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More "Spick" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the left as he faced towards Boisingham. This drive, which was some three hundred yards long, led up a rather sharp slope to his own place, Honham Cottage, or Molehill, as the villagers called it, a title calculated to give a keen impression of a neat spick and span red brick villa with a slate roof. In fact, however, it was nothing of the sort, being a building of the fifteenth century, as a glance at its massive flint walls was sufficient to show. In ancient times there had been a large Abbey at Boisingham, two miles away, which, ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... Empire safe while it was growing up. The guard of red-coated marines presented arms, and the hundreds of bluejackets were all in their places as the two commanders stepped on board. The naval officers on the quarter-deck were very spick and span in their black three-cornered hats, white wigs, long, bright blue, gold-laced coats, white waistcoats and breeches and stockings, and gold-buckled shoes. The idea of having naval uniforms of blue and white and gold—the same colours that ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... an excellent term for this, which, though borrowed from the stable, carries with it only sweet and wholesome suggestions. It is "well-groomed." A well-groomed woman is not only a well-gowned woman, but one who, like a favorite mare, is always spick and span in her person, and happy in her quiet consciousness of it. And every woman, whether she possesses a maid or not, indeed, whether she has fine gowns or not, may win the admiration of all ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... church about eleven o'clock. We were received with expressions of great joy. Mrs. Manoela was so happy over our coming that she embraced us in true Brazilian style. We were shown into our room, where we refreshed ourselves by brushing off the dust and bathing. How spick and span clean was everything in that room, even ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... pattern. It is easy to forgive St. Petersburg, in its giddy youth of one hundred and seventy-five winters, for its Western features and comforts; but that Kieff, in its venerable maturity of a thousand summers, should be so spick and span with newness and reformation seemed at first utterly unpardonable. The inhabitants think otherwise, no doubt, and deplore the mediaeval hygienic conditions which render the town the most unhealthy in Europe, in the matter of ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... UP LIE , and a stationer's with LUE LACK INK. Isn't it distressing?—and so bad for growing children to see so much slovenliness. And what can foreigners think of us? The Americans, for instance, who are always so spick and span, and—" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... recommence;—the play, Will be the last of seven, and spick-span new— 'Tis usual here that number to present. A dilettante did the piece invent, And dilettanti will enact it too. Excuse me, gentlemen; to me's assign'd, As dilettante to uplift ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... hands that were never idle. He had given her leave to make any changes she chose in the house, and she was for ever stitching away at white muslin, or tacking it over pink calico. These affairs made their little home very spick and span, and kept Polly from feeling dull—if one could imagine Polly dull! With the cooking alone had there been a hitch in the beginning. Like a true expert Mrs. Beamish had not tolerated understudies: none but the lowliest jobs, such as raisin-stoning ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Betty went into the dressing-room and there washed pink and white faces and hands till they shone, and brushed silk locks till they lay straight and shining. Clean frocks were forthcoming, and two spick and span babies emerged to beam upon a transformed world no longer seen through a veil of tears. This new friend could tell the most wonderful stories, invent delightful games, and sing dozens of foolish little rhymes in a low sweet ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man into ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... roused himself, however, and begged him, when he should return for the dish, to restore neatness to the bed and to assist him in the ordering of his toilet which he wished to be spick and span. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... new-born, nascent, neonatal [Med.], new-fashioned, new-fangled, new-fledged; of yesterday; just out, brand-new, up to date, up to the minute, with it, fashionable, in fashion; in, hip [Coll.]; vernal, renovated, sempervirent^, sempervirid^. fresh as a rose, fresh as a daisy, fresh as paint; spick and span. Adv. newly &c adj.; afresh, anew, lately, just now, only yesterday, the other day; latterly, of late. not long ago, a short time ago. Phr. di novello tutto par bello [It]; nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum est prius [Lat.]; una scopa ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tell you—it was in his twenty-fifth year—about three in the afternoon, by the clock, October Twenty-first, Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five. The day was Indian summer, warm and balmy. He sat there reading in the window of his office on Court Street, Boston, a spick-span new law-office, with four shelves of law-books bound in sheep, a green-covered table in the center, three armchairs, and on the wall a steel engraving ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... they were to go, not to the armourer, and the draper, and the tailor, and the weaver, and the wheelwright, and the blacksmith,—but, hey presto! Master Warner set his imps a-churning, and turned ye out mail and tunic, worsted and wagon, kettle and pot, spick and span new, from his brewage of vapour and sea-coal. Oh, have I not heard enough of the sorcerer from my brother, who works in the Chepe for Master Stokton, the mercer!—and Master Stokton was one of the worshipful ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of my club, and myself seated at a little table by the window looking out on Piccadilly. And there's a spotless table-cloth, and all the accessories are spick and span. An obsequious menial brings me a rumpsteak, grilled to perfection, and so tender that it melts in the mouth. And he puts by my side a plate of crisp fried potatoes. Can't you smell them? And then a liveried flunky brings me a pewter tankard, and into it he pours ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... Mrs. Bertram Henshaw were expected home the first of September. By the thirty-first of August the old Beacon Street homestead facing the Public Garden was in spick-and-span order, with Dong Ling in the basement hovering over a well-stocked larder, and Pete searching the rest of the house for a chair awry, or ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... Mr. A. We are amiable too, For we follow our amiable Leader, like you; But when forced to say, "Bless you!" we choke with our spleen, And we add, sotto voce, "You know what I mean." While we sit spick and span as a picture by FRITH, And contend with our ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... a great time for the wild Sea Rovers who gather at Cowes and Southampton. The Rover may always be recognised on shore—and, by-the-way, he stays ashore a good deal—for his nautical clothing is spick and span new, the rake of his glossy cap is unspeakably jaunty, and the dignity of his gesture when he scans the offing with a trusty telescope is without parallel in history. When the Rover walks, you observe a slight roll ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... one chief aim in the building of my house beautiful will be to have a house that will require the minimum of trouble and work to keep clean and orderly. It will be no spick and span and polished house, with an immaculateness that testifies to the tragedy of drudge. I live in California where the days are warm. I'd prefer that the servants had three hours to go swimming (or ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... and fell in with his wish. He'd promised to eat his Christmas dinner along with them and Joey; but the pup was to come as a rare surprise next morning, and though Minnie Ford didn't much hold with a young dog about her spick and span home, she couldn't withstand the little silky creature, nor yet Teddy's wish to pleasure ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... to spick about my cafe," she said to Miss Spencer, with her agreeable smile. "I should like it served in the ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... talent for mortifying persons in a small way; by a gesture, an expression, a look, cloaked too very often with all the character of profound deference. The old nobility of Spain delighted to address each other only by their names, when in the presence of a spick-and-span grandee; calling each other, "Infantado," "Sidonia," "Ossuna," and then turning round with the most distinguished consideration, and appealing to the Most Noble Marquis ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... bad business of Dohna's men. I thought, when we joined them, they looked too spick and span to be any good; but that they should run, almost as fast and far as the men of the Federal army at Rossbach, is shameful. Neither in the last war nor in this has a Prussian ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... music, shouted "A-more! A-more!" so we went on, disregarding Whinnie and the bunk-house window and Struthers' acrid stare from the shack-door. I was in the middle of Fay Templeton's lovely old Rosie, You Are My Posey, when Lady Alicia rode up, as spick and span as though she'd just pranced off Rotten Row. And as I'd no intention of showing the white feather to her ladyship, I kept right on to the end. Then I looked up and waved the banjo at her where she sat stock-still on her mount. There was an enigmatic look on her face, but ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... that rage of impotence which finds its easiest outlet in violence. As he rose to take his leave, with all the outward signs of friendly ceremoniousness, he had time to be appalled at the perception that he, the middle-aged, spick-and-span New-Yorker, should so fully understand how it is that a certain type of frenzied brute can kill the woman whom he passionately loves, but who ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... splendid full-rigged ships and barques lying moored in the Hooghly along the whole length of the Maidan. The line must have extended for two miles, and I never tired of looking at these beautiful vessels with their graceful lines and huge spars, all clean and spick and span with green and white paint, the ubiquitous Calcutta crows perched in serried ranks on their yards. To my mind a full-rigged ship is the most beautiful object man has ever devised, and when the dusk was falling, with every spar and rope ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... Mayflower, so new, and strong, and spick, and span, and that rotting hulk which, for lack of custom now, was daily growing blacker and more worm-eaten! The old woman seemed to vision in the future a day when the Mayflower might drift ashore, cracked and water-logged, just as old Fleet-Foot had come home ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... friezes is placed above a simple wainscot, the effect is charming. The paper for nurseries is usually waterproof, for a nursery must be absolutely spick and span. Another thing that gives much pleasure in a nursery is to build on one side of the room a platform about a yard wide and six inches high, ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... was in order at Camp Meade. Before the boys answered the first drill formation each morning they did the housework. Everything had to be left spick and span. There was a specific place for everything and everything had to ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... were in a straight line with those of the next boy, each shoulder-strap set at the same angle as its fellows, each gun was as well polished as its neighbor, and the spick and span appearance the line presented, after its long fatiguing march, spoke volumes in favor of ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 27, May 13, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the whitest of doublets and a spotless apron, that denoted rather the miller, than the baker, he let bring, every morning about the hour that he expected Messer Geri and the ambassadors to pass by his door, a spick-and-span bucket of fresh and cool spring water, and a small Bolognese flagon of his good white wine, and two beakers that shone like silver, so bright were they: and there down he sat him, as they came by, and after hawking once or twice, fell a drinking ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... narrow alleys and peaceful convents; her harmless antique cannon on the parapets and her sweet-toned bells in the spires; her towering chateau on the heights and her long, low, queer-smelling warehouses in the lower town; her spick-and-span caleches and her dingy trolley-cars; her sprinkling of soldiers and sailors with Scotch accent and Irish brogue and Cockney twang, on a background of petite bourgeoisie speaking the quaintest of French dialects; her memories of an ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... almost at the Indian's feet, reclined a brawn of a man with his knees drawn high—a French sergeant in a spick-and-span white tunic with the badge of the Bearnais regiment. A musket lay across his thighs, so pointed that John looked straight down its barrel. Doubtless it was loaded: but John had plenty to distract his thoughts from such a trifle—in the heat, the glare, the torment ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... noses and otherwise damaged the countenances of his two previous owners, who had not the knack of preventing him tossing his head in their faces. The saddle—large and capacious—made on the principle of the impossibility of putting a round of beef upon a pudding plate—was "spick and span new," as was an enormous hunting-whip, whose iron-headed hammer he clenched in a way that would make the blood curdle in one's veins, to see such an instrument in the ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... to Kirtley after a month that personal cleanness and neatness in Germany were not particularly considered as next to godliness. The gold braid, spick and span uniforms and other showy gear, were apt to cover dirty bodies and soiled underwear. Alas, the Germans could not wash in beer. He wondered why his old enthusiastic mentor had never given him a hint of these things. Likely he did not know. Distance often increases eloquence ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... quite spick and span with their polished silk hats, and there are any number of pretty girls. The shops, too, seem quite attractive. I can even imagine myself living here for a time, ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the loftier as in the lower sense. To "live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self- conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws, which ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... too tall to wear with decency the short Eton jacket; he possessed a trouser-press; and his "bags" were perfectly creased and quite spotless. From tip to toe, at all seasons and in all weathers, he looked conspicuously spick and span. Chaff provoked the solemn retort: "One should be well groomed." He spoke impersonally, considering it bad form to use for first person singular. Amongst the small boys he ranked as the Petronius ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... felt anything like the coarseness of those stockings as I drew them on. The shoes, too, were of the clumsiest make; they were large for me, which perhaps accounted for their extreme heaviness. I was a bit of a dandy; always priding myself upon my spick and span get-up. No doubt this made me critical, but certainly the tweed of which the clothes were made was the roughest thing of its kind I had ever handled. I got into them, however, without any comment, only remarking, when my ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... buried as quickly and decently as the place allowed of. Things were generally cleaned up, and by noon the little fort was as spick as if the sound of a rifle had never been heard within its walls. Lewis and Andover had the midday meal in a sort of gun-room which looked over the edge of the plateau to a valley in the hills. It had been arranged and ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... it would be profanation to eat anything in this spick-and-span bower, so as I'm tremendously hungry, I propose an adjournment," ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... upstairs wash days with the housework. Eight o'clock and my house is spick span, even my cellar steps wiped down. Take off that pink thing and I'll help you make the bed. It was all right to wear it around the first week for your husband, but now one of your cotton crepes will do. Come, help turn ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... children have been busy all our lives trying to get educated, so we could keep mother in luxury after a while. In the meantime, she had done with bare necessities, for the life-insurance father left wasn't large enough to take any liberty with. Mother has things spick and span. No palace could be more beautifully kept than our home, but the furnishing is nothing whatever ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... it, Rusty's wife said that there must be kind people living in the farmhouse, or they never would have driven nails through a spick-and-span can just to make ...
