seemed to be the leader of the crowd, sang "The Homespun Dress," a song very popular in the South, and having the same tune as the "Bonnie Blue Flag." ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... tall as her three sisters-in-law; and that her abundant brown hair was short and curly and kept close to her head, almost like a boy's. Were not her shoulders a trifle square-set for a woman?—but perhaps that appearance was owing to her costume, for she wore a Norfolk jacket of gray homespun that looked as if it could afford a good defence against the weather. She was entirely in gray, in fact; for her short-skirted dress was of the same material; and so also was the Tam o' Shanter, adorned with salmon flies, that ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... man of very homespun extraction, who hovered in Boston on the ambiguous verge between the social and the scholastic worlds; the sort of young man whom one asked to tea rather than to dinner. He was an earnest student, and was attached to the university by an official, though unimportant, tie. ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... is a gentleman in purple and fine linen, otherwise broadcloth; and sometimes in hodden gray, otherwise homespun or slop-shop; and sometimes he cuts the poor little chap with a silver knife, which is rhetoric, and sometimes with a wooden spoon, which is raw-hide. Am I ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... their unpacking, and Judith, who was naturally very orderly, soon had everything in its place. Her mother's parting gift had been couch-cover, cushions, and hangings for the new room—homespun of a lovely deep blue for cover and cushions, and a delightful ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... had seen many years, and whose manner might imply that all these chances of life and death came in the gross, and that existence was a medley at best. The other, a witness, was young. More than once the "valley man" cast a covert glance at her as, clad in a brown homespun dress, she leaned against the log wall, her face, which was very pale, half turned toward it, as if to hide the features already much obscured by the white sunbonnet drawn far over it. One arm was lifted, and her ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... I know'd to win dat gal, I sho would need some othah means 'Sides a-hangin' 'round big meetin' in a suit o' homespun jeans. ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... stopped, and Hilda must open her eyes, whether she would or no. In the porch, under the blossoming clematis, stood a tall, broad-shouldered man, dressed in rough homespun, who held out his great brown hand and said ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... china, tripped up to him, and smiled, and gave him her hand, and led him out to a minuet. And he danced it perfectly—poor little August in his thick, clumsy shoes, and his thick, clumsy sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He must have danced it perfectly, this dance of kings and queens in days when crowns were duly honoured, for the lovely lady always smiled benignly and never scolded ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... horses and fewer servants, but he has still more than he requires, and his mode of life has undergone no perceptible alteration. Maria Petrovna complains that she is no longer supplied with eggs, chickens, and homespun linen by the peasants, and that everything is three times as dear as it used to be; but somehow the larder is still full, and abundance reigns in ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... machine. Nobody wove jeans any more—but a good carpet-loom now, that might be made useful. Unwilling to hang the bedding on bushes for fear of a chance tear from twig or thorn, she rigged a line in the back yard, and spread quilt and homespun blanket, coarse white sheets and pillowcases that were yellowing with age, out for the glad gay wind to play with, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... comical that she likes it." . . . . . . . The song grew momentarily more distinct: among the leaves there were fugitive glimpses of blue and white, and at last Clarsie appeared, walking lightly along the log, clad in her checked homespun dress, and with a ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... it may have been that glimpses of home gatherings in the firelight may have given to these men of war many a twinge of homesickness for hearths across the border, where women who had been clad in satin and brocade sat spinning homespun, and were content to drink spring water from the hills, while the tea they had loved to sip in their Colonial drawing-rooms was floating about the Boston beaches. If the Boys in blue and buff encountered any of the ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... clad in a thick grey overcoat of some shaggy kind of cloth which looked like homespun. He wore a felt hat, and carried a thick oak stick, and there was nothing in his appearance to indicate that he belonged to any higher grade than that of the shepherds and guides with whom Hammond had made himself familiar during his previous visit. And yet there was something ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... haply with her jewelled hands She smooths her silken gown,— No more the homespun lap wherein I shook the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in October, 1808, Franz in his homespun grey suit, spectacles shielding his bright, near-sighted eyes, his bushy black hair covered by an old fashioned hat, presented himself for examination by the Court Capellmeister and the singing master. The other boys jeered at his odd appearance, but he kept his good ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... Sir Tiglath," Lady Enid went on, with pleasant ease, and a sort of homespun self-possession that trumpeted, like a military band, her sensibleness, "Mr. Vivian consulted me as to what to do; whether to give the whole thing up, or to make an appeal to you at the risk of disturbing you and taking up ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... so snug—just soft enough, but not too soft—not the kind of suffocatingly soft feather-bed in which you get down into a hole and never get out of it all night. It was springy as well as soft, and though the linen was not perhaps so fine as what Lena was accustomed to at home, it was real homespun for all that—and through everything there was the delicious wild thymy sort of scent of lavender which Mrs. Denny had promised her. Lena went to sleep really burrowing her nose, which was rather a snub one to ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... which streamed in through the holes in the tops of the shutters I distinguished the green painted chairs backed up stiffly against the wall, the striped homespun carpet, andirons crossed in the fireplace, with shovel and tongs to match, the big Bible on the table under the glass, a waxwork on the high mahogany desk in the corner, and a few shells and other ornaments upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... that we had reached the last purpose for which the homespun woolen yarn was required? We were mistaken, for here is the entry: "To-day dyed the yarn for back-hall carpet. Remember to tell the weaver that I prefer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... was, what his name was, where the place from which he came was, Who had brought him from the battle, and had left him at our door, He could not speak to tell us; but 'twas one of our brave fellows, As the homespun plainly showed us ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... and I were left to tell secrets. When he was sure we were alone he took from his trunk a long, flat box. Inside was the most wonderful shirt I have ever seen; it looked like a cross between a nightshirt and a shirt-waist. It was of homespun linen. The bosom was ruffled and tucked, all done by hand,—such tiny stitches, such patience and skill. Then he handed me an old daguerreotype. I unfastened the little golden hook and inside was a face good to see and to remember. It was dim, yet clear in outline, just as if she ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... our own great and complex organisation, and bring ourselves mentally into the attitude of a simple agricultural people, requiring little beyond what was produced on each man's own farm or petty holding. Such people are mainly fed from their own corn and meat, mainly clad from their own homespun wool and linen. A little specialisation of function, however, already existed. Salt was procured from the wyches or pans of the coast, and also from the inland wyches or brine wells of Cheshire and the midland counties. Such names as Nantwich, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... quite old but hearty, with a stubbly fringe of white beard around a ruddy face. He had come on a wood-sled for the greater convenience of bringing Sylvia's goods. There were a feather-bed, bolster, and pillows, tied up in an old homespun blanket, on the rear of the sled; there was also a red chest, and a great bundle of bedclothing. Sylvia sat in her best rocking-chair just behind ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... women as they disappeared into the woods with their sleds. The November forests listened in the frost to the speech of these foreign women, echoed it, without understanding it. Ahead of them, walked an old man to lead the way. They wore Icelandic homespun skirts, and had them tucked up at the waist. Around their heads, they had tied Icelandic woollen shawls. They say they are such good walkers. They intend to take lodging somewhere for the ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... deem, I know not, but the door was opened wide, And the King's name a voice long silent cried, And Phoebus on the very threshold trod, And yet in nothing liker to a god Than when he ruled Admetus' herds, for he Still wore the homespun coat men used to see Among the heifers in the summer morn, And round about him hung the herdsman's horn, And in his hand he bore the herdsman's spear And cornel bow, the