— The Tale of Rusty Wren • Arthur Scott Bailey
... of age, but he was in love, and in love too with Captain Treves's wife, who, in his eyes, was spick-span perfection. In their turn Mrs. Treves's two little boys, aged six and five respectively, were in love with Dick, who appeared to them to be the model of all that ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... of antiquity, which is particularly pleasant in a land where almost everything is spick-and-span new; but the rooms I thought low and stuffy, and the walls and passages had a neglected plaster-broken appearance. There are some very fine old trees in the green, which, throwing their shade over the time-worn building, help ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... delay. 'Twas a strain on the patience. I'd long wanted—an' I'd come far—t' see my godson. But bein' a bachelor-man I held my tongue for a bit: for, thinks I, they're washin' an' curlin' the child, an' they'll fetch un in when they're ready t' do so, all spick-an'-span an' polished like a door-knob, an' crowin', too, the little rooster! 'Twas a fair sight to see Mary Mull smilin' beyond the tea-pot. 'Twas good t' see what she had provided. Cod's-tongues an' bacon—with new greens an' potatoes—an' capillaire-berry pie an' bake-apple jelly. 'Twas pretty, ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... himself the upper right-hand corner, the other eminent persons pictured being ex-Presidents Roosevelt, McKinley and Cleveland. The star illustration, however, is a "made up" picture, in which a photograph of Latta, looking spick-and-span, has been pasted onto what is very obviously a painted picture of a hall full of people in evening dress, all of them gazing at Latta, who stands upon the stage, dignified, suave, impressive, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Australian, Canadian, New Zealanders, colored French Colonials, a few Russians who, following the sudden collapse of their government, were now soldiers lacking a flag, Scotch Highlanders in their gaudy kilts, Japanese officers in spick uniforms not yet baptized in the mud of the trenches—a varied, colorful parade of young men bent on ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... was her own housekeeper, and employed, besides the coachman, whose business was in the stables and upon his box, five servants. There were twenty-five rooms in the palatial house, giving to each servant five to be kept in the spick-and-span array demanded by the master's position and taste. As a matter of course something was neglected in every department, the instinct of self-preservation being innate and cultivated in Abigail, Phyllis and Gretchen, "Jeems" and "Chawls." Even more as a matter ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... inferno, a spotlessly clean apparition in blue without either waterproof or umbrella. I refer to Jane. She suddenly appeared, as I was passing The Ladies' Tea Association Rooms, walking in front of me. She looked just the same as when I last saw her—spick and span, and—dry. I repeat the word—dry—for that is what attracted my attention most. Despite the deluge, not a single raindrop touched her—the plumes on her toque were splendidly erect and curly, her shoe-buckles sparkled, her patent leathers were spotless, whilst the cloth of her coat and ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... was well fitted out, spick and span in fresh carpets and paint, and crowded to the utmost capacity for comfort. Every stateroom was full; each seat at the tables occupied. Not a foot of space above or below decks was left unused, but provision was made for all, and ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... kindness in suitable fashion. A few flagons of wine were drunk, and the interview ended. The company aboard the Golden Boar had no great opinion of their visitors, but the visitors had a better one of them. They had noted the spick and span order on shipboard, the bearing of the men, and they did not forget the name of the captain—they only made the mistake of confounding him with the ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... of course you have a right to dictate in the matter; but I tell you what, these darkies o' yours are a dreadful lazy set, specially that Suse; and it's mighty hard for folks that's been used to seein' things done up spick and span and smart ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... met again the Albanian coachman Shan, who had served me very faithfully on my previous visits. He took me to the house of his family. A striking contrast to the Montenegrin houses, it was spick and span and even pretty, for the Albanian has artistic instincts, whereas the Montenegrin has none. Left to himself, his taste ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... Henrietta told them. She was so excited that she couldn't eat her breakfast. But her chicks had no such trouble. And perhaps it was just as well that Henrietta Hen had her hands full looking after them and trying to keep them all under her eye, and spick-and-span for the journey. Otherwise she would have been in more of a flutter ...
— The Tale of Henrietta Hen • Arthur Scott Bailey
... spick and span to go to church, David soon found out—never before had he been so scrubbed and brushed and combed. There was, too, brought out for him to wear a little clean white blouse and a red tie, over which Mrs. Holly cried a little as she had over ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... not wear overalls, like Johnnie Green. But they did not seem to mind that. They knelt right down beside him in their spick-and-span velvet suits and stared ...
— The Tale of Buster Bumblebee • Arthur Scott Bailey
... had lived in Paris, and been to balls at the Tuileries. Of course, it was a tip-top New-York-Paris party, with all the new, fashionable, unspeakable crinkles and wrinkles, all the high, divine, spick and span new ways of doing things; which, however, like the Eleusinian mysteries, being in their very nature incommunicable except to the elect, must be left to ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a spick and span new one, bought on purpose for this interview. I admire your bookcases, said I. Can you tell me ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... been more genial for the purpose, and the prospect of a few miles' march, with the people of town and village en fete, was a welcome one to all but the men in the infirmary, who were looking gloomily from the windows at their comrades, all spick and span, eager ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... suggesting, by its brightness and snapping, pine-knots full of pitch and resin. The front doors of the stove were open and the firelight danced across the room, filling it with cheer. It was one of those homelike kitchens where everything is spick and span, and the nickel on the stove shines ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... then, dear maid, do you Forsake your gayest hue And dress in viewless khaki spick and span? You charming little miss, It never can be this: To render you ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... to me the importance of the Bulair Lines and urged me to throw the new Divisions against them. He seems to think he is mooting to me a spick and span new idea—that he has invented something. Finally, he suggests ten shillings and a free pardon be offered to every Turk who deserts to our lines with his rifle and kit: he believes we should thus get rid of the whole of the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... men so spick and span in their fresh blue uniforms, in strange contrast to the ragged and soiled Confederate gray? Every man of them wore white gaiters and neat attire, while the dust and smoke of battle had surely never touched the banners ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... lovely little bay surrounded by rich southern vegetation. The oleanders and magnolias in full bloom, gardens and vineyards, are no less strikingly contrasted with the barrenness and monotony that follows, than Banyuls itself, spick and span, brand-new, with the buried cities scattered on the way, ancient as Tyre and Sidon, and once as flourishing. There is much sadness yet poetic charm in the landscape sweeps of silvery-green olive or bluish salicornia against a pale-blue sky, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the evidence. However, you'll find that as a general policy of the hotel, the car-washing is performed as a standard service. In fact, if any guest parks his car in our garage and his car is not rendered spick and span, someone is going to get fired ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... justify himself by the use of that word "technical." Louis' polite and unpremeditated threat enraged him to an extreme degree. He was the savage infuriate. He cared for no consequences, even consequences to himself. He hated Louis because Louis was spick and span, and quiet, and because Louis had been palmed off on him by Louis' unscrupulous respectable ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the hatches on with spick-and-span white hatch covers, a broad white ribbon brightened the black side, and gold leaf bedizened the quarter badges besides gilding the rope scroll on the stern. The ship had been well painted up, a ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... ha bout mine hinstead hof gossiping 'ere. Yer'll soon see 'ow spick and span I'll ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... very jolliest Christmas we ever had, but the day seemed long. When night came we were in a precious bustle. The wagon bed on bobs, filled with hay and covers, drawn by Ned and Jo, was brought up for the family, and the sleigh made spick-and-span and drawn by Laddie's thoroughbred, stood beside it. Laddie had filled the kitchen oven with bricks and hung up a comfort at four o'clock to keep ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... a noticeable ripple when Eileen Lorimer walked into the ballroom that evening in the winsome attire of a Quaker maid, with Professor Hodgson, as Pierrot, on one side, and the tall, commanding figure of Peter the Brazen, in a spick-and-span white-and-gold uniform of the Pacific Mail Line, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... an atmosphere of old-time splendour and luxury. Something of impressiveness has recently been introduced into the interior by the artistic arrangement of old furniture which the house's present owner, Mr. Templeton Coolidge, has brought about. But the exterior is "spick-span" in modern yellow and ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... brick houses and insignificant streets, settles down hopelessly into the dumps when the weather is bad. Even with the sun doing its best on the eternal cloud of smoke, it is dingy and gloomy enough, and so dirty, after spick-span, shining Paris. And there is a contrast in the matter of order and system; the lack of both in London is apparent. You detect it in public places, in crowds, in the streets. The "social evil" is bad enough in its demonstrations in Paris: it is twice as offensive in London. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... believed his old tub was quite seaworthy, and that he should be perfectly willing to undertake a voyage in it, provided it would lead him to me. Oh, he was so silly, and so pompous, and so conceited, and so spick and span! He is the most immaculate creature you ever saw, and was great fun for a while. Then he got to be such a desperate bore that I simply couldn't endure him any longer; and so, here ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... lie drowned in a heap, And Southey's last Pan has pillowed his sleep; That Felo de se who, half drunk with his Malmsey, Walked out of his depth and was lost in a calm sea, 10 Singing "Glory to God" in a spick and span stanza, The like (since Tom Sternhold was choked) ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... mauled by English war correspondents, but you would never have suspected it. Bearded dragoons and Uhlans were still able to sit up and smoke big Hamburg cigars as they rode along, the horses looked fresh, the guns of the batteries were spick and span, the men seemed to have "morale" to spare; they looked as if they were just going for the first time—and not coming from ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... part of Endymion's fastidiousness that the sight of blood— that is, of human blood—turned his stomach. In her distress Dorothea could not help admiring how he conquered this aversion; how he knelt in his spick-and-span evening dress, and, after turning back his ruffles, unlaced the prisoner's soaked shoe and rolled ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Breezes jumped up and ran through the rushes to the very edge of the Smiling Pool. There on a great green lily pad sat Great-Grandfather Frog, his hands folded across his white and yellow waistcoat and his green coat shining spick and span. ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... the nature of an eyesore. Fond as he was of his own beautiful house he would have liked to keep the neighbourhood free from this essentially modern phase of river-life; but to Toni the gay little bungalows had a charm of their own. They were all specially spick and span just now, having been newly painted and garnished with flowers for the season; and Toni looked across the river with frank interest at the Cot, the Dinky House, the Mascot, and the rest of the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... supper, a pipe full of tobacco and a restful evening, however, restored him, especially as Shismakoff made his appearance all spick and span after his day's work on the water. The recital of his adventures with a school of whale in mid-ocean, and the capture of one of them, occupied a good share of the evening. Eyllen's father asked many questions relative to the subject. To these were supplemented ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... dwarf of a meeting-house, sinking up to its knees in a narrow lane, and looking as blank as a wall, with a trap-door of a mouth, and a grating cast of eye. How yonder bridegroom, just cemented in an alliance that will not last out his lease of life, "spick and span new," all eyes, and a double row of buttons ornamenting his latticed waistcoat, looks at his adored opposite, who holds her Venetian parasol—sun shade—before her face, glowing like a red brick wall in the sun. Ah! his regards are attracted by a modest little nymph of the grove, seated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... than its account of the purchase, conversion and enjoyment of the Ark Royal. The most prejudiced—again I speak personally—will find pleasure in the author's zestful story of how the dingy, foul-smelling Will Arding, full of cement (and worse things), was transformed into the spick-and-span Ark Royal, with a piano in the saloon and Queen Anne silver on the breakfast-table; while for the persuadable there are added plans, scales of expense and the like, which bring the whole matter to a working basis. The book, in short, is propaganda at its best (was it perhaps this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... like waste-paper merchants. I put in a request to be put back into my regiment, and they said to me, 'Take your damned hook, and get busy with it.' I lit on a sergeant, a little chap with airs, spick as a daisy, with a gold-rimmed spy-glass—eye-glasses with a tape on them. He was young, but being a re-enlisted soldier, he had the right not to go to the front. I said to him, 'Sergeant!' But he didn't ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... little with the centuries. There are the narrow crooked streets, the tall half-timbered houses with their many-dormered roofs, and there is the grey Minster, which has looked down on the city through all her fortunes. To the north lie the newer quarters of the town, spick and span, and to the south are great arsenals and barracks, guarded by ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... schoolmates. Little misses dressed in fine style, in dainty ruffled frocks and necklaces and bright hair-ribbons, tripped gracefully in and advanced to meet Mrs. Morris, quite like grown ladies in their manners. Behind them came several boys, spick and span in fresh white linen waists and silk ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his undergraduate days—he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year. He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span—his friends declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... room slowly. They never gave him the same, and he could not get used to these 'spick-and-spandy' bedrooms with new furniture and grey-green carpets sprinkled all over with pink roses. He was wakeful and that wretched Habanera kept throbbing in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... away the solemn duty of visitation. To take the comfort of his presence, to give the light of his countenance to the smitten, was a part of his sacred function. These accidents were among the sore trials incident to a cure of souls. The Reverend Nicholas had brushed himself spick-and-span that morning, and, taking up his gold-headed cane, had walked the two miles ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... of stone, or a Habbey, much out of repair, A skelinton Banquetting 'All, and a bit of a broken-down stair, May appear most perticular "precious" to them as the picteresk cops; But give me the sububs and stucco, smart villas, and spick-and-span shops. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... and down, And watched their herd of brutes, Their uniforms were spick and span, And they wore their Sunday suits, But we knew the work they had been at, By the ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... she keeped a school at Dalkeith, and teached childering, ane tall woman came to the declarants hous when the childering were there; and that she had, as appeared to her, ane chyld upon her back, and on or two at her foot; and that the said woman desyred that the declarant should imploy her to spick for her to the Queen of Farie, and strik and battle in her behalf with the said Queen (which was her own words).'[130] Among the Salem witches in 1692, 'this Rampant Hag, Martha Carrier, was the person, of whom the Confessions of the Witches, and of her own Children among ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... the Marshall homestead. She had always loved the quaint, picturesque old place, so different from all the commonplace spick and span new houses of the prosperous valley. Judith had never been able to decide whether she really cared very much for Bruce Marshall or not, but she knew that she loved that rambling, cornery house of his, with the gable festooned with ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... room is, where it hangs. It hung up fronting my old cobwebby folios and batter'd furniture (the fruit piece has resum'd its place) and was much better than a spick and span one. But if your room be very neat and your other pictures bright with gilt, it should be so too. I can't judge, not having seen: but my dingy study ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... very different from the Mrs. Braiding of 1914, a shameless creature of more rounded contours than of old, and not quite so spick and span as of old. She was carrying in her arms that which before the war she could not have conceived herself as carrying. The being was invisible in wraps, but it was there; and she seemed to have no shame for it, seemed indeed to be proud of it ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... fingers, and the stretchings of Mr Holroyd's thumb across rather slack surfaces of cheek and chin. In the interval between the hair and the face, Mr Holroyd should have a good supper downstairs with Foljambe and the cook. And tomorrow morning, when he met Hermy and Ursy, Georgie would be just as spick and span and young as ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... ought to have been relinquished here. The frantic falsetto of the milkman, the crash of the furious butcher's cart over the never-to-be pulverized stones of the new road through the "park," always sounded profanely to the passing stranger, in the spick-and-span stillness of this Paradise of the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... there! This individual was like the originals, yet unlike,—he was less gaudy, and a good deal dingier, than his Gallic prototypes are apt to be. Then he wore a burnoose,—the yellow, grimy-looking article of the Arab of the Soudan, not the spick and span Arab of the boulevard. Chief difference of all, his face was clean shaven,—and whoever saw an Algerian of Paris whose chiefest glory was not his well-trimmed ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... jewels which my pocket affords; the genuine divining rods, mandrake roots, change pennies, money extractors, the napkins of Rolando's Squire, and divers other miracle- workers,—a choice assortment; but all this is not fit for you—better that you should have Fortunatus's wishing-cap, restored spick and span new; and also a fortune-bag which belonged to him." "Fortunatus's fortune-bag!" I exclaimed; and, great as had been my terror, all my senses were now enraptured by the sound. I became dizzy,—and nothing but double ducats seemed sparkling ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... Lafontaine put on her kindliest smile as ushered in by the maid Mr. John C. Bedelle came magnificently into the room, spick and span, cool as the cucumber is credited to be at any temperature; an immaculate purple tie blooming under an unsullied collar, with only a slight pollen on the carefully-divided hair. How was she to know that, in five minutes, under the sting of betrayed ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... at home from business to escort the travellers to the train. The trunks were packed, and everything was in readiness for their departure. Marjorie herself, in a spick-and- span pink gingham dress, a tan-colored travelling cloak, and a broad-brimmed white straw hat, stood in the hall saying good-bye to the other children. She carried Puff in her arm, and the sleepy, indifferent kitten cared little ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... flaming like the jaws of hell, all covered with mortars interlaced with pestles, and nothing of his arms was to be seen but his clutches. His hutch, and that of the warren-cats his collaterals, was a long, spick-and-span new rack, a-top of which (as the mumper told us) some large stately mangers were fixed in the reverse. Over the chief seat was the picture of an old woman holding the case or scabbard of a sickle in her right hand, a pair of scales in her left, with spectacles ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Lane was a neatly built little fellow, very spick and span. First America and then England had done their best—or worst—by him. Just as every hair on his head was properly brushed, so Dr. Parkman felt quite sure that every idea within the head was properly beaten down with a pair of intellectual ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... place. A stranger, ignorant of the Pennsylvania Dutch custom of living in the kitchen and shutting off the "best rooms,"—to be used in their mustiness and stiff unhomelikeness on Sunday only,—would have thought the house temporarily empty. It was forbiddingly and uncompromisingly spick-and-span. ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... the visitors entered was the neatest one in Heart's Desire. The tall, narrow fireplace of clay in the corner of the other room was swept clean, spick and span. A chair stood exactly against the wall. The parlor table—ah, appalling spectacle! the parlor table, bare and empty, held upon its surface no object ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... roughing it de luxe with a most de-luxey vengeance! Here were three tents, or rather three canvas houses, with wooden half-walls; and they were spick-and-span inside and out, and had glass windows in them and doors and matched wooden floors. The one that was a bedroom had gay Navajo blankets on the floor, and a stove in it, and a little bureau, and a washstand with white towels and good lathery soap. And there were two ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... water for personal use. B. speedily finished his ablutions. I was strolling carelessly and solo from the cook-wagon toward one of the two tents—which protestingly housed some forty huddling Americans by night—holding in my hand an historic morceau de chocolat, when a spick, not to say span, gentleman in a suspiciously quiet French uniform allowed himself to be driven up to the bureau, by two neat soldiers with tin derbies, in a Renault whose painful cleanliness shamed my recent efforts. This must be a general at least, I ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... of the broken beau. Yet, if it were doubted that his soul ever rose above the collar of a coat or the brim of a hat, his letters to Mr. Raikes in the time of his poverty would settle the question. 'I heard of you the other day in a waistcoat that does you considerable credit, spick-and-span from Paris, a broad stripe, salmon-colour, and cramoise. Don't let them laugh you into a relapse—into the Gothic—as that of your former English simplicity.' He speaks of the army of occupation as 'rascals in red coats waiting for embarkation.' 'English education,' he says ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... his hot journey, instinctively they turned their steps to the excavation. Things had certainly advanced greatly during Michael's absence. The deep shaft was almost cleared of rubbish; the site was tidied up and in spick-and-span order. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... mother to daughter; and when this is the case, she is no doubt a valuable possession, and is consulted in all the momentous matters connected with the nursery. However, at the birth of the first baby, she is of course spick-and-span new; and in comes the dusky stranger, all pride and expectation, all hope and joy. It is fortunate that there is no difference in young babies—that the one is as ugly a little thing as the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... trip. That will rest you. We'll get lunch at a tea-room, and shop all the afternoon. We'll go to a hotel for dinner, and stay all night. Then in the morning we can get up early, have our breakfast, and drive back here in time before the men come. Now isn't that perfectly spick-and-span for a plan?" ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... were negligible beside them. And they were not only fashionably and very fashionably attired—all their frocks and all their hats and all their parasols and all their boots were new, glittering, spick-and-span; were complex and expensive; not one feared the sun. The conception of what those innumerable chromatic toilettes had cost in the toil, stitch by stitch, of malodorous workrooms and in the fatigue of pale, industrious creatures was really formidable. But it could not detract from ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... room known as the library is on the ground floor in a wing of the main building. As rooms have a way of doing, it expresses unmistakably the character of its tenant. There is a book-case, with a few spick-and-span books standing in prim, cold rows behind the glass doors—which are always locked. The key is somewhere, no doubt. There are no pictures on the walls, save a fancy calendar—presented with the compliments of the Judge's banker, a crayon portrait of the Judge's father—in a cheap gilt ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... Everything above decks was spick and span, and young Horatio gazed with wondering admiration at the neatness of the white decks continually scraped and holystoned until they fairly glistened in the sun, at the imposing size and length of the long lines of black cannon, ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... lift my eyes with wonder to the amazing and crowded cluster of spires and towers: its antique air, and even look of shattered dilapidation showing that the restorer has not been at his work. There was no smugness or trimness, or spick-and-spanness, but an awful and reverent austerity. And with an antique appropriateness to its functions the Flemish women, crones and maidens, all in their becoming cashmere hoods, and cloaks, and neat frills, still hurry on to the old Dom. Near me rose the ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... poor; its only treasures are its Roman re- mains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland. It is true that this church looked out on a square completely French, - a square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a classical ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... all this dirt and dust, For Mamma is busy today and help her I surely must. Everything now is spick and span; away to my play I will run. It will be such a 'sprise to Mamma to find ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... exclaimed M'Allister, who had now rejoined us, looking spick and span, and with his face shining from the fresh application of soap and water, "I believe they are all down there watching ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... on the farm; then she sent a call for aid to a couple of neighbors. Within an hour all the green shutters had swung wide on their creaking hinges, and the window-sashes were up. Out of the open windows poured some dust and a great deal of commotion. Before night the big house was spick and span from garret ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... quickly the signs of the wind and weather were effaced, until the great, square-set house was all as spick-and-span as though it had been erected yesterday. There were abundant signs that money was no consideration to General Heatherstone, and that it was not on the score of retrenchment that he had taken up ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in response to the doctor's telephone message, stood over the iron bed in the spick-and-span men's ward of St. Mary's, a wave of that intense feeling he had experienced at the accident swept over him. The farmer's beard was overgrown, and the eyes looked up at him as from caverns of suffering below the bandage. They ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... far different from the spick-and-span battleship which had left Portsmouth only six ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... small, low-eaved, white-washed building set back from the main road among green spruces. Beyond it, amid tall elms, was the old church with its square tower hung with ivy. He felt glad to see it; he had expected to see a new church, offensively spick-and-span and modern, for this church had been old when he was a boy. He recalled the many times he had walked to it on the peaceful Sunday afternoons, sometimes with ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the fellow, producing one, 'this is the infallible and invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain, rust, dirt, mildew, spick, speck, spot, or spatter, from silk, satin, linen, cambric, cloth, crape, stuff, carpet, merino, muslin, bombazeen, or woollen stuff. Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains, pitch-stains, any stains, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... me t' ride a spick an' span, over-fed, highly decorated critter like that? My! I ain't entered for a horse show, Cully. I want a pony that can run without thinkin' of takin' prizes on points. And a dandy saddle with fancy stitchin' and finery ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... observed the teacher's noiseless return to the room after conducting her pupils down the hall, and was astonished to find the stiff figure sitting in its accustomed place behind the desk which had once more been whisked into spick and ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... opened the window, and dropped quietly into a gooseberry bush. Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled down the side of a tributary burn, and won the highroad on the far side of the patch of trees. There stood the car, very spick and span in the morning sunlight, but with the dust on her which told of a long journey. I started her, jumped into the chauffeur's seat, and stole gently ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... was in Hyde Park, gazing at the people in the drive, when a spick-and-span and very brand-new open carriage went by, and in it sad Mrs. Deane (that was), all alone in her glory, and looking very sulky indeed. She recognized me and bowed, and I bowed back again, with just a moment's little flutter of the heart—an involuntary tribute to auld lang syne—and ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you. Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a new bran gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... day he wandered up to the rooms which had been Evadne's. They were kept very much as she was accustomed to have them, but there was that something of bareness about them, and a kind of spick-and-spanness conveying a sense of emptiness and desertion which strikes cold to the heart when it comes of the absence of someone dear. And Mr. Frayling felt the discomfort of it. The afternoon sunlight slanted across the little sitting room, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... again toward evening they began to laugh at seeing each other as spick and span and smart as on the day of a grand review. The commandant's hair did not look so gray as it was in the morning, and the captain had shaved, leaving only his mustache, which made him look as if he had a streak of fire ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... longer dusty and grimy; quite spick and span, on the contrary; so freshly and prettily dressed, indeed, that the thought will occur to me that it is a pity there are not more people to see me. However, no doubt some one will turn up by-and-by. The weather is serenely, evenly ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... given cause for anxiety. But he was familiar with these convulsions which, it is true, weakened the invalid, but produced no other results; so he permitted Eva to help him put the last touches to his dress, on which he lavished great care. Spick and span as if he were just out of a bandbox, the elderly man, before leaving the house, went once more to the sick-room, and Eva stood near as, after many questions and requests, he whispered something to Els which she did not hear. With excited curiosity she asked what he had said ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... went wallowing up the coast, their old tub sagging with the weight of the rails under her hatches, Mate Mayo felt considerable of a young man's ambitious envy of that spick-and-span swaggerer who had yelled anathema from the pilot-house of the Triton. It was real steamboating, he reflected, even if the demands of owners and dividend-seekers did compel a master to take his luck between his teeth and ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... dusty and derelict, in the spick-and-span office, where hung the old-fashioned steel engravings on the wall, of Civil War battles, of generals and officers seated about tables on camp stools,—bushy-bearded ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... at last, for the captain fixed his eyes upon him with a look of invitation to which Fitz instantly responded by closing up, colouring slightly the while with consciousness, as it seemed to him that the American captain, all spick and span in his neat naval uniform, was looking askant at the well-worn garments ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... Country dear, and hold them in the van; It's keep your lungs and conscience clean, your body spick and span; It's "shoulders squared" and "be prepared," and always "play the man"; Shouting the ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... of the delight of steaming away on the spick and span yacht, there was heartfelt regret in every wave of the hand that bade farewell to Ellen's Isle, when the hour of leaving came, and never had it seemed fairer than when they looked upon its wooded height for the last time. Out in the channel they passed the lighthouse where the Hares had ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... as Durban, he would manage, by permission of the Admiral at Cape Town, to get us passages on board this ship. Of course we were delighted, and early next morning we embarked. It was the first time I had ever been on a troopship, and every moment was of interest. As spick and span as a man-of-war, with her wide, roomy decks, it was difficult to imagine there were 2,000 souls on board the Victoria, and only in the morning, when the regiment paraded, appearing like ants from below, and ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and chain. During the preceding season a young orchard had been planted out in the space intervening between the house and the road. Everything about the place was kept in spick and span order. The tenant was fairly successful in his farming operations, and appeared to be holding his own with the world around him. He paid his rent promptly, and was on excellent terms with his landlord. ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... treasure. Night came, and dark and dreary it was too, with heavy clouds drifting across the moon, almost hiding its brightness; and it grew so late, past twelve, we began to think Mr. Reynard suspected us, and would not come. But he did, looking so sleek and shiny, with his coat all spick and span, ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... the state of things when the three girls arrived at the Merrimans'. The house had truly been swept and garnished. The room where Jane had been ill was re-papered and painted, the place looked spick-and-span and beautiful, and Mrs. Merriman came out with a smiling face to welcome the arrival of the ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... utility man and Miss Upton borrowed him at times; but he liked best working on the yacht, where he was never through polishing and cleaning, keeping it spick and span. He was given a blue suit and a yachting cap and rolled around the deck the jolliest of jolly ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... astonished gaze traveled from Medenham to the spick and span automobile. For the moment he had forgotten his role, and each word he uttered deepened her bewilderment, which grew stronger when she looked at the Mercury. The sleek coachwork and spotless leather upholstery, the shining brass fittings and glistening wings, every visible ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... you've been there for your lessons, we've likewise effected at home a great saving in what would otherwise have been necessary for your eating and use. Something has been, it's true, economised; but you have further a liking for spick and span clothes. Besides, it's only through your being there to study, that you've come to know Mr. Hseh! that Mr. Hseh, who has even in one year given us so much pecuniary assistance as seventy and eighty taels! And now you would go and raise a row in this school-room! why, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... in spick and span whites, came down the Egret's shiny gangway, entered the path leading to the Swastika's dock, and in a few minutes came hurrying back to his boat carrying ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... opening out of the main road on the left as he faced towards Boisingham. This drive, which was some three hundred yards long, led up a rather sharp slope to his own place, Honham Cottage, or Molehill, as the villagers called it, a title calculated to give a keen impression of a neat spick and span red brick villa with a slate roof. In fact, however, it was nothing of the sort, being a building of the fifteenth century, as a glance at its massive flint walls was sufficient to show. In ancient times there had been a large Abbey at Boisingham, two ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... Holroyd's thumb across rather slack surfaces of cheek and chin. In the interval between the hair and the face, Mr Holroyd should have a good supper downstairs with Foljambe and the cook. And tomorrow morning, when he met Hermy and Ursy, Georgie would be just as spick and span and young as ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... instructor. I had not seen him for more than three years, during which time he had developed a pronounced tendency to baldness, though his apple face had lost none of its roseate freshness. He looked spruce as ever, his clothes spick and span, his "four-in-hand" tastefully tied, his collar and cuffs immaculate. His hazel eyes, however, had a worn and wistful ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... looked suspiciously from the two grimy travellers to the spick-and-span Englishmen in golfing costume. He said something ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... said nothing of Cary and his boat at the Inn, for we soon saw that both were far-and-away better than common, and we were selfish. Nor did the man himself seem to care for more patronage. He was always ready when we wished to go, and jumped from his spick-and-span deck to meet us with a smile that started us off in sunshine, no matter what the weather. And with my affection for the lovely, uneven coast and the seas that held it in their flashing ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... under its shadow, and lift my eyes with wonder to the amazing and crowded cluster of spires and towers: its antique air, and even look of shattered dilapidation showing that the restorer has not been at his work. There was no smugness or trimness, or spick-and-spanness, but an awful and reverent austerity. And with an antique appropriateness to its functions the Flemish women, crones and maidens, all in their becoming cashmere hoods, and cloaks, and neat frills, still hurry on to the old Dom. Near me ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... his whim that everything entering into the construction of "Abraham" should be spick-and-span. He watched with his own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... life to have a pull at the oars. You remember that old sailor we saw in charge of the engine back there at the government tank? You saw how he had the engine?—clean and bright as a new pin—everything spick-and-span and shipshape, and his hut fixed up like a ship's cabin. I believe he thinks he's at sea half his time, and shoving her through it, instead of pumping muddy water out of a hole in the baking scrubs for starving stock. Or maybe he reckons ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... revived, both being merely stunned, as was Mr. Damon. They looked about in wonder, and then, feeling that they were prisoners, resigned themselves to their fate. Both men were shabbily dressed, and Tom would hardly have known the once spick and span Mr. Peters. He had no rose in ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... do," said Fred, getting anxious in his hankering after the mare, "I'll throw the harness into the bargain—spick and span new from Hamilton's. I paid eight pound ten for it not a month since. All the new fashion—brass fittings and brass haines. You could have the crests taken out, and new ones put in, for a few shillings; only send me down ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... rough-and-tumble pair, Mothery," said King; "look at Kitty there! she kept herself almost spick and span." ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... pleasant middle-aged woman, an old retainer in the family, and the pantry at The Meads was quite a good-sized room, and a comfortable one at that, boasting a fireplace in which blazed the cheeriest of fires, for Martin was fond of comfort, and took a pride in keeping her domain spick and span. Her face brightened as she saw the girl standing in the passage, for Dreda was a favourite with all the servants. Miss Rowena, they agreed, was "high;" but Miss ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that!—Here, little one," he continued, addressing his Lolotte, "this is M. Schmucke, poor M. Pons' friend. He does not know where to go, and he would like to live with us. I told him that we were not very spick-and-span up here, that we lived on the sixth floor, and had only the garret to offer him; but it was no use, he ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Depper—his name was William Kittle, a fact of which the neighbourhood made no practical use, which he himself only recalled with an effort—preferred to the dirt, untidiness and squalor of his own abode the spick-and-span cleanliness of Dinah Brome's. Small wonder that in this atmosphere of wholesomeness and comfort, he chose to spend the hours of the Sabbath during which the public-house was closed; and other hours. Small wonder, looking ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... respectable mud, Where the divers of Bathos lie drowned in a heap, And Southey's last Pan has pillowed his sleep; That Felo de se who, half drunk with his Malmsey, Walked out of his depth and was lost in a calm sea, 10 Singing "Glory to God" in a spick and span stanza, The like (since Tom Sternhold ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... men were buried as quickly and decently as the place allowed of. Things were generally cleaned up, and by noon the little fort was as spick as if the sound of a rifle had never been heard within its walls. Lewis and Andover had the midday meal in a sort of gun-room which looked over the edge of the plateau to a valley in the hills. It ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... of things when the three girls arrived at the Merrimans'. The house had truly been swept and garnished. The room where Jane had been ill was re-papered and painted, the place looked spick-and-span and beautiful, and Mrs. Merriman came out with a smiling face to welcome the arrival of the party from ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... on deck, and passing to the bow of his embarkation, looked for the first time up the river. He started. Only a few hundred yards above another houseboat lay moored among the willows. It was very spick-and-span, an elegant canoe hung at the stern, the windows were concealed by snowy curtains, a flag floated from a staff. The more Gideon looked at it, the more there mingled with his disgust a sense of impotent surprise. It was very like his uncle's houseboat; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... high brass-hatted man Inspect the Depot with his ribboned train, When all seems spick and absolutely span And no man spits and nothing gives him pain, I think what blissful ignorance is theirs Who only see us on inspection days, And wonder, could they catch us unawares, Would they be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... process of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his undergraduate days—he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year. He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span—his friends declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were charming, whether alert with intelligence ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... enemy. On the other side I was not long in finding out Tempest, with the glow of enthusiasm on his cheek as now and again he broke through the ruck and sent the ball into quarters. Wales, too, was there, spick and span as usual, playing neatly and effectively, ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... d'you expect me t' ride a spick an' span, over-fed, highly decorated critter like that? My! I ain't entered for a horse show, Cully. I want a pony that can run without thinkin' of takin' prizes on points. And a dandy saddle with fancy stitchin' and finery don't help any in gettin' the mails through on time. What's the matter ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious. But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man into a ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... sound of reveille every young man sprang from his bed. Then followed hasty but orderly dressing and the making of the toilet. The cadet must be spick and span. ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... was tired with planning and thinking. It was out of his power; his fashionable life bore him far away from labour and thought. His work grew cold and colourless; and he betook himself with indifference to the reproduction of monotonous, well-worn forms. The eternally spick-and-span uniforms, and the so-to-speak buttoned-up faces of the government officials, soldiers, and statesmen, did not offer a wide field for his brush: it forgot how to render superb draperies and powerful ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the doctor's telephone message, stood over the iron bed in the spick-and-span men's ward of St. Mary's, a wave of that intense feeling he had experienced at the accident swept over him. The farmer's beard was overgrown, and the eyes looked up at him as from caverns of suffering ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda's smiles, Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it twenty crayon smiles writhed and wriggled upon the spick-span cloth. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... yellow beams shining with varnish; the tall mast at the bow, with its stout cordage; the brand-new stove, that was to boil their tea for them in the long watches of the night; the magnificent oars; the new sheets and sails—everything spick and span. And this great mass of ruddy netting lying in the shed, with its perfect floats and accurate sinkers—this was not like the makeshift that had ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... laughing: "it's something to be clean, even if you can't be president." She was not at all alarmed by Dorry's recent reaction in favor of personal adornment. He came down pretty soon, very spick and span in his best suit, and asked her to fasten the blue ribbon under his collar, which she did most obligingly; though he was very particular as to the size of the bows and length of the ends, and made her tie and retie more than once. ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... In a spick and span blue-checked bungalow apron, she stood at her window just as Dawn swept a brush of partially-hued color across the eastern horizon. Having had it in her mind when she went to bed the night ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... slopes spread out at their feet, criss-crossed and traversed by hard-beaten roads and trails. Immediately in front of the house Folsom had seeded and watered and coaxed into semblance of a lawn the best turf to be had in that section of Wyoming, and inclosed it in a spick and span white picket fence. The main road between the fort and the railway station passed directly in front of his gate. The side window of the cozy room looked out to the west over the valley of a rushing stream, once rich in trout, but now much infested by the mules from Burleigh's ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... also cries sadly about his dry chestnuts and pumpkin-seeds. The shops are all closed, and the shopkeepers and clerks saunter up and down the streets, dressed better than the same class anywhere else in the world,—looking spick-and-span, as if they had just come out of a bandbox, and nearly all of them carrying a little cane. One cannot but be struck by the difference in this respect between the Romans on a festa-day in the Corso and the Parisians during ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... it well enough and fell in with his wish. He'd promised to eat his Christmas dinner along with them and Joey; but the pup was to come as a rare surprise next morning, and though Minnie Ford didn't much hold with a young dog about her spick and span home, she couldn't withstand the little silky creature, nor yet Teddy's wish to ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... now crossed in a "coronet" over her head, she gave the ghost of a sigh. This morning she didn't want to wear her every-day bows; but dutifully she tied them on, a big brown cabbage above each ear. When she had scrambled into her checked gingham "sailor suit," all spick and span, Missy stood eying herself in the mirror for a wistful moment, wishing her tight braids might metamorphose into lovely, hanging curls like Kitty Allen's. They come often to a "strange child"—these ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... wallowing up the coast, their old tub sagging with the weight of the rails under her hatches, Mate Mayo felt considerable of a young man's ambitious envy of that spick-and-span swaggerer who had yelled anathema from the pilot-house of the Triton. It was real steamboating, he reflected, even if the demands of owners and dividend-seekers did compel a master to take his luck between his teeth ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... our admiration and respect. What matter though some of them are a bit frowsy and not over-clean? they have precious little time to attend to their personal adornment. I ask, who can fulfil all their duties and remain "spick-and-span"? ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... town has changed but little with the centuries. There are the narrow crooked streets, the tall half-timbered houses with their many-dormered roofs, and there is the grey Minster, which has looked down on the city through all her fortunes. To the north lie the newer quarters of the town, spick and span, and to the south are great arsenals and barracks, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... their footsteps. I saw them, across the Commandant's shoulder, as they filed past the corner of the window and, having formed into platoon, grounded arms, the butts of their muskets thudding softly on the turf—a score of men in blue-and-white uniforms, spick and span in the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... When this spick-and-span non-commissioned officer demanded Mr. Traill's price for the little dog that took his eye, the landlord replied curtly that Bobby was not for sale. ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... Owen these little summer dwellings were in the nature of an eyesore. Fond as he was of his own beautiful house he would have liked to keep the neighbourhood free from this essentially modern phase of river-life; but to Toni the gay little bungalows had a charm of their own. They were all specially spick and span just now, having been newly painted and garnished with flowers for the season; and Toni looked across the river with frank interest at the Cot, the Dinky House, the Mascot, and the rest of the tiny shanties. She liked the houseboats, too, with their gaily-striped ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... waiting for Edith, spick, span and debonair as always (although during the war he had discarded his buttonhole). He was occupied, as he usually was in his leisure time, not in playing the piano or composing, but—in making photograph frames! This was ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... 'Master Pinch, Grove House Academy,' inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! That whiff of russia leather, too, and all those rows on rows of volumes neatly ranged within—what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open; tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too were ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... profanation to eat anything in this spick-and-span bower, so as I'm tremendously hungry, I propose an adjournment," he ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... to our rendezvous at the Elliot Islands on the afternoon of 9th April, the little Kasanumi looking as smart and spick-and-span as a new pin, her hull, funnels, mast, guns—everything, in fact, except her deck—painted that peculiar tint of medium smoky-grey which experience had proved to render her almost invisible, even in daylight, and absolutely so at night; and the moment that our anchor ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... he found himself lying in bed, with Squire Lavington sitting by him. There was real sorrow in the old man's face, 'Come to himself!' and a great joyful oath rolled out. 'The boldest rider of them all! I wouldn't have lost him for a dozen ready-made spick ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... colour never retained for above a twelvemonth by the red brick of to-day—glowing, athwart its surrounding greenery, like the warm welcome of a friend; the exquisite neatness of the garden, where every flower that could be coaxed into growing in the open air bloomed in perfection; the spick-and-span brightness of the windows; the elegant order that prevailed within, from cellar to garret; the old, carefully-chosen furniture, which had for the most part been collected from other old-world homesteads; the artistic colouring ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... to be so logically perfect that I was long repelled by its perfection. I felt, half unconsciously, that a living thing ought not to be so spick and span in its external evidence for itself, and that what I wanted for conviction was not the sight of a faultless intellectual superficies, but the touch and pressure ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... esplanades; her narrow alleys and peaceful convents; her harmless antique cannon on the parapets and her sweet-toned bells in the spires; her towering chateau on the heights and her long, low, queer-smelling warehouses in the lower town; her spick-and-span caleches and her dingy trolley-cars; her sprinkling of soldiers and sailors with Scotch accent and Irish brogue and Cockney twang, on a background of petite bourgeoisie speaking the quaintest ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... he cried suddenly. He ran into the next room, and there stood Geppetto, grown years younger overnight, spick and span in his new clothes and gay as a lark in the morning. He was once more Mastro Geppetto, the wood carver, hard at work on a lovely picture frame, decorating it with flowers and leaves, and ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... to Omaha, much to Button's curiosity and disquiet. Mrs. Stannard, left temporarily widowed, was none the less radiant. A romance was unfolding right under her roof, and the heart of the woman was glad. Her patient was sitting up in spick and span uniform and a sunshiny parlor. Plainly furnished as were the frontier quarters of that day and generation, the room looked very bright and cosey this crisp December evening. Christmas had come and gone with but faint celebration, ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... hawser around the narrow part of the whale just forward of the tail and then ordered the men to pull for the schooner. It was a tug, now I tell you! but we got the whale to the Sea Spell after a while. I expected to see the spick and span schooner all messed up with try-out works, and grease, and smoke. It disgusted me that the Yankee skipper should be so sharp after the Almighty Dollar. But I didn't yet know Captain ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... sharpshooters might already be hidden, for the affluent Dutchmen forced their poorer countrymen to maintain eyrie-like positions—padded with blankets and hedged in with boulders—in readiness for the approach of an army, while they themselves arrived fresh, spick and span, only on the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... but not particularly intelligent.... Walpole, in a fit of spleen, once called him 'a porcelain sphinx,' and the phrase sticks; but, indeed, there is more of the china-doll about him. He possesses the same too-perfect complexion, his blue eyes have the same spick-and-span vacuity; and the fact that the right orb is a trifle larger than its fellow gives his countenance, in repose, much the same expression of placid astonishment.... Very plump, very sleepy-looking, immaculate as a cat, you would never ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... hand, and I, glancing round the transformed store, agreed with him. Everything was spick and span and mighty attractive—clean and neat-looking—with the new stock in the shining cases and arranged on the glistening white shelves: not all of it set out by any means, of course, but no unplaced goods in sight, cluttering up the counters ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... and shop all the afternoon. We'll go to a hotel for dinner, and stay all night. Then in the morning we can get up early, have our breakfast, and drive back here in time before the men come. Now isn't that perfectly spick-and-span for ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... trough which ran all round the rim of the table, to catch any possible spillage. He was horrified to observe how inevitably callers came at the worst possible moment. Mr. and Mrs. Chow, for instance, drew up one afternoon in their spick-and-span coupe with their intolerably spotless only child sitting self-consciously beside them. Groups, Bunks, and Yelpers were just then filling the garden with horrid clamour. They had been quarrelling, and one ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... not half a kilt among thim, playin' for the dear life, an' swingin' their rumps like buck rabbits, an' a native rig'mint shrieking blue murther. Ye niver heard the like. There was men cryin' like women that did - an' faith I do not blame thim. Fwhat bruk me down was the Lancers' Band - shinin' an' spick like angels, wid the ould dhrum-horse at the head an' the silver kettle-dhrums an' all an' all, waitin' for their men that was behind us. They shtruck up the Cavalry Canter, an', begad, those poor ghosts that had not a sound fut in a throop they answered to ut, the men rockin' in ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... interest on this the proudest moment of his life. No. 999 was the crack locomotive of the system, brand new and resplendent. Its headlight was a great glow of crystal, its metal bands and trimmings shone like burnished gold, and its cab was as spick and span and neat as the private office of ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... stairs he came in from the porch and met me on the landing, at the door of Miss Montmorency's best parlour— a spick-and-span apartment containing a cottage piano, some gilded furniture of the Second Empire fashion, a gaudy lithograph or two, and a carpet that had to be seen to ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... luxe with a most de-luxey vengeance! Here were three tents, or rather three canvas houses, with wooden half-walls; and they were spick-and-span inside and out, and had glass windows in them and doors and matched wooden floors. The one that was a bedroom had gay Navajo blankets on the floor, and a stove in it, and a little bureau, and a washstand ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... the sedan-chair, all exhaling an atmosphere of old-time splendour and luxury. Something of impressiveness has recently been introduced into the interior by the artistic arrangement of old furniture which the house's present owner, Mr. Templeton Coolidge, has brought about. But the exterior is "spick-span" in ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... physical development of the girls. Further evidence of this is found in the airy and well-lighted work-rooms, from which funnels and exhaust fans collect and carry off all dust, and improve the ventilation, so that in spite of the multitudinous operations in progress, the whole place is kept as "spick and span" as a ship of the line. But another aggressive sign of the firm's belief in the motto mens sana in corpore sano is the presence of a lady whose whole time is devoted to the physical culture of the girls. Trained in Swedish athletics, this lady and her assistant undertake the teaching, ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... again. Mrs. Kenney never let her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you. Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran-new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... decency the short Eton jacket; he possessed a trouser-press; and his "bags" were perfectly creased and quite spotless. From tip to toe, at all seasons and in all weathers, he looked conspicuously spick and span. Chaff provoked the solemn retort: "One should be well groomed." He spoke impersonally, considering it bad form to use for first person singular. Amongst the small boys he ranked as the ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... "No. You run along to your lambs. I'm running with the wolves to-night, old scout, and you might get that spick-and-span uniform considerably mussed up. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... his conversation I thought very striking. Like every young man of twenty, I was on the look-out for something to set up that would do duty for an ideal. The world was to me, at this time, what a toy-shop had been fifteen years before: everything was spick and span, and every illusion was set out straight and smart in new paint and gilding. But Julien kept me at a distance, and the rare occasions when he favoured me with his society only served to prepare my mind for the friendship which awaited me, and which was destined ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... other neighbours; and Mrs. Reed found it very pleasant. One afternoon late in March, Mr. Reed came home quite early, and carried his wife down into the dining-room. He had asked the Deans over to tea, and Doctor Joe. And there was the table, spick and span, the silver shining, the windows so clean you couldn't see there was any glass in them, the curtains fresh, the tablecloth ironed so that every flower and leaf in it stood out. There wasn't ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... traveled from Medenham to the spick and span automobile. For the moment he had forgotten his role, and each word he uttered deepened her bewilderment, which grew stronger when she looked at the Mercury. The sleek coachwork and spotless leather upholstery, the shining ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... with thermometers and temperatures and other people's whims. Let me indulge my own whims, Louisa dear, and punish me with a cold bite when I come in late for meals. I'm not even going to church again. It was horrible there yesterday. The church is so offensively spick-and-span brand new ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... contrast between the Mayflower, so new, and strong, and spick, and span, and that rotting hulk which, for lack of custom now, was daily growing blacker and more worm-eaten! The old woman seemed to vision in the future a day when the Mayflower might drift ashore, cracked and water-logged, ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... like the dead. Tumble out! You and Porringer are to go to Godwyn's after that new sail for the Nancy. Sir Charles Carew has taken it into his head to run over to Accomac, and he's got to have a spick and span white rag to sail under. Hurry up, now! He wants to start by sun up, and I clean forgot to send for it last night. You're to be back within the hour, d' ye hear? Take the four-oared shallop. There's the key," and the overseer strode ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... who had now rejoined us, looking spick and span, and with his face shining from the fresh application of soap and water, "I believe they are all down there ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... some distance from the house, on the side of the stables, and I had passed it on several of my journeyings to and fro wondering at its forlorn and untarred appearance under a regime where everything was so spick and span; but it had never once occurred to me as possible that I should come to spend a night under its roof with a comparative stranger, and undergo there an experience belonging to an order of things I had always rather ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... 'There is nothing shabby or worn- out about it! It is entirely new,spick and span. Please, is my next lesson to go deeper than Prim's trunk, and take off ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... toned blasts of the steamer's siren, in grotesque contrast with the strident tooting of a dozen diminutive tugs which, puffing and snorting, were slowly but surely coaxing the leviathan into her berth alongside the dock. The great vessel, spick and span after a coat of fresh paint hurriedly put on during the last day of the voyage, bore no traces of gale, fog and stormy seas through which she had passed on her 3,000 mile run across the ocean. Conspicuous on the bridge, directing the docking operations, stood Capt. ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... Kirtley after a month that personal cleanness and neatness in Germany were not particularly considered as next to godliness. The gold braid, spick and span uniforms and other showy gear, were apt to cover dirty bodies and soiled underwear. Alas, the Germans could not wash in beer. He wondered why his old enthusiastic mentor had never given him a hint of these things. Likely he did not know. Distance often increases eloquence ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... Edward is bound 'prentice to Mr. Howe.(913) All this you have heard; yet, like my cousin the Chronicle, I repeat what has been printed in every newspaper of the week, and then finish with one paragraph of spick and span. Alack! my postscript is not very fortunate: a convoy of twelve thousand men, etc. was going to the King of' Prussia, was attacked unexpectedly by five thousand Austrians, and cut entirely ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... square, the hatches on with spick-and-span white hatch covers, a broad white ribbon brightened the black side, and gold leaf bedizened the quarter badges besides gilding the rope scroll on the stern. The ship had been well painted up, a neat harbour furl put on the sails, and if the steamers ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... continued to carry most of our own stuff and to trust largely to our own sense of direction. Above came a three-hour climb through pine-forested mountains, such as the Harz might be without the misfortune of German spick and spanness. He who starts at an elevation of 7500 feet and climbs 4000 upward in a brief space of time, with a burden on his back, knows he is mounting. Occasionally a dull-gray glimpse of the hazy valley of Mexico broke through the trees; about ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... was spick and span, and young Horatio gazed with wondering admiration at the neatness of the white decks continually scraped and holystoned until they fairly glistened in the sun, at the imposing size and length of the long lines of black ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... thanks to my host, opened the window, and dropped quietly into a gooseberry bush. Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled down the side of a tributary burn, and won the highroad on the far side of the patch of trees. There stood the car, very spick and span in the morning sunlight, but with the dust on her which told of a long journey. I started her, jumped into the chauffeur's seat, and stole gently out on to ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... if it were doubted that his soul ever rose above the collar of a coat or the brim of a hat, his letters to Mr. Raikes in the time of his poverty would settle the question. 'I heard of you the other day in a waistcoat that does you considerable credit, spick-and-span from Paris, a broad stripe, salmon-colour, and cramoise. Don't let them laugh you into a relapse—into the Gothic—as that of your former English simplicity.' He speaks of the army of occupation as 'rascals in red coats waiting ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Thetis dipped a farewell salute to the Spanish warships in Havana harbour as she next morning swept past them, outward bound, shortly after nine o'clock in the morning of a glorious April day. Jack was on the navigating bridge with Milsom, and as the beautiful little ship, looking as spick and span as though just fresh from the stocks, and with all her brasswork gleaming and flashing like burnished gold in the brilliant morning sunlight, brought the lighthouse abeam and gaily plunged her keen, shapely bows into the heart of the first blue, wind- ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... out of his tweeds and, once more the spick-and-span man about town, he sat down in his office with an order that he was to be informed the moment that Sir Hilary Thornton returned. Meanwhile, he occupied himself with a work of composition. It was necessary to break gently ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... lessons, we've likewise effected at home a great saving in what would otherwise have been necessary for your eating and use. Something has been, it's true, economised; but you have further a liking for spick and span clothes. Besides, it's only through your being there to study, that you've come to know Mr. Hsueeh! that Mr. Hsueeh, who has even in one year given us so much pecuniary assistance as seventy and eighty taels! And now you would go and raise a row in this school-room! why, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... fellow in wonder. Then he gave a cry and took the fellow by the shoulders. He had recognized, despite disguising superficialities of garb and manner, Bertha's once spick-and-span butler. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... something he had always wanted,—a little cart with a real live pony in the shafts. And the pony was all dressed in new harness, spick and ...
— Seven O'Clock Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... well, worked with a windlass and chain. During the preceding season a young orchard had been planted out in the space intervening between the house and the road. Everything about the place was kept in spick and span order. The tenant was fairly successful in his farming operations, and appeared to be holding his own with the world around him. He paid his rent promptly, and was on excellent terms with his ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... Two things that seldom fail to hit. 390 Valour's a mouse-trap, wit a gin, Which women oft are taken in. Then, HUDIBRAS, why should'st thou fear To be, that art a conqueror? Fortune th' audacious doth juvare, 395 But lets the timidous miscarry. Then while the honour thou hast got Is spick and span new, piping hot, Strike her up bravely, thou hadst best, And trust thy fortune with the rest. 400 Such thoughts as these the Knight did keep, More than his bangs or fleas, from sleep. And as an owl, that in a barn Sees a mouse creeping in the corn, Sits still, and shuts his round ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... dairy farm of Broek, through which visitors file during the time allowed by the steam-boat's captain, things happen as they should: the cows' tails are tied to the roof, and all is spick and span. The author of Through Noord-Holland tells us that among the dairy's illustrious visitors was an Italian duchess from Livorno who ordered cheese for herself, for the Princess Borghese and for the Duke of Ceri. Everything in the farm, he ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Jack, after a careful examination of the papers. "As to speed, we should get twenty-three knots on a pinch. Her fighting equipment is excellent, everything is spick and span, and I was impressed with the officers and crew. Yes, she ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... necessities in London; how we travelled to Liverpool by the night mail, and how we embarked upon the steamer Gambia, it is unnecessary to relate in detail. Suffice it to say that within twenty-four hours of meeting the big negro we were safely on board the splendid mail-steamer where everything was spick and span. Kouaga had engaged a cabin for our exclusive use, and the captain himself had evidently ascertained that Omar was a person of importance, for in passing us on deck he paused to chat affably, and express a hope that we should find ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... circus announce that the performances are under his direct patronage. "Victoria, the Empress of the Arena," is to-night to perform her unparalleled feats in the ring in the presence of His Excellency. This was the only tribute we saw paid in India to Her Majesty's spick-and-span brand-new title of Empress. We attended the performance, which was really creditable, but the natives sat unmoved throughout every scene; so different from the conduct of the Japanese, who scream with delight like children under similar circumstances. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... impotence which finds its easiest outlet in violence. As he rose to take his leave, with all the outward signs of friendly ceremoniousness, he had time to be appalled at the perception that he, the middle-aged, spick-and-span New-Yorker, should so fully understand how it is that a certain type of frenzied brute can kill the woman whom he passionately loves, but who is ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... seemed to be without other name, Betty went into the dressing-room and there washed pink and white faces and hands till they shone, and brushed silk locks till they lay straight and shining. Clean frocks were forthcoming, and two spick and span babies emerged to beam upon a transformed world no longer seen through a veil of tears. This new friend could tell the most wonderful stories, invent delightful games, and sing dozens of foolish little rhymes in a low sweet voice that disturbed ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... pipe full of tobacco and a restful evening, however, restored him, especially as Shismakoff made his appearance all spick and span after his day's work on the water. The recital of his adventures with a school of whale in mid-ocean, and the capture of one of them, occupied a good share of the evening. Eyllen's father asked many questions relative to the subject. To these were supplemented ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... a look of antiquity, which is particularly pleasant in a land where almost everything is spick-and-span new; but the rooms I thought low and stuffy, and the walls and passages had a neglected plaster-broken appearance. There are some very fine old trees in the green, which, throwing their shade over the time-worn building, help to give it a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... mended, axes sharpened, "Billys" polished and made to shine like new tin, and a hundred and one things to be done. At last, however—although it seemed that it would never come—the eventful Monday arrived, as eventful days of all kinds have a habit of doing; and the Eagle Patrol, spick and span and shining from tan boots to campaign hats, fell in line behind the band. Proudly they paraded up the street, with their green and black Eagle Patrol sign fluttering gallantly ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... out, spick and span in fresh carpets and paint, and crowded to the utmost capacity for comfort. Every stateroom was full; each seat at the tables occupied. Not a foot of space above or below decks was left unused, but provision was made for all, and the ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... strident bugle-calls, leaping in unison from the brass throats of bugles; tawny soldiers lining up for guard-mount before the officer of the day, as spick and span as a toy soldier; troopers in blue shirts, with their mess-kits in their hands, running across the street for rations; men in khaki everywhere, raising a racket on pay-day, fraternizing with the Filipinos when off duty; poker games in ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... where even the one-wheeled wheelbarrow has never been seen. The grass grows thick among the broken stones, and men and beasts have made a narrow beaten track along the extreme outside edge of the precipice. The new bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness when you came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring freshets. A glance tells you that the massive-looking piers were hollow, built of one thickness of stone, shell-fashion, and ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... "Isn't it spick and span?" repeated Catherine, sitting down with precision in the arm-chair, discovered ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... daily "decimated," "cut to pieces," and otherwise badly mauled by English war correspondents, but you would never have suspected it. Bearded dragoons and Uhlans were still able to sit up and smoke big Hamburg cigars as they rode along, the horses looked fresh, the guns of the batteries were spick and span, the men seemed to have "morale" to spare; they looked as if they were just going for the first time—and not coming from ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... magnificence was his wife. She was her own housekeeper, and employed, besides the coachman, whose business was in the stables and upon his box, five servants. There were twenty-five rooms in the palatial house, giving to each servant five to be kept in the spick-and-span array demanded by the master's position and taste. As a matter of course something was neglected in every department, the instinct of self-preservation being innate and cultivated in Abigail, Phyllis and Gretchen, "Jeems" and "Chawls." Even ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... the very jolliest Christmas we ever had, but the day seemed long. When night came we were in a precious bustle. The wagon bed on bobs, filled with hay and covers, drawn by Ned and Jo, was brought up for the family, and the sleigh made spick-and-span and drawn by Laddie's thoroughbred, stood beside it. Laddie had filled the kitchen oven with bricks and hung up a comfort at four o'clock ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... went that her husband had gone away to foreign parts and never come back again, and that her temper was soured in consequence. Be that as it might, she was an excellent manager; everything at the Low Farm was in spick-and-span order, and fit for inspection at any time of the day. Maids and men alike knew that they must do their work, or Alison Shaw would demand the reason of any neglect or unpunctuality; and with those black eyes fixed upon them it was impossible ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... 'bus had just stopped in front of the hotel and a company of newly arrived guests were entering the corridor, while the bell-boys were running forward to relieve them of their luggage and lead them to the spick-and-span clerk behind ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... the Empire safe while it was growing up. The guard of red-coated marines presented arms, and the hundreds of bluejackets were all in their places as the two commanders stepped on board. The naval officers on the quarter-deck were very spick and span in their black three-cornered hats, white wigs, long, bright blue, gold-laced coats, white waistcoats and breeches and stockings, and gold-buckled shoes. The idea of having naval uniforms of blue and white and gold—the same colours that are worn ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... guardian's entrance he roused himself, however, and begged him, when he should return for the dish, to restore neatness to the bed and to assist him in the ordering of his toilet which he wished to be spick and span. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... place, and each could have been displayed in no better place. Paint and varnish seemed to be kept somewhere out of sight, in constant readiness to obliterate stray finger-marks wherever any might become perceptible in Mr. Tartar's chambers. No man-of-war was ever kept more spick and span from careless touch. On this bright summer day, a neat awning was rigged over Mr. Tartar's flower-garden as only a sailor can rig it, and there was a sea- going air upon the whole effect, so delightfully complete, that the flower-garden might ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... the spick and span, had something on his mind, however, which he did not know how to put. He continued to reflect upon Mrs. Germain, but only by way of marking time. "She used to be very good fun in my young days. And she made things spin ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... and of course you have a right to dictate in the matter; but I tell you what, these darkies o' yours are a dreadful lazy set, specially that Suse; and it's mighty hard for folks that's been used to seein' things done up spick and span and smart ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... full and varied life," if the experience derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self- conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws, which forbid the violation of certain ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... from business to escort the travellers to the train. The trunks were packed, and everything was in readiness for their departure. Marjorie herself, in a spick-and- span pink gingham dress, a tan-colored travelling cloak, and a broad-brimmed white straw hat, stood in the hall saying good-bye to the other children. She carried Puff in her arm, and the sleepy, indifferent kitten cared little whither she ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... these friezes is placed above a simple wainscot, the effect is charming. The paper for nurseries is usually waterproof, for a nursery must be absolutely spick and span. Another thing that gives much pleasure in a nursery is to build on one side of the room a platform about a yard wide and six inches high, and cover ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... love for a while and then again we don't and are at peace. But with our mistresses it is different. If there is a hole in the cover of the old sofa down in my room, I don't care, and some time when I have time I mend it; but the company rooms upstairs must be spick and span, and that's what I look out ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... new-fashioned, new-fangled, new-fledged; of yesterday; just out, brand-new, up to date, up to the minute, with it, fashionable, in fashion; in, hip [coll.]; vernal, renovated, sempervirent[obs3], sempervirid[obs3]. fresh as a rose, fresh as a daisy, fresh as paint; spick and span. Adv. newly &c. adj.; afresh, anew, lately, just now, only yesterday, the other day; latterly, of late. not long ago, a short time ago. Phr. di novello tutto par bello[It]; nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum est prius[Lat]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... when Cousin Ethel returned to her young guests, she found them all spick and span, in their dainty white ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... Hark! how the cows were lowing. They were waiting impatiently. But how they would stare when they saw her in her beautiful, new, red dress, with its many pleats, which she had got on purpose to do the thing in grand style with Jendrek, and her spick-and-span new shoes, in which she had danced last ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... Canadian, New Zealanders, colored French Colonials, a few Russians who, following the sudden collapse of their government, were now soldiers lacking a flag, Scotch Highlanders in their gaudy kilts, Japanese officers in spick uniforms not yet baptized in the mud of the trenches—a varied, colorful parade of young men bent ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... see. From the steamer the emigrant is led to a dealer in frippery, where he is required to doff his baggy trousers and crimson cap, and put on a suit of linsey-woolsey and a hat of hispid felt: end of First Act; open the purse. From the dealer of frippery, spick and span from top to toe, he is taken to the hostelry, where he is detained a fortnight, sometimes a month, on the pretext of having to wait for the best steamer: end of Second Act; open the purse. From the hostelry at last to the steamship agent, where ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the office, where They think he's just a man The same as they are, with his hair All slick and spick and span. Oh, don't I make it in a mess! It makes us scream for joy. "Sh—sh!" he says, "they mustn't guess I'm nothing ...