prowling dog-wolfs fear, Though empty of its shafts the quiver was. He to ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... ALIVE that day. Judah was hot, but I was hotter; and, before the cartridge box was empty, he pulled down his homespun blue and white frock sleeve over his wrist, and rested me upon it when he took aim. He was a gentle-hearted fellow, though as ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... when they returned to him, had not budged from his resting-place. The fingers still lay, starfish-wise, upon the folds of that soiled homespun; his eyes still stared out of the leafy bower; his face still wore ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... that I spent it all on dress! I'd buy—I'd buy—oh,—silk stockings, and long gloves, and French cambric underclothes, and chiffon nightgowns like those Yvonne wears (but they aren't decent: still that doesn't matter so long as you're not married, and they are so pretty)! And a homespun tailor-made suit with a seam down the back and open tails: and—and—one of those real Panamas that you can pull through a wedding ring: and—oh! dear, I am greedy! It must be because I never have any clothes at all that I'm always ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... sceptically, but they knew of the visit to Purvy's store, and they were willing to admit that in part at least he had erased the blot from his escutcheon. Then, too, except for cropped hair and a white skin, he had come back as he had gone, in homespun and hickory. There was nothing highfalutin in his manners. In ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... fishing-boats, but also a snug farm, adjoining the brown house, together with some fresh, juicy pasture-lots on neighboring islands, where he raised mutton, unsurpassed even by the English South-down, and wool, which furnished homespun to clothe his family ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Rania? I need not ask Marguerite, lest she might miss a chance of seeing 'Farmer Phil' and lose effervescence of the hayseed. Do you know he is always associated, in my mind, with homespun and hayseed." ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... stayed on with Capt. Posey, and I washed and ironed with them later when I was big enough. I done some cooking, too. I could card and spin and make homespun dresses. My ma ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... once more. Judith Browne did not like to see her husband in this mood. She knew well how vain every exercise of her wifely arts of diversion would prove when he once fell into this train of black thoughts; but she could not refrain from essaying the hopeless task by holding up her apron of homespun cloth full of cotton rolls, pretty in their whiteness and roundness and softness, meantime coquettishly turning her still girlish head on one side, and saying: "Now, Mr. Browne, why don't you praise my cotton? Did you ever see ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... Witness their Constitution, their Parliament, their 30,000 schools in active operation; witness their museums and hospitals; witness their colleges and universities. 'But,' you would also have said, 'give us a race whose women are homespun and refined, courteous and winsome, not tottering on tortured feet, nor immured in zenanas and harems, but who freely mingle in social life, and adorn all they touch;' and such, without controversy, are the women of Japan. Above all, 'give us a reverent and a religious people, who yet ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... in the depot. The passengers now swarmed forth by hundreds—a curious and motley crowd of men, women, and children; good-looking people, and ill-looking ones; the fine lady in silk, and the rough backwoods-man in homespun; the middle-aged woman in black, with three trunks and four bandboxes, and the smooth-faced dandy, whose sole ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... him now,—his form, and face, and motions, His homespun habit, and his silver hair,— And hear the language of his trite devotions Rising ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... received a curt 'Yes' and a stare. Apparently his suit of brown Connemara homespun did not commend him to these aristocrats. They turned their backs on ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... daring logicians would grant that every man should have liberty to lead his life as he chooses, so long as he hurts neither himself nor any other individual nor the State, then one might follow their argument; but a plain homespun proposal like that of mine is not enough for your advanced thinker. In England he says, "Let us have deliverance from all restrictions;" in Russia he says, "Anarchy is the only cure for existing evils." For centuries past the earth has been deluged ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the fickle element. All that lay in the past. And in a degree he was saved from the disgrace of being a landsman by the smell of tar and bloaters that heralded his coming, by the blue jersey and the brown homespun trousers which he wore all the week, and by the saving word which distinguished him from the poor inland lubbers who had no dealings with ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... her, and as they were going to visit the first lady of the land, they thought that they should dress themselves in their finest clothes. Arrayed in silks, satins, and ruffles, they were shown into the presence of Mrs. Washington, and were utterly amazed to find her wearing a striped homespun apron, and busily engaged in knitting stockings. She received them, however, with as much dignity and courtesy as if she had had a crown on her head and a scepter in her hand; and in the course of conversation she said that it was the duty ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... heavy lashes hung low in the slumbrous, dreamy way that sees all and reveals nothing. Instinctively I started up, with wild thoughts thronging to my lips. At the same moment Mr. Sutherland did the most chivalrous thing I have seen in homespun or broadcloth. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... The whole 10 family went barefoot in the summer, but in winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin and buckskin leggins or trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and flax called linsey-woolsey, 15 and out of this the dresses of his wife and daughters were made. The wool was shorn from the sheep, which were so scarce that they were never killed ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... handiwork; so is the harness; the home-spun cloth of his suit is made by his wife from the wool of his own sheep: it is an excellent fabric but, alas, the young people now prefer the machine-made cottons and cloths of commerce and will no longer wear homespun. Sometimes the habitant makes his own boots, the excellent bottes sauvages of the country. The women make not only home-spun cloth, but linen, straw hats, gloves, candles, soap. When there are maple trees, the habitant provides his own ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... them homespun words, coarse as they were, cheered my drooping spirits, and the real Connecticut nasal twang with which they were uttered sounded like music to my ears; how it brought up home and far-off friends to my mind, and how it sent up a tear of mingled joy ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... wide on its hinges and Gila entered, trig and chic as usual, in a stylish little coat-suit of homespun, leather-trimmed and short-skirted, high boots, leather leggings, and a jaunty little leather cap with a bridle under her chin. Only her petite figure and her baby face saved her from being taken for a tough ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Lights came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter Place. There at his own table my grandfather sat down delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers." ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... past! If I were a dove and dwelt in the monstrous chestnuts, where the bees murmur all day about the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay on the field there under my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet dead in the kirkyard—some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything but what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep chestnuts, among the graves, where the fervent ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... do their part to stimulate. She submitted to this possibility, and waited for his coming, which began to seem unreasonably delayed. The door opened at last, and a tall, powerfully framed man of thirty-five or forty, dressed in an ill-fitting suit of gray Canada homespun appeared. He moved with a slow, pondering step, and carried his shaggy head bent downwards from shoulders slightly rounded. His dark beard was already grizzled, and she saw that his mustache was burnt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... therefore, to confront a tribunal (not the official but the popular) already prepared for its condemnation. Before it stood John Bull, burly, dogged and determined not to be humbugged—his judgment made up and his sentence ready to be recorded. Nothing disconcerted, the brown, rough, homespun Yankee in charge jumped on the box, starting the team at a smart walk, setting the blades of the machine in lively operation, and commenced raking off the grain in sheaf-piles ready for binding,—cutting a breadth of nine or ten feet cleanly ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... afternoon in March, 1905, there entered the writer's office in the Criminal Courts Building, New York City, a ruddy, stoutly-built man, dressed in homespun garments, accompanied by an attractive and vivacious little woman, who, while unable to speak a single word of English, had no difficulty in making it obvious that she had a story to tell of the most ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... also contrasted Lawyer Wilson's appearance with that of her father; the former, well dressed in the style of a gentleman of the time, in broadcloth, with fine linen, and a tall silk hat carefully placed on the floor of the pew; while Deacon Baxter wore homespun made of wool from his own sheep, spun and woven, dyed and finished, at the fulling-mill in the village, and carried a battered felt hat that had been a matter of ridicule these dozen years. (The Deacon would be buried in two coats, Jed Morrill always said, for he owned just ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... on,—district nursing, classes in sanitation and hygiene, social clubs and entertainments for people of all ages, and a department of fireside industries, through which is created an outside market for the beautiful coverlets, blankets and homespun, woven by the mountain women, as well as for their ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... ago, and died when their time came. Some of them may have had fine equipage and caparisoned postillion, but the most of them were only footmen. My father started in life belonging to the aristocracy of hard knuckles and homespun, but had this high honor that no one could despise. He was the son of a father who loved God, and kept His commandments. What is the House of Hapsburg or Stuarts, compared with being son of the Lord God Almighty? Two eyes, two hands, and two feet, were the capital my father started with. ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... a mouthful of schooling but what I got at home. It's all homespun. I make no boast of scholarship; but as for navigating, or for finding my way about the 'arth, I'll turn my back on no man, unless it be to leave him behind. Now we have people with us that think a great deal of their geometry and astronomies, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... fur coat, another long coat, a dozen hats and from four to ten house dresses. In this day of week-ends in the country, no trousseau, no matter how town-bred the bride, is complete without one or two "country" coats, of fur, leather or woolen materials; several homespun, tweed or tricot suits or dresses; skirts with shirt-waists and sweaters in endless variety; low or flat heeled shoes; woolen or woolen and silk mixture ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... and children had white homespun linen skirts, embroidered at the edges, and the men had trousers of the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 33, June 24, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... ambush of laurel bushes close beside the path, a tall, slender form stood forth, the lissome figure of a girl in the budding charm of womanhood. There was a lithe, curving beauty in the lines that the scant homespun gown outlined so clearly. The swift movement by which she revealed herself was instinct with grace. As she rested motionless, with arms extended in a gesture of appeal, there was a singular dignity in the pose, a distinction of personality that was in no ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... by the bridge a man was plowing. He was an elderly man, sturdy and stolid of figure, and clad in blue homespun. There was nothing clerical in his garb or manner, yet he was the vicar and school-master of the parish. His low-crowned hat was drawn deep over his slumberous gray eyes. The mobile mouth beneath completed the expression ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of princes than in the homely loyalty of shopkeepers and the sturdy gallantry of their apprentices. The lively, easy, honest improvisation of the opening scenes has a certain value in its very crudity and simplicity: the homespun rhetoric and the jog-trot jingle are signs at once of the date and of the class to which these plays must be referred. The parts of the rebels are rough-hewn rather than vigorous; the comic or burlesque part of Josselin is very cheap and flimsy farce. The peculiar powers ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... he said, "and in them are homespun and jeans. One can't lead his 'fluttered folk and wild' in a ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... thus his tale, Then rising took down from its nail The sword that hung there, dim with dust, And cleaving to its sheath with rust, And said, "This sword was in the fight." The Poet seized it, and exclaimed, "It is the sword of a good knight, Though homespun was his coat-of-mail; What matter if it be not named Joyeuse, Colada, Durindale, Excalibar, or Aroundight, Or other name the books record? Your ancestor, who bore this sword As Colonel of the Volunteers, Mounted upon his old gray mare, Seen here and there and everywhere, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... enterprise. At the time of the conquest, and in fact for many years previously, the principal products of the country were beaver skins, timber, agricultural products, fish, fish oil, ginseng (for some years only), beer, cider, rug carpets, homespun cloths—made chiefly by the inmates of the religious houses—soap, potash, leather, stoves, tools and other iron manufactures—made in the St. Maurice forges—never a profitable industry, whether carried on by companies or ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... mendicant, but a landowner—and a landowner possessed of fully a thousand serfs, the superior of all his neighbours in wealth of flour and grain, and the owner of storehouses, and so forth, that were crammed with homespun cloth and linen, tanned and undressed sheepskins, dried fish, and every conceivable species of produce. Nevertheless, such a phenomenon is rare in Russia, where the tendency is rather to ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... wild figure, in the midst of a strange, wild scene: his clothes, originally of some homespun cloth, now patched so freely with dressed deerskin as to leave little of the original material; moccasins on his feet, a beaver cap upon his head, his leather belt stuck round with hunting knives, and the pistol to be used at close quarters ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... reindeer. The ladies, therefore, were very anxious to display these powerful attractions to the greatest advantage; and the best rooms in the house, instead of being adorned with caricatures of Dame Nature, in water-colors and needlework, were always hung round with abundance of homespun garments, the manufacture and the property of the females; a piece of laudable ostentation that still prevails among the heiresses of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... flannel and blue hickory shirts. Four sewing-machines stood near the wall where grated windows admitted sunshine, and their hymn to Labor was the only sound that broke the brooding silence. The room was scrupulously clean and tidy, and the inmates, wearing the regulation uniform of blue-striped homespun, appeared comparatively neat; but sordid, sullen, repulsively coarse and brutish were many of the countenances bent over the daily task, and now and then swift, furtive glances from downcast eyes betrayed close kinship with ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... write. For this a British author bids again The heroine rise, to grace the British scene: Here, as in life, she breathes her genuine flame, She asks, What bosom has not felt the same? Asks of the British youth—is silence there? She dares to ask it of the British fair. To-night our homespun author would be true, At once to nature, history, and you. 20 Well pleased to give our neighbours due applause, He owns their learning, but disdains their laws; Not to his patient touch, or happy flame, 'Tis to his British heart he trusts ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... hair so high. She had a pretty new frock—a rich warm brown ground, with little flowers in green and yellow and a kind of dull red sprinkled all over it. It had come from New York, and was called delaine. She had discarded her homespun woolen. And, oh, how stylishly pretty she was, quite like the young ladies ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... active, agile, unmuscular race, mostly preserve the old national dress. Some men still wear, and both sexes once wore, the ridiculous carapuca, or funnel-cap with a rat-tail for a tassel. The rest of the toilet consists of homespun cottons, shirts and knickerbockers, with buff shoes or boots broad-soled and heelless. The traveller who prefers walking should always use this chaussure, and the 'little girl in topboots' is still a standing joke. The women affect parti-coloured petticoats of home-made baize or woollen stuff, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... beds—in most cases merely a few boards with a straw mattress placed thereon—the straw sandal on the foot, wooden chopsticks in place of knives and forks, the small variety of foods and of cooking utensils, the simple homespun cotton clothing—much of this finds favor in the eye of the English traveler. The Chinese, of all Orientals, teach us how to live without furniture, without impedimenta, with the least possible ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... ground were littered with garments and furs and weapons, and odds-and-ends of spoil, as if a ship had been overturned on the spot. The lean little man whom Rolf had pointed out stood in the midst of it all, examining and directing. He was dressed in coarse homespun of the dingy colors of trading vessels, gray and brown and rusty black, which contrasted oddly with the mantle of gorgeous purple velvet he was at that moment trying on. His little freckled face was wrinkled into a hundred shrewd puckers, and his eyes were two ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... himself in bed, and knowing no fear looked steadily. What he saw thrown into relief against the shadows was the figure of a hillman of the west, and one that in an instant he knew. The Covenanter was dressed in rough homespun hodden gray, stained heavily with the black of the peat holes in which he had been hiding, and torn here and there where the rocks had caught him as he was crawling for shelter. Of middle age, with hair hanging over his ears and beard uncared ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... alone. One difference I noticed about her, however; that she was clothed in garments such as I had never seen her wear before. They were close fitting, save for a flowing cape, and made of some grey material, not unlike a coarse homespun or even asbestos cloth. Still they became her very well, and when I remarked upon them, all she answered was that part of our road would be rough. Even her feet were shod with high buskins ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... and tears should mingle with each other. Where could I get one? There had been many written, and as I looked back into the dramatic history of the past a long line of lovely ghosts loomed up before me, passing as in a procession: Job Thornberry, Bob Tyke, Frank Ostland, Zekiel Homespun, and a host of departed heroes "with martial stalk went by my watch." Charming fellows all, but not for me, I felt I could not do them justice. Besides, they were too human. I was looking for a myth—something intangible and impossible. But he would not come. Time went on, and ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... imitative sense, Deem taste in dress the proof of excellence; And spurn the meanness of your homespun arts, Since homespun habits would obscure their parts; Whilst all, which aims at splendour and parade, Must come from Europe, and be ready made. Strange! we should thus our native worth disclaim, ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... folded bit of Britain, Laid by in lavender and hid The year—let's say—Tom Jones was written; An old farm manor-house it is With fantails fluttering on the gables, A place of men and memories And solid facts and homespun fables. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... into the parlor, would have given him half-glad, half-indifferent greeting, and then found either occasion to laugh at him or would have turned elsewhere for amusement. We looked, I say, in vain. Before me stood my pattern of neatness in a rough uniform of brown homespun. A dark flannel shirt replaced the snowy cambric one, and there was neither cravat nor collar to mark the boundary line between his dark face and the still darker material. And the dear little boots! O ye gods and little fishes! they were clumsy, and mud-spattered! ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... her interrogatively the colour faded from her face. The relief of hearing that homespun plan had chilled her blood, and she was faint for an instant with the sickness of hearty youth that only knows it feels odd to itself and concludes the strangeness is of the soul. But she did not answer, for Anne was ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... profiles like birds of prey, all clad in dark steel armor, and some displaying the white Maltese cross. From portrait to portrait the countenances grew more refined, but without losing the prominent forehead and the imperious family nose. The wide, soft collar of the homespun shirt became transformed into starched folds of plaited ruffs; the cuirasses softened into jackets of velvet or silk; the stiff broad beards in imperial style changed to sharp goatees and to pointed mustaches, which, with the soft locks falling over the temples, served as a frame ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... grass, I devoted myself to a passionate absorbing of every detail. At the end of five minutes there was not a button on him that I could not have passed an examination in; and the wearer himself of that homespun suit was probably less familiar with its pattern and texture than I was. Once he looked up, nodded, half held out his tobacco pouch,—mechanically, as it were,—then, returning it to his pocket, resumed his work, and I my ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... thrifty. The blankets of the bed were homespun; the fine linen towel was the same. The mistress's dress was home-made, and so was the cloth of her husband's clothes. In noticing this I was told that where they could keep a few sheep the people were better off, but it was harder now to ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... and if "they" were satisfied with the country, the Seminoles were to be transported to it in three divisions, one in 1833, one in 1834, and the last in 1835. Something was said about the payment of annuities, about the distribution of blankets and homespun frocks, and compensation for cattle and slaves stolen by the whites. But the point that concerned Osceola most of all was that the Seminoles were expected to leave Florida and live among the Creeks west of the Mississippi! Still there was no reason ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... indulged in, and homespun was the principal material used for clothing. Mrs. Washington had sixteen spinning-wheels in her house. Her husband often wore homespun while at home, and on rainy days sometimes placed a pair of home-made trousers of the barn-door ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... dressed in white and green—a compliment, by the way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose favourite colours they were—and in white, with green garlands and gilded vizors, the angels are to come to Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in homespun, Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots. The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband in mourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... a large, comfortable room, with strings of red peppers hanging from the ceiling, and boards of sliced apples drying on upturned flour barrels near the door. The bright homespun carpet left a strip of bare plank by the stove, and on this stood two hampers of black walnuts ready for storing. A few coloured prints, culled from garden magazines, were tacked on the wall, and these, without exception, represented blossoms of a miraculous splendour and size. In Sarah's straitened ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... through wid deir day's work and finished eatin' supper, dey all had to git busy workin' wid cotton. Some carded bats, some spinned and some weaved cloth. I knows you is done seen dis here checkidy cotton homespun—dat's what dey weaved for our dresses. Dem dresses was made tight and long, and dey made 'em right on de body so as not to waste none of de cloth. All slaves had was homespun clothes ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... iniquities flourished, and to whom, by the further and richer providence of God, a means of escape was now offered. He would no more have thought of declining the proposed service, even though the poor girl were dressed in homespun and clattered in sabots, than he would have closed his ear to the cry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... the interruption, and banded it to Pagett; a large card with a ruled border in red ink, and in the centre in schoolboy copper plate, Mr. Dma Nath. "Give salaam," said the civilian, and there entered in haste a slender youth, clad in a closely fitting coat of grey homespun, tight trousers, patent-leather shoes, and a small black velvet cap. His thin cheek twitched, and his eyes wandered restlessly, for the young man was evidently nervous and uncomfortable, though striving to assume a free ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... and bland, with a pale, puffy, and unsmiling face, and only betrayed his irony with a slow wink when he was sure you were not deceived. He knew much about the gentry around, those bored and weary youths in check coats, riding breeches, and large pipes, and the young ladies in pale homespun costumes who had rude and familiar words to all they judged were their equals, and were accompanied invariably by ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... I detect a trace of hostile feeling in the countenance, words, or manner of any prisoner there. Almost to a man, they were simple, bumpkin-like fellows, dressed in homespun clothes, with faces singularly vacant of meaning, but sufficiently good-humored: a breed of men, in short, such as I did not suppose to exist in this country, although I have seen their like in some other parts of the world. They were peasants, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... came down from the hills he already felt very hungry, his fingers tenderly fondling the slices of oaten bread he had put away in the pocket of his grey homespun coat. But he checked the impulse to eat, the long jaw of his swarthy face set, his strong teeth tight together awaiting the right hour to play their eager part. If he ate all the oaten bread now—splendid, dry, hard stuff, made of oat meal and water, baked on a gridiron—it ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... the house of a husbandman, a friend and acquaintance of both of them. After awhile, the rain showing no sign of giving over and they wishing to reach Florence by daylight, they borrowed of their host two old homespun cloaks and two hats, rusty with age, for that there were no better to be had, and set out ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... slowly, as though loath to leave the Patriarch's face, travelled over the gray homespun suit that clothed the man, the white wristbands of the home-washed shirt, unstarched, but spotlessly clean—and his fancy of flowing, Grecian robes with rope girdles seemed to hold him up to mockery as a crude and paltry bungler before the perfect, ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... has been known to march sixty or seventy miles, without taking any other refreshment, than a meal of cold potatoes and a drink of cold water, in twenty-four hours. During this period men were but badly clothed in homespun, which afforded little warmth. They slept in the open air, according to their means, either with or without a blanket. They had nothing but water to drink. They fed chiefly upon sweet potatoes, either with or without fresh beef. And they submitted to this without a murmur; but all sighed for ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... well-equipped stove. Corn was the principal grain food, and wild game supplied most of the meat. The wild animals furnished clothing as well as food; for the pioneers could not afford to pay from 15 to 25 cents a yard for calico, and from 25 to 75 cents for gingham.