— A Jolly Jingle-Book • Various
... unfashionable by-street, and halted before a modest door in a row. Ruth noted the railings, that they were spick-and-span as paint could make them; the dainty window-blinds. Through the passage-way, as he opened the door, came wafted from a back garden the ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the steep, narrow stairs with a lagging step. How brightly the afternoon sun had shone on Reggie, his fair, smooth hair, vivid necktie, the flower in his coat. How the brass harness had glittered, and Black Michael's satin coat had shone; how spick and span was Odgers, the groom, in his green and buff livery; what an air of wealth and well-being ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... at which the visitors entered was the neatest one in Heart's Desire. The tall, narrow fireplace of clay in the corner of the other room was swept clean, spick and span. A chair stood exactly against the wall. The parlor table—ah, appalling spectacle! the parlor table, bare and empty, held upon its surface no object of any ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... in every corner, all covered with virgin-white cloths and, in the centre of each, a vase full of chrysanthemums. It was all in order—all spick and span—French, every ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... it was pretty well soiled, and did not look very much like the spick-and-span new wheel that a few days back had been the envy ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... inspection of barracks was in order at Camp Meade. Before the boys answered the first drill formation each morning they did the housework. Everything had to be left spick and span. There was a specific place for everything and everything had to ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... amphitheatre, its lovely little bay surrounded by rich southern vegetation. The oleanders and magnolias in full bloom, gardens and vineyards, are no less strikingly contrasted with the barrenness and monotony that follows, than Banyuls itself, spick and span, brand-new, with the buried cities scattered on the way, ancient as Tyre and Sidon, and once as flourishing. There is much sadness yet poetic charm in the landscape sweeps of silvery-green olive or bluish salicornia against a pale-blue sky, dull-brown ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and Fischer paused upon the threshold. Certainly, of all the people concerned, the two speculators themselves seemed the least moved by the excitement they were causing. Fischer was dressed with his usual spick-and-span neatness, and his appearance betrayed no sign of flurry or excitement. He nodded grimly ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... daughter Dorothy to play tennis. The game had already started on the court some little distance off—the players being Dorothy, Peggy and a couple of athletic, flannel-clad parsons. Marmaduke Trevor reposed on a chair under the lee of Lady Bruce. He looked very cool and spick and span in a grey cashmere suit, grey shirt, socks and tie, and grey suede shoes. He had a weak, good-looking little face and a little black moustache turned up at the ends. He was discoursing ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... to improve the business. The shop wanted livening up with a coat of paint. He would put new shelves up, run a partition across, and dress the windows like the shops down town. In his eager thoughts he saw the dingy shop transformed under his touch, spick and span, alive with customers, who jostled one another as they passed in and out, the coin clinking merrily in ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... Dunikin to come and scrub; we pulled out pots and pans, stove-polish and dish-towels, napkins and odd stockings missed from the wash; we cleared every corner, and had every box and bottle washed; then we left everything below spick and span, so that it almost tempted us to stay even there, and sent for the sheet-iron man, and had the stove taken up stairs. We only carried up such lesser movables as we knew we should want; we left all the accumulation ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... 'Igh Churchism, as I could never make head nor tail of; and that, no doubt, has offended some o' the old-fashioned folk like me. But it's when they starts restoring the old churches, and makin' 'em all spick and span, that the religious feelin' seems to die out on 'em, and folks begins to stop goin'. You might as well be in a concert hall—the place full o' chairs and smellin' o' varnish enough to make ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... business of Dohna's men. I thought, when we joined them, they looked too spick and span to be any good; but that they should run, almost as fast and far as the men of the Federal army at Rossbach, is shameful. Neither in the last war nor in this has a Prussian soldier so ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... came out again; Timmy Willie sat by his burrow warming his little fur coat and sniffing the smell of violets and spring grass. He had nearly forgotten his visit to town. When up the sandy path all spick and span with a brown leather bag came ...
— The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse • Beatrix Potter
... about to recommence;—the play, Will be the last of seven, and spick-span new— 'Tis usual here that number to present. A dilettante did the piece invent, And dilettanti will enact it too. Excuse me, gentlemen; to me's assign'd, As dilettante ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... night and in a gale because they were drunk, and only by making them put out to sea could he prevent them from becoming more drunk. A congener of his, Evans—"Old Man Evans"—boasted of a boat which was as spick and span as a post-captain's gig, and of a crew who wore uniform. Nor must the best of Maori whalers be forgotten—the chief Tuhawaiki—brave in war, shrewd and businesslike in peace, who could sail a schooner as cleverly as any white skipper, and who has ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... filth-bespattering inferno, a spotlessly clean apparition in blue without either waterproof or umbrella. I refer to Jane. She suddenly appeared, as I was passing The Ladies' Tea Association Rooms, walking in front of me. She looked just the same as when I last saw her—spick and span, and—dry. I repeat the word—dry—for that is what attracted my attention most. Despite the deluge, not a single raindrop touched her—the plumes on her toque were splendidly erect and curly, her shoe-buckles sparkled, her patent leathers were spotless, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... Half-an-hour later, a spick and span and eminently youthful-looking naval lieutenant raised his cap to the three folk who stood eagerly awaiting his approach at ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... The Dutch East Indies and China have only seven thousand apiece, but in China there has recently come a forward movement. A fund of twenty million dollars is to be spent in constructing a national system of telephone and telegraph. Peking is now pointing with wonder and delight to a new exchange, spick and span, with a couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards. Others are being built in Canton, Hankow, and Tien-Tsin. Ultimately, the telephone will flourish in China, as it has done in the Chinese ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... Santa Claus boy is the latest thing out; He's the rage of the season, they say, And wherever you wander, you'll find him about With his beautiful, dutiful way; He's as spick and as span as a dandified man. And his look is a heavenly joy; And however he does it, whatever his plan, We know he's the Santa Claus boy! He jumps out of bed in the morning himself, And he never lies still for the rest; He dresses in haste with the skill ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... Christmas we ever had, but the day seemed long. When night came we were in a precious bustle. The wagon bed on bobs, filled with hay and covers, drawn by Ned and Jo, was brought up for the family, and the sleigh made spick-and-span and drawn by Laddie's thoroughbred, stood beside it. Laddie had filled the kitchen oven with bricks and hung up a comfort at four o'clock to keep ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... well fitted out, spick and span in fresh carpets and paint, and crowded to the utmost capacity for comfort. Every stateroom was full; each seat at the tables occupied. Not a foot of space above or below decks was left unused, but provision was made for all, and ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... A conspicuous, smart, spick-and-span house on the main street, built of brick and wood, with a verandah, and picked out in bright colours, was pointed out to me by this amiable citizen as the residence of a "returned American." This was a man, he said, who had made some money in America, but got tired of ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... Dinsmore, and Dinsmore, and of course you have a right to dictate in the matter; but I tell you what, these darkies o' yours are a dreadful lazy set, specially that Suse; and it's mighty hard for folks that's been used to seein' things done up spick and span and smart to put ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... "It was a spick and span new one, bought on purpose for this interview. I admire your bookcases, said I. Can you tell me just how ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with venom and with froth. Mix the brains (tho' apt to hash ill, Being scant) of Lord Mountcashel, With that malty stuff which Chandos Drivels as no other man does. Catch (i. e. if catch you can) One idea, spick and span, From my Lord of Salisbury,— One idea, tho' it be Smaller than the "happy flea" Which his sire in sonnet terse Wedded to immortal verse.[1] Tho' to rob the son is sin, Put his one idea in; And, to keep it company, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... shop with a card at the door: "Town and touring cars for hire by day, week, or month." A gorgeous Mercedes, too spick, too span, altogether too celestial for earthly use, occupied most ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... a boat ashore on the morning of the 12th with an invitation to come on board and lunch. I accordingly went out to the vessel and, after lunching, had a thorough look over her, mentally contrasting her spick-and-span appearance at the time with what it had been when I left her in December. I went ashore again in the afternoon and assisted the visitors to get their loads down to the boat, as they were returning to the ship, which ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... to-day—glowing, athwart its surrounding greenery, like the warm welcome of a friend; the exquisite neatness of the garden, where every flower that could be coaxed into growing in the open air bloomed in perfection; the spick-and-span brightness of the windows; the elegant order that prevailed within, from cellar to garret; the old, carefully-chosen furniture, which had for the most part been collected from other old-world homesteads; the artistic colouring of draperies and carpets—all ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the scrub-woman had made her last trip with the extra dishes, and the little home was spick and span. ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... from a tree. Next the wood opened, and we issued forth again into the day on the precipitous broadside of the isle. A village was before us: a Catholic church and perhaps a dozen scattered houses, some of grass in the old island fashion, others spick-and-span with outside stair and balcony and trellis, and white paint and green, in the more modern taste. One arrested my attention; it stood on the immediate verge of a deep precipice: two stories high, with double balconies, painted white, and showing by my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was most carefully preserved. Indoors he always promptly assumed a dressing-gown, a skull cap with a gold tassel, and his great porcelain pipe. His meals he cooked for himself. Never did he leave his house until about three o'clock. Then, spick and span, exquisitely appointed, he sauntered forth swinging his malacca cane. After a promenade of several hours he returned again to his dressing-gown, his porcelain pipe, and his books. Keith enjoyed hugely his detached, reflective, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... leave at any moment," Henrietta told them. She was so excited that she couldn't eat her breakfast. But her chicks had no such trouble. And perhaps it was just as well that Henrietta Hen had her hands full looking after them and trying to keep them all under her eye, and spick-and-span for the journey. Otherwise she would have been in more of ...
— The Tale of Henrietta Hen • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Edith, spick, span and debonair as always (although during the war he had discarded his buttonhole). He was occupied, as he usually was in his leisure time, not in playing the piano or composing, but—in making photograph frames! This was his hobby, and people often said that ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... of impressiveness has recently been introduced into the interior by the artistic arrangement of old furniture which the house's present owner, Mr. Templeton Coolidge, has brought about. But the exterior is "spick-span" in ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... house, leaving no room for doubt as to its existence. There it stood, spick and span, with white window-curtains tied up with red ribbons, and rows of flower-pots on the sills, and a shining brass handle and knocker on the door, and a dark blind in the shop window through which, howsoever noses might ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... of the day. I stand in the open place, under its shadow, and lift my eyes with wonder to the amazing and crowded cluster of spires and towers: its antique air, and even look of shattered dilapidation showing that the restorer has not been at his work. There was no smugness or trimness, or spick-and-spanness, but an awful and reverent austerity. And with an antique appropriateness to its functions the Flemish women, crones and maidens, all in their becoming cashmere hoods, and cloaks, and ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... ceremony, you shall see. From the steamer the emigrant is led to a dealer in frippery, where he is required to doff his baggy trousers and crimson cap, and put on a suit of linsey-woolsey and a hat of hispid felt: end of First Act; open the purse. From the dealer of frippery, spick and span from top to toe, he is taken to the hostelry, where he is detained a fortnight, sometimes a month, on the pretext of having to wait for the best steamer: end of Second Act; open the purse. From the hostelry at last to the steamship agent, where they secure ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... home-like to us. We said nothing of Cary and his boat at the Inn, for we soon saw that both were far-and-away better than common, and we were selfish. Nor did the man himself seem to care for more patronage. He was always ready when we wished to go, and jumped from his spick-and-span deck to meet us with a smile that started us off in sunshine, no matter what the weather. And with my affection for the lovely, uneven coast and the seas that held it in their flashing fingers, grew my interest in the winning personality ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... action came, making it very uncomfortable for the enemy. On the other side I was not long in finding out Tempest, with the glow of enthusiasm on his cheek as now and again he broke through the ruck and sent the ball into quarters. Wales, too, was there, spick and span as usual, playing neatly and effectively, and ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... completely enveloped their figures, and fixing veils round the tweed caps they wore, they repacked their portmanteaus, watched a favourable opportunity, and slipped out of the hotel and proceeded to a quiet bye-street near the wharf. Here their macintoshes and veils disappeared into the river, and two spick and span young gentlemen emerged into the main thoroughfare again. The feeling was peculiar at first, but as no one appeared to take particular notice of them, they soon felt ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... new And spick and span, As nice as clothes could be; For though John hardly can Be called a man, They were made for ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... hard-beaten roads and trails. Immediately in front of the house Folsom had seeded and watered and coaxed into semblance of a lawn the best turf to be had in that section of Wyoming, and inclosed it in a spick and span white picket fence. The main road between the fort and the railway station passed directly in front of his gate. The side window of the cozy room looked out to the west over the valley of a rushing stream, once rich in trout, but now much infested by the mules from Burleigh's ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... contractors having taken so much more time than they said; anyhow, he turned the carpenters out of the house the day previous to our arrival, carried in the furniture, nailed up mosquito blinds, and did many things himself, so that everything should be in spick ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... sometimes remarked by visitors that her surroundings had not the spick-and-span appearance which usually characterises a Scottish Mission station. She had, nevertheless, a real appreciation of order and beauty, and liked to have everything clean and tidy about her. How to accomplish this was her daily problem, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... had forgotten her long ago and turned his attentions elsewhere. What girl, unless silly and Victorian, would be afraid of a dude who lived for the sleekness of his hair and the spick-and-spanness of his clothes? Yet now Win was afraid, and she did not think it was because she had suddenly become silly or Victorian. This aquiline-faced young man with the prominent jaw was looking ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... past a model dairy. Thence we went past two large farms, and out into open meadow lands, everything being kept most spick-and-span by ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... was on his feet. Along the broad, white road, with its rows of poplars on either side, came a troop of cent-gardes, spick and span in their brilliant uniforms, their cuirasses blazing in the sunlight, and immediately behind them rode the Emperor, accompanied by his staff, in a wide open space, followed by a second troop ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... M'Allister, who had now rejoined us, looking spick and span, and with his face shining from the fresh application of soap and water, "I believe they are all down there watching for ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... obviously excited by the music, shouted "A-more! A-more!" so we went on, disregarding Whinnie and the bunk-house window and Struthers' acrid stare from the shack-door. I was in the middle of Fay Templeton's lovely old Rosie, You Are My Posey, when Lady Alicia rode up, as spick and span as though she'd just pranced off Rotten Row. And as I'd no intention of showing the white feather to her ladyship, I kept right on to the end. Then I looked up and waved the banjo at her where she sat stock-still on her mount. There was an enigmatic ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... me to be so logically perfect that I was long repelled by its perfection. I felt, half unconsciously, that a living thing ought not to be so spick and span in its external evidence for itself, and that what I wanted for conviction was not the sight of a faultless intellectual superficies, but the touch and pressure ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... were branded and turned loose again to roam the range during the summer; the corral fences were repaired, new irrigation ditches were laid, others extended—the numerous details received the attention they merited, and when summer came in earnest, the Flying W was spick and span and prospering. ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Carpenters and joiners appeared, and the premises were completely severed. From her room in the shadows at the back the invalid heard the hammering and sawing, and suffered. W. H. Johnson came out with a spick-and-span window, and had his wife, a shrewd, quiet woman, and his daughter, a handsome, loud girl, to help him on Friday evenings. Men flocked in—even women, buying their husbands a sixpence-halfpenny tie. They could have bought a tie for four-three from James Houghton. But no, they would ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... ranch house. Very bravely he set out, equipped with his cowboy regalia—except the riata, which the Dean, fearing experiments, had, at the last moment, thoughtfully borrowed—and armed with a fencing tool and staples. He was armed, too, with a brand-new "six-gun" in a spick and span holster, on a shiny belt of bright cartridges. The Dean had insisted on this, alleging that the embryo cowboy might want it to kill a sick ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... Dutch East Indies and China have only seven thousand apiece, but in China there has recently come a forward movement. A fund of twenty million dollars is to be spent in constructing a national system of telephone and telegraph. Peking is now pointing with wonder and delight to a new exchange, spick and span, with a couple of ten-thousand-wire switchboards. Others are being built in Canton, Hankow, and Tien-Tsin. Ultimately, the telephone will flourish in China, as it has done in the Chinese quarter in ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... it de luxe with a most de-luxey vengeance! Here were three tents, or rather three canvas houses, with wooden half-walls; and they were spick-and-span inside and out, and had glass windows in them and doors and matched wooden floors. The one that was a bedroom had gay Navajo blankets on the floor, and a stove in it, and a little bureau, and a washstand with white ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... was the handsomest specimen. His hair looked so spick—his shoulders were so big and broad—his teeth so white—and his skin, well, Miss Carey, if you'd seen him, I'll bet you'd have just gone crazy to kiss him yourself. (MISS CAREY, who is drinking tea, nearly chokes on this—coughing on the tea which ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... beautiful turf, except where a river, leaping from the higher plateau over the precipice, has chosen it for a bed. You must not suppose, however, that the disruption and land-slip of Thingvalla took place quite in the spick and span manner the section might lead you to imagine; in some places the rock has split asunder very unevenly, and the Hrafna Gja is altogether a very untidy rent, the sides having fallen in in many places, and almost filled up the ravine with ruins. On ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... in spite of my recent familiarity with house-agents, the difference between a fixture and a fitting. It is possible that neither word has any virtue without the other, as is the case with "spick" and "span." One has to be both; however dapper, one would never be described as a span gentleman. In the same way it may be that a curtain-rod or an electric light is never just a fixture or a fitting, but always "included in ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... is poor; its only treasures are its Roman remains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... angered her that anything so plainly meant for beauty and dignity should go so neglected and unkempt. On the other, if house and gardens had been spick and span like the other houses of the neighbourhood, if there had been sound roofs, a modern water-supply, shutters, greenhouses, and weedless paths,—in short, the general self-complacent air of a well-kept country house,—where would have been that thrilling intimate ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Upper School mercifully given to boys of the Lower School who are too tall to wear with decency the short Eton jacket; he possessed a trouser-press; and his "bags" were perfectly creased and quite spotless. From tip to toe, at all seasons and in all weathers, he looked conspicuously spick and span. Chaff provoked the solemn retort: "One should be well groomed." He spoke impersonally, considering it bad form to use for first person singular. Amongst the small boys he ranked as the Petronius of ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... conversation. As already observed, he had noticed the altered style of the schoolmaster's costume; and it was to this transformation that his next speech alluded. "Why, Josh," said he, attempting an easy off-hand style of talk, "ye're bran new, spick span, from head to foot; ye look for all the world jest like one o' them ere cantin' critters o' preechers I often see prowlin' about Swampville. Durn it, man! what dodge air you up to now. You hain't got rileegun, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... appearance, perfect order, method, and discipline of his troops. Madame Delbet admitted that this praise was fully justified, for the troops and horses were quite fresh, their uniforms and equipments were all spick and span, and the officers even ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... of fact, nothing the matter with it. It was as spick and span as paint and polish could make it. The curtain-stretching days were long past. There had even been talk of moving out of the house by the tracks, but at the last moment Mrs. Scaritt ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... the elderly woman who presided behind the nickel-plated American cash-register. The only thing that rang false about the place was that register, perked up there spick-span new. Hawkins insisted that it was a typewriter, and as we passed out he took a handful of matches (thinking them toothpicks) and asked the cashier to play a tune on the thingumabob, but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... after a careful examination of the papers. "As to speed, we should get twenty-three knots on a pinch. Her fighting equipment is excellent, everything is spick and span, and I was impressed with the officers and crew. Yes, she is ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... spot or trace of ink anywhere upon his enamelled coat, the tree-stump, the milestone or the three-cornered hat, he had been washed and cleaned for the cabinet with a vengeance, and looked as beautiful and as spick and span as the day the artist had turned him out to an ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... play tennis. The game had already started on the court some little distance off—the players being Dorothy, Peggy and a couple of athletic, flannel-clad parsons. Marmaduke Trevor reposed on a chair under the lee of Lady Bruce. He looked very cool and spick and span in a grey cashmere suit, grey shirt, socks and tie, and grey suede shoes. He had a weak, good-looking little face and a little black moustache turned up at the ends. He was discoursing to his neighbour ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... my little coquet heart fluttered with joy at the sight of a white lutestring, flowered with silver, scoured indeed, but passed on me for spick and span new, a Brussels lace cap, braited shoes, and the rest in proportion, all second-hand finery, and procured instantly for the occasion, by the diligence and industry of the good Mrs. Brown, who had already a chapman ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... enjoyment of the Ark Royal. The most prejudiced—again I speak personally—will find pleasure in the author's zestful story of how the dingy, foul-smelling Will Arding, full of cement (and worse things), was transformed into the spick-and-span Ark Royal, with a piano in the saloon and Queen Anne silver on the breakfast-table; while for the persuadable there are added plans, scales of expense and the like, which bring the whole matter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... thousands of working men's wives, and such women demand our admiration and respect. What matter though some of them are a bit frowsy and not over-clean? they have precious little time to attend to their personal adornment. I ask, who can fulfil all their duties and remain "spick-and-span"? ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... want to make it look like a gardener's garden, all clipped an' spick an' span, would you?" he said. "It's nicer like this with things runnin' wild, an' swingin' an' catchin' hold ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... laughingly. Aunt Hetty Freeman was known as one of the best housekeepers in Brewster, and no one had ever seen her looking other than "spick and span," as her husband often admiringly declared. Rose always said that she could tell just what part of the big house Aunt Hetty was in because she could hear her starched skirts rattle; and she realized that Anne's untidy ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... spice, cinnamon, nutmegs, cloves, and some of the very best Maccaboy snuff. Oh, let me see! I want a new foot-stove. Our old one is all banged up, and I am ashamed to be seen filling it at noon in winter in Deacon Stonegood's kitchen, with all the women looking on, and theirs spick ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... here's a spick and span new supplication, By order of a Committee for the Reformation, To be read in all churches and chapels of this nation, Upon pain of slavery and sequestration. From fools and knaves in our Parliament ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... the rooms, and speedily arrived to take possession, bringing with him a spick-and-span new fishing-rod and basket. He did not know much about fishing, but he enjoyed himself just as thoroughly as if he did; and he laughed so good-humouredly at his own Cockney blunders, as he called them, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... that we won't give her anything old. I want it spick, span, new; and to be absolutely up-to-date." Alexia took her chin out of her hand, and sat up decidedly. "The idea of matching up those mouldy old portraits!—and that house ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... tidy officers who so love to see a ship kept spick and span clean; who institute vigorous search after the man who chances to drop the crumb of a biscuit on deck, when the ship is rolling in a sea-way; let all such swing their hammocks with the sailors; and they would soon get sick of this daily ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... kitchen range, suggesting, by its brightness and snapping, pine-knots full of pitch and resin. The front doors of the stove were open and the firelight danced across the room, filling it with cheer. It was one of those homelike kitchens where everything is spick and span, and the nickel on the stove shines ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... original; the scarcity of timber, the high price of labour, and the pressing urgency of more important claims upon the time of the small agriculturist, prevent him, for the most part, from attaining the spick- and-span neatness of an English homestead. Many makeshifts are necessary; a broken rail or gate is mended with a piece of flax, so, occasionally, are the roads. I have seen the Government roads themselves being repaired with no other material than stiff tussocks of grass, flax, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... a rough-and-tumble pair, Mothery," said King; "look at Kitty there! she kept herself almost spick and span." ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... hopelessly. 'The girls in these parts are far too proud to be hired to work in a house. Why, the best folks in town mostly does their own work; there's Mrs. Reid, so rich, just has a woman to do the charing; and Eelan—that's the beauty, you know—makes the pies and keeps the house spick-and-span. But you couldn't keep your own house clean, could you, sir?