* Some persons indulged in homespun cloth for Sunday and festal occasions, but the common outside garments were made of dressed deerskins. Parley P. Pratt, in his autobiography, speaks of passing through a settlement where "some families were entirely dressed in skins, without any other clothing, including ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... She saw a number of canvas-covered wagons drawn up in front of the cabins; the vehicles were dusty and the wheels encrusted with yellow mud. The grizzled frontiersman who had smiled at Nell stood leaning on his gun, talking to three men, whose travel-stained and worn homespun clothes suggested a long and toilsome journey. There was the bustle of excitement incident to the arrival of strangers; to the quick exchange of greetings, the unloading of wagons and unharnessing of ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... years Weaned from the bosom of thy native land, Returnest back and seekest true repose. Oh, what more pleasant than the short-breathed sigh When laying down your burden at the gate, And dizzy with long wandering, you embrace The cool and quiet of a homespun bed." "Alas," said Dalica, "though all commend This choice, and many meet with no control, Yet none pursue it! Age by Care oppressed Feels for the couch, and drops into the grave. The tranquil scene lies further still from Youth: Frenzied Ambition and desponding Love ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... fair-haired, blue-eyed girl who stood directly opposite to him. At her throat there was a cowslip—a rare flower in Orkney. She wore a rough, homespun frock, as all the other girls did; but, for some reason which I cannot explain, Thora Kinlay was quite unlike her companions. Such was the refined gentleness of her nature that I can compare her only with the tern—the most beautiful, I believe, ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... The farmer, in his homespun, may possess the real essentials which make the gentleman—good feeling, and respect for the feelings of others. The homely dress, weather-beaten face, and hard hands, could not deprive him of the honest independence and genial benevolence he derived from nature. No real gentleman ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... hated new clothes. He felt them an intolerable burden. He did not mind his new homespun, home-made flannel check shirt of mixed red and white, but the heavy fulled-cloth suit made by his Aunt Kirsty felt like a suit of mail. He moved heavily in it and felt queer, and knew that he looked ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... man, with a pale, care-worn face and grayish hair, and dressed in a homespun jacket and trousers, came ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... her father; the former, well dressed in the style of a gentleman of the time, in broadcloth, with fine linen, and a tall silk hat carefully placed on the floor of the pew; while Deacon Baxter wore homespun made of wool from his own sheep, spun and woven, dyed and finished, at the fulling-mill in the village, and carried a battered felt hat that had been a matter of ridicule these dozen years. (The Deacon would be buried in two coats, Jed Morrill always ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... spittoons, filled with sea-shells instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole adornment—poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imply that all these chances of life and death came in the gross, and that existence was a medley at best. The other, a witness, was young. More than once the "valley man" cast a covert glance at her as, clad in a brown homespun dress, she leaned against the log wall, her face, which was very pale, half turned toward it, as if to hide the features already much obscured by the white sunbonnet drawn far over it. One arm was lifted, and her hand was passed between the unchinked logs in a convulsive grasp upon ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and your Cousin Oliver get together and fix those new gadgets on my ship. I'll take the other boys for a run over to this spaceport town. The boys need a run ashore, and there might be some loot. Your grandmother's fond of homespun. I'll try to ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... for him in the living-room, where modern taste had made use of the blue-and-white homespun coverlets of the Doctor's grandmother as door curtains and couch covers. She noticed the kettle swung over the fire from the same crane that had balanced its burden thus for a hundred years, and she listened to Bob knocking about up-stairs ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... elected to Parliament from County Meath. He was then twenty-seven years old. He had never shaved, and his full brown beard and serious, earnest, dignified manner, coupled with his six-foot-two physique, attracted instant attention. He wore a suit of gray, Irish homespun, but the requirements of Parliament demanded black with a chimney-pot hat—the hat being always religiously worn in session, except when the member addressed the Chair—and to these Piccadilly ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... older man, a jacket of black and white homespun is extremely appropriate. It is smart when worn with a waistcoat of white flannel, white shirt and collar and gayly figured tie of silk foulard. Trousers of white flannel would complete this excellent costume for the elderly ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... this is preserved the greater part of what we have left of the hard shrewd sense and the simpler manner of those homespun old worthies who planted the seed of the Republic. In our great cities we are cosmopolitans; but here we are Americans of the primitive type, or as nearly as may be. It was unimportant settlements like the one we are describing that ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... began to gather into Boston. Tan, lanky, awkward fellows came in squads, and companies, and regiments, swaggering along, dressed in their brown homespun clothes and blue yarn stockings. They stooped as if they still had hold of the plough-handles, and marched without any time or tune. Hither they came, from the cornfields, from the clearing in the forest, from the blacksmith's ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... billiard-room, kept the garden in order, and watered the Tivoli, all for fifty francs a year. He was always without a jacket, except on grand occasions; usually his sole garments were a pair of blue linen trousers, heavy shoes, and a striped velvet waistcoat, over which he wore an apron of homespun linen when at work in the cafe or billiard-room. This apron, with strings, was the badge of his functions. The fellow had been hired by Socquard at the last annual fair; for in this valley, as throughout Burgundy, servants ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... had been worked out for the various classes. They were adapted both to the purse and to the pursuit. They were fitting—that is, silk was not worn in huts or homespun in palaces; slippers were for carriages and sabots for streets. The garments of a class were founded on good sound principles on the whole—but they marked the class. Democracy sought to destroy outward distinctions. The proscribed costumes went into ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... be deemed uncouth, she was an uncouth little atom of humanity. Her blue checked homespun dress, graced with big horn buttons, descended almost to her feet. Her straight, awkwardly cropped hair was of a nondescript shade pleasantly called "tow." As she came into the light of the fire, she lifted wide black eyes deprecatingly ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... top table stood in one corner of the room, a mahogany gateleg occupied the centre, its beauty largely concealed by a cover of yellow and white checked homespun linen, upon which rested a glass oil lamp with a green paper shade, a wide glass dish filled with pictures, an old leather-bound album with heavy brass clasps and hinges. A rag carpet, covered in places with hooked rugs, added ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... odoriferous breath more perfumed the air than ordnance would that is charged with amomum, musk, civet and ambergreece." It was surely a mock-modesty which led Nash to fear that such ghost-stories as these would appear to his readers duller than Holland cheese and more tiresome than homespun. To 1594, too, belongs the tragedy of "Dido," probably left incomplete by Marlowe, and finished by Nash, who shows himself here an adept in that swelling bombast of bragging blank verse of which he affected to disapprove. A new edition of "Christ's Tears" also belongs ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... sorely started to feel a great warm hand on my shoulder, and a loud, cheery voice saith, 'Dolly Jennings, whither away so fast thou canst not see an old friend?' I looked up, and there was dear old Farmer Ingham, in his thick boots and country homespun; but I declare to you, child, that in my trouble his face was to me as that of an angel of God. I brake down, and sobbed aloud. 'Come, come, now!' saith he, comfortably; 'not so bad as that, is it? ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... wore gowns of very coarse homespun and home-woven cloth, composed of linen and wool, and called linsey-woolsey, very coarse shoes, and sometimes with buckskin gloves of their own manufacture. If any one chanced to have a ring or pretty buckle, it was ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... advanced toward them through the thickening gloom, very slowly; leaning on a stick. As he drew nearer, they observed that he was pale and worn, and that his anxious eyes were deeply sunken in his head. His dress of homespun blue hung about him in rags; his feet and head were bare. He sat down on a stump half-way, and beckoned them to come to him. When they complied, he put his hand upon his side as if in pain, and while he fetched his breath stared at ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... form, and face, and motions, His homespun habit, and his silver hair,— And hear the language of his trite devotions Rising ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... eager to see the plowman poet. The fuss they made over him was enough to turn the head of a lesser man. But in spite of all the flattery, Burns, though pleased and glad, remained as simple as before. He moved among the grand people in their silks and velvets clad in homespun clothes "like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird"* as easily as he had moved among his humble friends. He held himself with that proud independence which later made ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... day and blue coats the next," said an old woman clad in homespun grey, who came out of a low frame house as the troops slowly made their way past the teams through the ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... as good as I wanted," was the hesitating reply; "but 'peared to me they were men, all right. And they seemed to be dressed in gray homespun, too, like some of the farmers around ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... roar. Rairin, roaring. Rair't, roared. Raise, rase, rose. Raize, to excite, anger. Ramfeezl'd, exhausted. Ramgunshoch, surly. Ram-stam, headlong. Randie, lawless, obstreperous. Randie, randy, a scoundrel, a rascal. Rant, to rollick, to roister. Rants, merry meetings; rows. Rape, v. raep. Raploch, homespun. Rash, a rush. Rash-buss, a clump of rushes. Rashy, rushy. Rattan, rattoon, a rat. Ratton-key, the rat-quay. Raucle, rough, bitter, sturdy. Raught, reached. Raw, a row. Rax, to stretch, to extend. Ream, cream, foam. Ream, to cream, to foam. Reave, to ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 1808, Franz in his homespun grey suit, spectacles shielding his bright, near-sighted eyes, his bushy black hair covered by an old fashioned hat, presented himself for examination by the Court Capellmeister and the singing master. The other boys jeered at his odd appearance, ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... arranged in rows, and Mrs. Brewster was putting out of sight every article suggestive of work. There was to be an evening meeting. I watched the people as they came in, still and solemn. Not many of the women wore bonnets. All who lived within a moderate distance just stepped in with a little homespun blanket over the head, or a patchwork cradle-quilt. I noticed Rachel when she entered and took her seat upon the settle. It will only take a minute to tell what a settle is, or, rather, was. If you should take a low ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... of care and toil, while his rugged, yet well-formed hands conveyed the impression of the unceasing war he had waged against the gigantic trees of this Western land. He was habited in a hunting-frock of grey homespun, reaching about half way down to his knee, and trimmed with a full fringe of a somewhat darker hue. His trowsers were of the same material, and both were girt around his loins by a common belt of black leather, fastened by a plain white buckle, into ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... nobles' estates. Dostoyevsky, though not of this landed-proprietor school, still dealt with the nobility, albeit with its waifs and strays. None of these masters more than touched the Russian merchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping and mean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities or the homely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves sprang, yet gifted ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... There swung the sign of the Amour de Dieu. And there beside it stood a homespun figure surely known to me. There was no mistaking that bald pate. I yelled at the top ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... matter. Elnathan, then about fifteen, was, much like a wild colt, caught and trimmed by clipping his bushy locks; dressed in a suit of homespun, dyed in the butternut bark; furnished with a New Testament and a Websters Spelling Book, and sent to school. As the boy was by nature quite shrewd enough, and had previously, at odd times, laid the foundations of reading, writing, and arithmetic, he was soon conspicuous in the school ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... England; including, by the way, sympathy for the outlaw, Jesse James taking the place of Robin Hood. Under modern conditions however, the native ballad is speedily killed by competition with the music hall songs; the cowboys becoming ashamed to sing the crude homespun ballads in view of what Owen Writes calls the "ill-smelling saloon cleverness" of the far less interesting compositions of the music-hall singers. It is therefore a work of real importance to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... A girl in a homespun gown and a blue sunbonnet came up the road and unlatched the little gate. She had upon her arm a small basket such as the mountain folk weave. "Good-mahnin', Mrs. Cole. Good-mahnin', Mr. Cole. It cert'ny is fine ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding—the very brood of the forest's innermost heart—had found a voice. Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in the severity of the forest routine, gave no sign ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... was most tender and touching in their ministrations. We might dwell, had we time, on the Cottons, the Mitchells, and the Sheppards, but, revered above all others, comes before us the venerable form of John Elliott, the missionary, clad in homespun apparel, his face shining with inward peace, while his silver locks overhang his shoulders. He was the Nestor of divines, and the character of his labors might be judged from his motto—' Prayers and pains with faith in Christ Jesus can accomplish anything.' ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... The New Englanders in homespun looked at one another with trepidation on their features. The red coat was not assuring, but they kept their peace and breathed hard, praying that the enemy had not captured the convention through strategy. Mr. Randolph's first suggestion was ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... that Orestes had been there. We have then an allusion to the means which Aeschylus had employed to bring about the recognition, namely, the resemblance of the hair, the prints of feet, as well as the homespun-robe, with a condemnation of them as insufficient and absurd. The probability of this part of the drama of Aeschylus may, perhaps, admit of being cleared up, at all events one is ready to overlook it; but an express reference like this to another author's treatment ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the crowd. Every state, every age, every social class, both sexes, and all human colors were represented. There were wealthy bankers, and a poor, blind, black beggar led by a boy; men in broadcloth and men in homespun; men with beards and men without beards; members of the press and of the lobby; contractors and claim agents; office-holders and office-seekers; there were ladies from Paris in elegant attire, and ladies from the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... all made of homespun. De women done all de spinning and de weaving but Miss Betsy cut out all de clothes and helped wid de sewing. She learned to sew when she was away to school and she learnt all her women to sew. She done all the sewing ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... at him. If so it passed harmlessly over his broad shoulders. In his immaculate evening dress he looked strangely out of place there. Enid had escaped the prevailing dilapidation, but her gown of grey homespun was severe as the garb ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... or two after he uttered his complaint, Robert saw a middle aged man, not remarkable of appearance, talking with Braddock. His dress was homespun and careless, but his large head was beautifully shaped, and his features, though they might have been called homely, shone with the light of an extraordinary intelligence. His manner as he talked to Braddock, without showing any tinge of deference, ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the room, her thin face set and grim, her rusty dress of old black satin all cracking, and her great cairngorm brooch marking her from the rest in capes and homespun. They drew away from her; she had never tried to associate with them; in her detachment she had never been human to them as Andrew had been in his wildness and his weakness, and now she walked silently across the room and sat down. The firelight shone out fiercely ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... feckless body," stands in a rather apprehensive attitude before the old lady. He is a huge man of about forty-five. He is clean-shaven, and he has humorous grey eyes and dark hair. Despite his homespun attire, he looks more like a leader of men ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... talent, skill, and cleverness, and though it was scathing of all usual ethics, for the crude, honest life of the poor it had sympathy. I remember remarks of his in the market-place a year before, as he and I watched the peasant in his sabots and the good-wife in her homespun cloth. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... nights in the snug farm-house kitchen, after the day's work was done, John Camm and his young wife together carved their initials on the 'brideswain,' a tall oak chest that held the goodly stock of homespun linen and flax brought by Mabel Camm to her new home. John Camm was something of an artist. His was the design of the interlaced initials. All his life he had been a skilful carver with his tools on the winter evenings, and now he took pleasure in showing ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... stifled sobs arising from that end of the building where some women and children knelt. For the Maid was ever the friend of all such, and never a woman or child whom she approached, whether she were clad in peasant's homespun or in shining coat of mail, but gave her love and ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... a brown homespun dress—that is to say, the materials had been woven by the deft fingers of her mother, with the aid of the old spinning wheel, which in those days formed a part of every household. The dark stockings were knitted by the same busy fingers, with the help of the flashing needles; and ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... sent from Conway, Mass., contained a pair of socks knit by a lady ninety-seven years old, who declared herself ready and anxious to do all she could. A homespun blanket bore the inscription, "This blanket was carried by Milly Aldrich, who is ninety-three years old, down hill and up hill, one and a-half miles, to be given ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... running, From China borrows aid to deck the scene — 10 There, sorrowing by the river's glassy bed, Forlorn, a rural bard complain'd, All whom Augusta's bounty fed, All whom her clemency sustain'd; The good old sire, unconscious of decay, 15 The modest matron, clad in homespun gray, The military boy, the orphan'd maid, The shatter'd veteran, now first dismay'd; These sadly join beside the murmuring deep, And, as they view 20 The towers of Kew, Call on their mistress — now no more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... evening that Ichabod arrived at the castle of the Heer Van Tassel, which he found thronged with the pride and flower of the adjacent country. Old farmers, a spare leathern-faced race, in homespun coats and breeches, blue stockings, huge shoes, and magnificent pewter buckles. Their brisk, withered little dames, in close crimped caps, long waisted short-gowns, homespun petticoats, with scissors and pincushions, and gay calico pockets hanging ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... still, although there are signs of labor in all directions. From a window of the girls' building a quaint little gray-clad figure is beating a braided rug; a boy in homespun, with his hair slightly long in the back and cut in a straight line across the forehead, is carrying milk-cans from the dairy to one of the Sisters' Houses. Men in broad-brimmed hats, with clean-shaven, ascetic faces, are ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... father,—a diminutive type of the boor. Truey was habited in a skirt of blue woollen stuff, with a neat bodice elaborately stitched and embroidered after the Dutch fashion, and over her fair locks she wore a light sun-hat of straw with a ribbon and strings. Totty was very plainly attired in strong homespun, without any head-dress. As for Swartboy, a pair of old leathern "crackers" and a striped shirt were all the clothing he carried, beside his sheep-skin kaross. Such were the costumes ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... eyes like yours to watch the sea As though you waited for a homing ship? My father might with reason spend his hours Scanning the far horizon; for his Swan Whose outward lading was full half a vintage Is now months overdue." She turned on me Her languor knit and, through its homespun wrap, Her muscular frame gave hints of rebel will, While those great caves of night, her eyes, faced mine, Dread with the silence of unuttered wrongs: At last she spoke as one who must be heeded. Truly I ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... had demurred. They had little fancy for being left with no other protection than a half-disciplined rabble, who, ready as they might be to act against their troublesome countrymen, had no more respect for a lawn sleeve than for a homespun jerkin. A few troops of regular cavalry were therefore retained, and one regiment of Foot Guards. The former were commanded by Athole, the latter by Linlithgow. Towards the end of 1677 a fresh troop of cavalry was raised, and the command given to the young ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... and some rush-seated chairs had their places against the walls; but in the further corner stood the chief piece of furniture, and the one which drew the attention of the visitors with the most powerful attraction. It was a large clumsy four-post bedstead, hung with blue and white homespun curtains, and covered with a gay patchwork quilt. The curtains on both sides were drawn back, and the face and figure of the sleeper were in full view. She lay as if under the influence of a narcotic, so still ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... walked up to the residence of President Hayden, and inquired for Dr. Robinson, he was decidedly homespun in appearance. He probably was dressed in his best, but his best was shabby enough. His trousers were of coarse satinet, and might have fitted him a season or two before, but now were far outgrown, reaching only half-way down from the ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... legends are not of a very romantic kind, and the maerchen are often humorous in character. So that a certain air of unromance is given by such a collection as that we are here considering. The English folk-muse wears homespun and plods afoot, albeit with a cheerful ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... nursing, classes in sanitation and hygiene, social clubs and entertainments for people of all ages, and a department of fireside industries, through which is created an outside market for the beautiful coverlets, blankets and homespun, woven by the mountain women, as well as for ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... rustle of silks, no waving of plumes, no clink of golden spurs. Our sympathies are not awakened by the changeful destinies, the rise and fall, of great families, whose doom was in their blood. Instead of all this, we have the homespun fates of Cephas and Prudence repeated in an infinite series of peaceable sameness, and finding space enough for record in the family Bible; we have the noise of axe and hammer and saw, an apotheosis of dogged work, where, reversing ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... fancied he had robed himself in the plain homespun of a natural philosopher at the age of twenty-three journeyed limping leisurely in the mountain maid Carinthia's footsteps, thankful to the Fates for having seen her; and reproving the remainder of superstition within him, which would ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... schooner, "Brilliant," with divers small fishing-boats, but also a snug farm, adjoining the brown house, together with some fresh, juicy pasture-lots on neighboring islands, where he raised mutton, unsurpassed even by the English South-down, and wool, which furnished homespun to clothe his family on ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the old couple good-bye, not without regret on either side. As the Wanita ploughed up the lake that day on her return trip, a man came down from the hurricane-deck into the cabin, sat by the table and took up a magazine lying there and turned it over. He was dressed in coarse, ill-fitting, homespun clothes, and had a newly-healed scar on his forehead. His upper lip was roughly shorn, and the rest of his face covered with a two or three weeks' beard. He was not an attractive-looking person, certainly, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... a fine type of the peasant. His features might, in the strong chiaroscuro of the candle-light, have stood as model for some church fresco of a St. Peter. His dress was of grey country homespun, cut in a long coat, and girded by a many-coloured arrow-pattern sash, and on his feet he wore a pair of ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... costumes, a fur coat, another long coat, a dozen hats and from four to ten house dresses. In this day of week-ends in the country, no trousseau, no matter how town-bred the bride, is complete without one or two "country" coats, of fur, leather or woolen materials; several homespun, tweed or tricot suits or dresses; skirts with shirt-waists and sweaters in endless variety; low or flat heeled shoes; woolen or woolen and silk mixture stockings; ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... a man in rough grey suit—frieze or homespun—addressed her while she was looking out for the mail-cart, with possible letters, and asked to be directed to Ancester Towers; which is, at this point, invisible from the road. She suspected him at first of being a vagrant of some new sort—then ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... a chair, and putting a bullet through a saloon-keeper who bullied everybody, Poteet won the reputation of being a man of marked shrewdness and common sense, and Gullettsville was proud of him, in a measure. But he never liked Gullettsville. He wore a wool hat, a homespun shirt, jeans pantaloons, and cotton suspenders, and he never could bring himself into thorough harmony with the young men who wore ready-made clothes, starched shirts, and beaver hats; nor was his ideal of feminine beauty reached by the village belles, with their roach-combs, ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... our societies, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat—not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, indeed, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... all men. In the years of anti-slavery agitation David Irish and his sister "made their protest against slavery by abstaining as far as possible from slave-made products; and together they made maple, to take the place of cane sugar, and used nothing but linen and woolen clothing (largely homespun)."