—let alone the meals; and you wouldn't live long if ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the eastern down. As they were emerging, they saw on the left hand an extraordinarily spick and span red bungalow. The low roof of dusky red sloped down towards the coolest green lawn, that was edged and ornamented with scarlet, and yellow, and white ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... paused, her heart contracting painfully as the spick and span aspect of the room, its ordered absence of any trace of occupation, reminded her that its one-time owner would never again have any ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of these friezes is placed above a simple wainscot, the effect is charming. The paper for nurseries is usually waterproof, for a nursery must be absolutely spick and span. Another thing that gives much pleasure in a nursery is to build on one side of the room a platform about a yard wide and six inches high, and ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... Spanish warships in Havana harbour as she next morning swept past them, outward bound, shortly after nine o'clock in the morning of a glorious April day. Jack was on the navigating bridge with Milsom, and as the beautiful little ship, looking as spick and span as though just fresh from the stocks, and with all her brasswork gleaming and flashing like burnished gold in the brilliant morning sunlight, brought the lighthouse abeam and gaily plunged her keen, shapely bows into the heart of the first blue, wind- whipped, foam-crested surge that ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... you what it is. Ladies like Miss Tredgold need their comforts. She won't find much comfort here, I'm thinking. She'll need her food well cooked, and that she won't get at The Dales. She'll need her room pretty and spick-and-span; she won't get much of that sort of thing at The Dales. My dear young ladies, you leave the house as it is, and, mark my words, Miss Tredgold will go in a week's ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... thoughtfully at the group. Yes, he was worried. And everyone was secretly worried. The situation was exceedingly delicate, fragile, breakable. Mr Bostock looked uneasily first at Adam Tellwright, tall, spick and span, self-confident, clever, shining, with his indubitable virtues mainly on the outside. If ever any man of thirty-two in all this world was eligible, Adam Tellwright was. Decidedly he had a reputation for preternaturally keen smartness in trade, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... the full his whim that everything entering into the construction of "Abraham" should be spick-and-span. He watched with his own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... a young girl such as Miss Bessemer is—for she's very young—would have been a little embarrassed at running up against such a spick and span lot as we were. Not a bit of it; didn't lose her poise for a moment. She bowed to my sister and to me, as though from the top of a drag, by Jove! and as though she were fresh from Redfern and Virot. You know a girl that ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... at the fellow in wonder. Then he gave a cry and took the fellow by the shoulders. He had recognized, despite disguising superficialities of garb and manner, Bertha's once spick-and-span butler. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... that "many hands make light work," and it is equally true that they turn off a lot of it, so at the end of half an hour the old peoples' wood pile was in apple pie order and the yard was in a spick and span condition. ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... slicked up from one week's end to another. But then, Solomon didn't mind. He was used to it. Mrs. Otus was just like his own mother in that respect; and it might have worried him a great deal to have to keep things spick and span after the way he had been brought up. Why, the beautiful white eggshell he hatched out of was dirty when he pipped it, and never in all his growing-up days did he see his mother or father really clean house. So it is no wonder he was rather shiftless ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... any longer put away the solemn duty of visitation. To take the comfort of his presence, to give the light of his countenance to the smitten, was a part of his sacred function. These accidents were among the sore trials incident to a cure of souls. The Reverend Nicholas had brushed himself spick-and-span that morning, and, taking up his gold-headed cane, had walked ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... a ring around the date. It's the first time you've condescended to pay me a compliment in a year. You men are the limit. You take it as a matter of course that a girl should be neat and spick and span. If she wasn't you'd notice it soon enough. It's easy for a girl like this Miss Burnaby. I don't suppose she ever did a day's work or anything useful in her life. She orders her clothes from the best places, and gets them fitted and sent home, and ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... we went. Cousin Dempster has made a good deal of money in Washington—contracting, or something—and he got a spick-span new open carriage for this high occasion—a carriage made soft as a bird's nest with brown satin cushions, and that glittered outside like a crow's back whenever the ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... its attention upon precision and cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. "But all exaltation neglects," said Prothero. "No religion has ever boasted that its saints were spick and span." This controversy raged between them in the streets of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way through the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... lead Messer Geri to invite himself. So, wearing always the whitest of doublets and a spotless apron, that denoted rather the miller, than the baker, he let bring, every morning about the hour that he expected Messer Geri and the ambassadors to pass by his door, a spick-and-span bucket of fresh and cool spring water, and a small Bolognese flagon of his good white wine, and two beakers that shone like silver, so bright were they: and there down he sat him, as they came by, and after ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... have been more genial for the purpose, and the prospect of a few miles' march, with the people of town and village en fete, was a welcome one to all but the men in the infirmary, who were looking gloomily from the windows at their comrades, all spick and ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... ruined his digestion with too much champagne, and after several years he fell for the Gospel according to the Methodists, sent his people to church, and cleaned up the beach and the trading crowd so spick and span that he would not permit them to smoke a pipe out of doors on Sunday, and, fined one of the chief traders one hundred gold sovereigns for washing his schooner's decks on the ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... it, sir? Something about the church? I should ha' thought the church was all spick and span by ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... shoes were nicely greased, and he himself had made a last endeavor to close the worst apertures with a bit of shoemaker's thread. He had had quite a struggle with himself, before starting, regarding these forlorn old shoes and another pair, spick and span and black, and heavily clamping with thick new soles, which Uncle Ozias Lamb had sent over for him ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Hamworthy, with their many industries and busy wharves, form a piquant contrast to spick-and-span Bournemouth with her tidy gardens and well-dressed crowds; but whatever the port of Poole may lack in other ways she has an abundance of history, although her claim to figure as a Roman station has been much disputed. We do know, however, ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... old sailor came along—it might put years on to his life to have a pull at the oars. You remember that old sailor we saw in charge of the engine back there at the government tank? You saw how he had the engine?—clean and bright as a new pin—everything spick-and-span and shipshape, and his hut fixed up like a ship's cabin. I believe he thinks he's at sea half his time, and shoving her through it, instead of pumping muddy water out of a hole in the ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... Burton declared. "I don't care for mouldy old ruins, with ivy and damp places upon the walls. I like something fine and spick and span and handsome, with a tower to it, and a long straight drive that you can see down to the road; plenty of stone work about the windows, and good square rooms. As for the garden, well, let that come. We can plant a lot of small trees about, and lay down a lawn. I don't care about ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... met and here we parted. But what a different place it was then! A lovely cape, half bleak moorland and half shaggy wood, a few rocky headlands and a great many coots and gulls, and one solitary old farmhouse standing just where that spick-and-span summer hotel, with its balconies and cupolas, stands now. So it was nineteen years ago, and so it may be again, perhaps, nine hundred years hence; but meanwhile, what a pretty array of modern aesthetic cottages, and plank walks, and bridges, ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... car to destroy the evidence. However, you'll find that as a general policy of the hotel, the car-washing is performed as a standard service. In fact, if any guest parks his car in our garage and his car is not rendered spick and span, someone is going to ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... along the walls on each side and in the middle, personages sitting in front of their spread-out goods like waste-paper merchants. I put in a request to be put back into my regiment, and they said to me, 'Take your damned hook, and get busy with it.' I lit on a sergeant, a little chap with airs, spick as a daisy, with a gold-rimmed spy-glass—eye-glasses with a tape on them. He was young, but being a re-enlisted soldier, he had the right not to go to the front. I said to him, 'Sergeant!' But he ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... rest you. We'll get lunch at a tea-room, and shop all the afternoon. We'll go to a hotel for dinner, and stay all night. Then in the morning we can get up early, have our breakfast, and drive back here in time before the men come. Now isn't that perfectly spick-and-span for a plan?" ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... to the doctor's telephone message, stood over the iron bed in the spick-and-span men's ward of St. Mary's, a wave of that intense feeling he had experienced at the accident swept over him. The farmer's beard was overgrown, and the eyes looked up at him as from caverns of suffering below the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ane tall woman came to the declarant's hous when the childering were there; she had, as appeared to her, ane chyld upon her back, and on or two at her foot; and the said woman desyred that the declarant should imploy her to spick for her to the Queen of Farie, and strik and battle in her behalf with the said Queen (which ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... breath. 'There is nothing shabby or worn- out about it! It is entirely new,spick and span. Please, is my next lesson to go deeper than Prim's trunk, and take off all the ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... Spick and span in their new uniforms, they came to drill daily on our parade ground. Slowly the change took place. They were "rookies" no longer, and the adjutant's sarcasm was a thing of the past. Commands were pronounced ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... were buried as quickly and decently as the place allowed of. Things were generally cleaned up, and by noon the little fort was as spick as if the sound of a rifle had never been heard within its walls. Lewis and Andover had the midday meal in a sort of gun-room which looked over the edge of the plateau to a valley in the hills. It had been arranged and furnished by a former commandant who found in the view a ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... was, and the moon was shining so brightly in at the little window that at first he thought it was daylight. And when he looked round the kitchen, for he slept in a corner of it, he could scarce believe it wasn't, for it was all tidied up, the fire burning beautiful, and everything spick and span as his mother loved to have it. "Poor mother," thought Robin, "why has she got up so early? and how sound I must have been sleeping ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth
... "That's all very well, sis. But I told you so! A brand-new, spick-and-span car like this! And to run ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... crowd in the big room. Outside, the depot 'bus had just stopped in front of the hotel and a company of newly arrived guests were entering the corridor, while the bell-boys were running forward to relieve them of their luggage and lead them to the spick-and-span clerk behind ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... all chunnicks of stone, or a Habbey, much out of repair, A skelinton Banquetting 'All, and a bit of a broken-down stair, May appear most perticular "precious" to them as the picteresk cops; But give me the sububs and stucco, smart villas, and spick-and-span shops. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... than was even their ordinary habit. Their curiosity was excited,—so were their faculties of criticism. The new servants from the Manor had attended church, sitting all together in a smart orderly row, and suggesting in their neat spick-and-span attire an unwonted note of novelty, of fashion, of change, nay, even of secret and suppressed society wickedness. Their looks, their attitudes, their whisperings, their movements, furnished plenty of matter to talk about,—particularly ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... up to its knees in a narrow lane, and looking as blank as a wall, with a trap-door of a mouth, and a grating cast of eye. How yonder bridegroom, just cemented in an alliance that will not last out his lease of life, "spick and span new," all eyes, and a double row of buttons ornamenting his latticed waistcoat, looks at his adored opposite, who holds her Venetian parasol—sun shade—before her face, glowing like a red brick wall in the sun. Ah! his regards are attracted by a modest little nymph of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... "cut to pieces," and otherwise badly mauled by English war correspondents, but you would never have suspected it. Bearded dragoons and Uhlans were still able to sit up and smoke big Hamburg cigars as they rode along, the horses looked fresh, the guns of the batteries were spick and span, the men seemed to have "morale" to spare; they looked as if they were just going for the first time—and not coming from ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... spotlessly clean apparition in blue without either waterproof or umbrella. I refer to Jane. She suddenly appeared, as I was passing The Ladies' Tea Association Rooms, walking in front of me. She looked just the same as when I last saw her—spick and span, and—dry. I repeat the word—dry—for that is what attracted my attention most. Despite the deluge, not a single raindrop touched her—the plumes on her toque were splendidly erect and curly, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... way of her sex, to make the fire burn better. Her face was rosy, flushed prettily with the glow from the blazing oak wood. Packard's eyes brightened as he looked at her, making a comprehensive survey of the trim little form from the top of her bronze hair to the heels of her spick-and-span boots. About her throat, knotted loosely, was a flaming-red silken scarf. The thought struck him that the Temple fortunes, the Temple ranch, the Temple master, all were falling or had already fallen ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... pastry-cook's. To fancy they could live a year! I find you're but a stranger here. The Dean was famous in his time, And had a kind of knack at rhyme. His way of writing now is past; The town has got a better taste; I keep no antiquated stuff, But spick and span I have enough. Pray do but give me leave to show 'em; Here's Colley Cibber's birth-day poem. This ode you never yet have seen, By Stephen Duck,[19] upon the queen. Then here's a letter finely penned Against the Craftsman and his friend: It clearly shows that all reflection ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... the opera-boxes, the social invitations, and the carriages of the minister. The Emperor of Russia would be thankful to be able to pay fifty thousand a year to one of these amiable constitutional poodles, so gentle, so nicely curled, so caressing, so docile, always spick and span,—careful watch-dogs besides, and faithful to a degree! But the private secretary is a product of the representative government hot-house; he is propagated and developed there, and there only. ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... any minute. We drove into the courtyard of the solid old Flemish house—a house in which he and his father before him had lived, with tiny rooms full of old paintings, garden, stable, and hothouse packed close in the saving Belgian fashion, and all as spick and span and shining as if built yesterday—and then into the street again. It was interesting to watch this square little man roll sturdily along, throwing out his stout arms impatiently and flinging at the nervous villagers—who treated ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... ass, and I am not at all sure he is affected. I suppose it is the way he has been brought up. There is no saying what you might have been yourself if you had had nurses and people about you who always insisted on your turning out spick-and-span. Well, Easton, what have you been doing with yourself since we saw ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... from the control. There it comes now," said Neeland, as a brand new taxicab, which looked like a private car, drew up at the curb, and a smiling and very spick ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... seemed subtly ennobled as they emerged from the luscious, well fitting sleeves, and the high collar, with its narrow edge of lace, stressed the nobility of her fine head. When she came home from church, she did not, as she would have heretofore, change at once into calico, but protected by a spick and span white apron, kept on the best frock through dinner and, frequently, until chore time in the afternoon. In the winter, too, she was exposed less to sun and wind and her skin lost much of its weathered look. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... Ludgate, the furniture of this house is as old as Methusalem's; and my friend, Mrs. Pimlico, said yesterday that it was a shame to be seen: and so to be sure it is, compared with her own, which is spick and span new. Yet why should she pretend to look down upon me in point of furniture, or any thing? Who was she, before she was married? Little Kitty Coxeater, as we always called her at the dancing school; and nobody ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Ethel returned to her young guests, she found them all spick and span, in their dainty white frocks ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... and rows of splendid full-rigged ships and barques lying moored in the Hooghly along the whole length of the Maidan. The line must have extended for two miles, and I never tired of looking at these beautiful vessels with their graceful lines and huge spars, all clean and spick and span with green and white paint, the ubiquitous Calcutta crows perched in serried ranks on their yards. To my mind a full-rigged ship is the most beautiful object man has ever devised, and when the dusk was falling, with every spar and rope outlined in black against ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... felt as if the deluge had come again, with some new and harrowing accompaniments, in which woman's rights and demands were prominent. Then, on the fifth, they rested from their labors in the clean, soap- charged atmosphere—walking gingerly over spick and span carpets, laying each book and paper demurely in place, and gazing, at a proper distance, through diamond-bright windows; and on the ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... work-rooms, from which funnels and exhaust fans collect and carry off all dust, and improve the ventilation, so that in spite of the multitudinous operations in progress, the whole place is kept as "spick and span" as a ship of the line. But another aggressive sign of the firm's belief in the motto mens sana in corpore sano is the presence of a lady whose whole time is devoted to the physical culture of the girls. Trained in Swedish athletics, this lady and her assistant undertake ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... domestic economy, as removed from it as the North Pole from the South. Small wonder that Depper—his name was William Kittle, a fact of which the neighbourhood made no practical use, which he himself only recalled with an effort—preferred to the dirt, untidiness and squalor of his own abode the spick-and-span cleanliness of Dinah Brome's. Small wonder that in this atmosphere of wholesomeness and comfort, he chose to spend the hours of the Sabbath during which the public-house was closed; and other hours. Small wonder, ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... steward, in spick and span whites, came down the Egret's shiny gangway, entered the path leading to the Swastika's dock, and in a few minutes came hurrying back to his boat ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... the father of all them that cast the angle in Glen Conquhar, who now fished little in these degenerate days, but instead told tales of the great salmon of thirty years ago—fellows tremendous enough to make the spick-and-span rods of these days, with their finicking attachments, crack their joints even to think of holding the monsters. Chiefly and finally there was "Old Royle," who came in March, first of all the fishing ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
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