[15] This later Quaker, possessed of the spirit of the community of his fathers, shows his inner conflict with the ideals of a competitive age in the expression "so far as possible." It was not as practicable in 1855 to "abstain ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their mixture of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points where they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all. Here is imprinted ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... in the neighborhood of running streams. The application of steam to the propulsion of machinery, and the discovery of engines capable of competing with the human hand, led to the substitution of machine-made fabrics for clothing, in place of homespun articles of domestic manufacture. This led to the employment of farm-laborers in procuring coals, to the removal of many from the rural into the urban districts, to the destruction of the principal employment of the family during the winter evenings, ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... considered to be proficient. In the census of 1901 nearly a quarter of the whole caste were shown as malguzars or village proprietors and lessees. They wear a coarse cloth of homespun yarn which they get woven for them by Gandas; probably in consequence of this the Agharias do not consider the touch of the Ganda to pollute them, as other castes do. They will not grow turmeric, onions, garlic, san-hemp or tomatoes, nor will they rear tasar ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... first of his own home; only recently has he commenced to appreciate that his and other homes form a community. In the "age of homespun" the pioneer subdued his new lands and built his home; the farm and the home were his and for them he lived. He bought but little and had but little to sell. Farms were largely self-supporting. Neighbors helped each other in numerous ways and as the country ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... flat land thickly covered with black walnuts, oaks, and hickories. As the general mast was a good one that year, squirrels were seen gamboling on every tree around us. My companion, a stout, hale, and athletic man, dressed in a homespun hunting-shirt, bare-legged and moccasined, carried a long and heavy rifle, which, as he was loading it, he said had proved efficient in all his former undertakings, and which he hoped would not fail on this occasion, as he felt proud to show me his skill. ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... white-bearded and grey-haired, carrying his hat in his hand as he walked. His rough homespun clothing, his collarless shirt open at the throat, the plaid scarf around his neck, all these Poltavo saw through his ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... subject of God's relation to creation. His ablest essay is the treatise on Language; the most literary is that on 'Work and Play'; the most penetrating in its insight is 'Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination'; the most personal and characteristic is 'The Age of Homespun.' His best sermon is always the one last read; and they are perhaps his most representative work. The sermon is not usually ranked as belonging to literature, but no canon excludes those preached by this great man. They are timeless in their truth, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... come, my folks stayed on with Capt. Posey, and I washed and ironed with them later when I was big enough. I done some cooking, too. I could card and spin and make homespun dresses. My ma ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... chance for new ones to spring up. Carriages, wagons, and farm implements went to decay, or could only be rudely patched up by the rough mechanics of the plantation. The stringent blockade shut out foreign goods, and the people were generally clothed in homespun. In many houses the floors were bare because the carpets had been cut up to make blankets for the soldiers. Ladies made their own shoes of such materials as they could find. They braided their own hats. They showed a wonderful ingenuity in supplying from native products the place of all the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... ruddy-faced man of sixty, with neatly trimmed, snow-white whiskers. He had on a soft Alpine hat of pearl gray, a modishly cut gray homespun suit, a tie in which glimmered an opal pin, wore tan gloves, and had slung over one shoulder by a narrow black ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Her red hair was coiled up now in a neat roll at the back of her head. Her freckled face was clean, and had apparently escaped bruising in her conflict with the dragoon. She wore a short grey skirt of woollen homespun. The sleeves of her bodice were rolled up, and displayed a pair of muscular red arms. The girl was more than commonly tall, and anyone listening to her heavy footfall, and noting her thick figure and broad ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... and 'down-along more than up-along 'men like Isaiah Fetch. (The phrase is his own.) And, in any case, I told myself, it was not for the likes of me to keep hired men. And so, when the garden was made, and the other needed work done, I parted with Isaiah—a good, honest, homespun creature, rich in a sort of bovine contentment which often moved me to sincere envy—and was left quite alone in my hermitage, save for the morning visit of perhaps a couple of hours, which the worthy ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... you no more with my chat," said his hostess, with kindly good humor, and slipped away upstairs. She lighted a great wood fire in the bedroom, and laid the bed and the blankets all round it, and opened the window, and took the homespun linen sheets out of a press, and made the room very tidy. Then she went down again, and the moment Henry saw her, he said "I feel your kindness, miss, but I don't know your name, nor where in the world I am." His hostess smiled. "That is no secret. I'm Martha Dence—at your service: ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... rough(ness), coarse(ness) RUFFLE, flaunt, swagger RUG, coarse frieze RUG-GOWNS, gown made of rug RUSH, reference to rushes with which the floors were then strewn RUSHER, one who strewed the floor with rushes RUSSET, homespun cloth of neutral or ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... semblance of gentility in any one who makes part of the travelling mob. When I see women whom, in their drawing rooms or elsewhere, I have been accustomed to respect and treat with every suitable deference—when I see them, I say, elbowing their way through a crowd of dirty emigrants or lowbred homespun fellows in petticoats or breeches in our country, in order to reach a table spread for a hundred or more, I lose sight of their pretensions to gentility and view them as belonging to the plebeian herd. To restore herself to her caste, let a lady ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... County 'bout two miles from Eatonton, Georgia. My Ma and Pa was 'Melia and Iaaac Little and, far as I knows, dey was borned and bred in dat same county. Pa, he was sold away from Ma when I was still a baby. Ma's job was to weave all de cloth for de white folks. I have wore many a dress made out of de homespun what she wove. Dere was 17 of us chillun, and I can't 'member de names of but two of 'em now—dey was John and Sarah. John was Ma's onliest son; all de rest of de other 16 of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... Christian. I had rather be the humblest German peasant that ever lived, sitting in his cottage, vine clad, from which the grapes hang, made purple by the kiss of the sun as the day dies out of the sky, shod with wooden shoes, clad in homespun, at peace with the world, his family about him, with never a thought of God—I say the truth I had rather be such a peasant than any Christian that I have ever known." And when he said it the people cheered him. It was, however, but the trick of an orator. Let us change the sentences ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... and linen, and her pride in these possessions was almost as vast as the labor she expended in caring for them. What a collection was in those old-time linen chests! Humphreys, in her Catherine Schuyler, copies the inventory of articles in one: "35 homespun Sheets, 9 Fine sheets, 12 Tow Sheets, 13 bolster-cases, 6 pillow-biers, 9 diaper brakefast cloathes, 17 Table cloathes, 12 damask Napkins, 27 homespun Napkins, 31 Pillow-cases, 11 dresser Cloathes and a damask Cupboard Cloate." And this too before the day of the washing-machine, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... but being in lieu adorned behind with the ringed tail, just as it grew on the living animal. The cap conceals one of his best features—a forehead bold, broad, round, and white, which, could it be seen, would much improve our portrait. The inside shirt, as may be seen by the collar, is of homespun cotton; the outside shirt of fair, soft buckskin, secured at the waist by a belt of the same material, and falling a little below the knees. Saving the buckskin of mother nature's own providing, the sturdy young legs are without covering—a deficiency which admits of plausible explanation. ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... stood beside it, holding Thankful. Thankful was about ten inches long, made of the finest linen, with little rosy cheeks, and a fine little wig of flax. She wore a blue wool frock and a red cloak. Sarah held her close. She even drew a fold of her own blue homespun blanket around her to shield her from the November wind. The sky was low and gray; the wind blew from the northeast, and had the breath of snow in it. Submit on the wall drew her quilted petticoats close down over her feet, and huddled herself into a small space, but her face ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... of character are remarkable for high-relief and sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... call a man came into the room, all dusty and sunburnt, a typical man of Aragon, dry and wrinkled, burnt like a son of Sahara. His clothing, like his face, was dust-coloured. He wore knee-breeches of homespun, brown stockings, a handkerchief that had once been coloured bound round his head, with the knot over his left ear. He was startlingly rough and wild in appearance, but his features, on examination, were refined, and ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
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