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More "Sweeper" Quotes from Famous Books



... in fancy costume, but most of the girls had decided during dinner what they meant to be. Romola flew to the kitchen and borrowed an apron from the cook, tied a duster round her head, seized up a pail and a carpet-sweeper, and came as 'Domestic Service.' Beata commandeered the boarders' bath-towels and appeared as an Arab, in robe and turban. Peggie, with her dormitory eider-down for a train, was a court lady. Catie draped ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... constructions in other cases. Such is the construction in common recoveries. The method of construction which in that case gives to the persons in remainder, for their security and representative, the door-keeper, crier, or sweeper of the court, or some other shadowy being without substance or effect, is a fiction of a very coarse texture. This was however suffered by the acquiescence of the whole kingdom, for ages; because the evasion of the old statute of Westminster, which authorized perpetuities, had more sense ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... married she knew that my outraged honour had doomed her family to extinction. But they would wait till the war was ended. Germany, indeed, might account for Robert Redmayne; and even the elderly Bendigo, who was appointed to a mine sweeper, might give his life for his country. Meantime we volunteered also and our record of service at Princetown Moss Depot is not to ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... small coal cinder and an ash stain in the shape of a heel, apparently overlooked by a careless sweeper. ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs

... coming down to dinner to-night," he announced, "and shall hope to find you in your places. What the mischief are you hanging about for, Brown?" he asked, turning to the steward, who was standing by with a carpet-sweeper in his hand. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... banking too steep . . . That's Boche shrapnel. They always burst it high. That's our big gun behind that outer hill . . . He'll drop his machine in the street if he doesn't take care . . . There goes a trench-sweeper. Those last two were theirs, but that"—it was a full roar ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling

... is quite clear, have any just right or title to be considered in the last resort as true-born Britons; they are all of them just as much foreigners at bottom as the Spitalfields Huguenots or the Pembrokeshire Flemings, the Italian organ-boy and the Hindoo prince disguised as a crossing-sweeper. But surely the Welshman and the Highland Scot at least are undeniable Britishers, sprung from the soil and to the manner born! Not a bit of it; inexorable modern science, diving back remorselessly into the remoter ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... superior that entire reliance might be placed on their fidelity, and that they knew of three or four other men in Leyden "as firm as trees and fierce as lions," whom they would engage—a fustian worker, a tailor, a chimney-sweeper, and one or two other mechanics. The looseness and utter recklessness with which this hideous conspiracy was arranged excites amazement. Van Dyk gave the two brothers 100 pistoles in gold—a coin about equal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... mounted on a cart and blowing a hoarse and dreadful blast from a tin horn, as much as to say, "Fresh fish!" And hark! a voice on high, like that of a muezzin from the summit of a mosque, announcing that some chimney-sweeper has emerged from smoke and soot and darksome caverns into the upper air. What cares the world for that? But, well-a-day, we hear a shrill voice of affliction—the scream of a little child, rising louder with every repetition of that smart, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Be not so sure of that. The passion for newspapers excites the minds of the whole republic. Now-a-days your servant reads the news as he works. The clergy peruse the Sunday extras, and the crossing-sweeper begs your worn-out copy instead ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... indeed so full of Incongruities and Barbarisms, that we appear a distracted City to Foreigners, who do not comprehend the Meaning of such enormous Outcries. Milk is generally sold in a note above Ela, and in Sounds so [exceeding [2]] shrill, that it often sets our Teeth [on [3]] Edge. The Chimney-sweeper is [confined [4]] to no certain Pitch; he sometimes utters himself in the deepest Base, and sometimes in the sharpest Treble; sometimes in the highest, and sometimes in the lowest Note of the Gamut. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... doubt but pain must be severely felt until the wound be healed. But the love of ornament defies weaker considerations, and no English beau can bear more stoutly the extraction of his teeth to make room for a fresh set from a chimney sweeper, or a fair one suffer her tender ears to be perforated, with more heroism than the grisly nymphs on the banks of Port Jackson, submit their sable ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench

... he possessed a pocket handkerchief, but wanted something more. "J'ai un mouchoir, mais pas de loge," he said. Yet his letter was left without a reply. After waiting a day or two, and still receiving no answer, Vivier engaged the dirtiest crossing-sweeper he could find, made him put on a little extra mud, and sent him with a letter to Mr. Gye demanding "the return of his correspondence." The courteous manager of the Royal Italian Opera could scarcely have known that, besides being ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... if they see his naked legs or arms, thorosaque brachia, [4929]&c., like that huntsman Meleager in Philostratus, though he be all in rags, obscene and dirty, besmeared like a ruddleman, a gipsy, or a chimney-sweeper, than upon a noble gallant, Nireus, Ephestion, Alcibiades, or those embroidered courtiers full of silk and gold. [4930]Justine's wife, a citizen of Rome, fell in love with Pylades a player, and was ready to run mad for him, had not Galen himself ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... pilgrimage. I have never seen so large or so varied a collection of professional and casual mendicants as within and about the sacred enclosures of Kief. Some appeared to enjoy vested rights; these privileged personages would as little endure to be driven from a favoured post as with us a sweeper at a crossing would tolerate a rival broom. Several of these waiters upon charity might be termed literary beggars; their function is to read aloud from a large book in the hearing of the passers-by. They are often infirm, and occasionally blind, but ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... nastiness as well as greediness. For if he was dressed in the morning as clean as hands could make him, he would, by running into puddles and kennels, and rolling upon the ground, become as black as a chimney sweeper before noon; and I sincerely believe that he thought it as great a punishment to have his hair combed, or to wash his hands and face, as to be whipped; for he would cry and struggle as much to avoid the one as to escape the other. But, to ease his parents ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous

... Diabolus, with horrid familiarity, "go thy ways, old fellow, that COCK WON'T FIGHT." And he retired up the chimney, chuckling at his wit and his triumph. Gambouge heard his tail scuttling all the way up, as if he had been a sweeper by profession. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... since you will have it," he began with a laugh, which despite the weariness and anxiety of the past twenty-four hours had forced itself to his lips, "I have been sweeper and man-of-all-work at the Temple for the past few weeks, you ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... or a New Way to play an old Game, a Comedy; acted at the duke's theatre, and printed in 4to. 1682 Isabella's being deceived by the Chimney Sweeper is ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... not more than forty millions, has had the honour of colonizing half the globe; but "these countries are our colonies no longer." Such are a few of the wonders of 2130! In the Dialogue is an admirable joke with a scientific street-sweeper and a learned beggar, who pleads necessitas non habet legem, and "embraces the profession of an operative mendicant." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various

... same time to mention, that Hugh rarely made use of a crossing on a muddy day, without finding a half-penny somewhere about him for the sweeper. He would rather walk through oceans of mud, than cross at the natural place when he had no coppers — especially if he had patent ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... street and danced for joy like a child, yes, and presented a crossing-sweeper against whom he butted with a whole sixpence in compensation. Thus he reached the Mansion House, not unsuspected of inebriety by the police, and clambered to the top of a bus crowded with weary and anxious-looking City clerks returning home after a long day's ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... of slavery as the negro who at that time was working in the fields of Georgia or Carolina. In a sense, of course, it may be said that every one who works for his living, from a Cabinet Minister to a crossing-sweeper, is a slave, for he has to conform to certain rules, and unless he works he will be deprived of many advantages which he wishes to acquire, and may even be reduced to a state of starvation. But speculations ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... of the bungalow are of hard wood. They are waxed a few times each year, and a little work each morning with dust mop and carpet sweeper keeps them in good order. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... feathers in their hats; and you'll think, complacently and piously, how lovely they look! So they do: and you love them heartily and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right: that is charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also,—it, in its Sunday dress,—the dirtiest rags it has,—that it may beg the better: we shall give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad. But what does Justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian Justice has been strangely ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... safely at anchor in this wonderful natural harbour. Now picks, shovels, rations and extra ammunition were issued, and in the afternoon of the next day the destroyer Racoon took off Brigade and Regimental Headquarters with A and B companies, followed by the sweeper Whitby Abbey, with C and D companies under Major Jowitt. Singing and cheering we passed down the long line of shipping to the harbour mouth, then into darkness and silence, bound at last to meet ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison

... arrived to speak to Roger and Astro, he found them in the tunnel, working as a team of a shoveler and a sweeper. Roger would sweep up a little pile of dirt and Astro would shovel it ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell

... Winterbottom's salon had evaporated. He felt as if he were swinging in midair hitched to a scudding aeroplane by a rope about his middle. The mucous membranes of his throat were as dry and as full of dust as the entrails of a carpet sweeper. His vision was blurred and he had no control over his muscles. Weakly he leaned against the table in front of the jury, the room swaying about him. The pains of hell gat hold upon him. He was dying. Even the staff felt compunction—all but the ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... resemble the great Finn's sweet-voiced, gracefully-shaped, long-snouted hound; the coracle lying on the shore of the little lough—the coracle made of skin, like the old Irish boats—is the Wave-Sweeper; and the faithful mare that we hire by the day is, by your leave, Enbarr of the Flowing Mane. No warrior was ever killed on the back of this famous steed, for she was as swift as the clear, cold wind of spring, travelling with equal ease and speed on land and sea, an' may the divil fly away ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... figures better known to the local crossing-sweeper than Mr. Millborne's, in his daily comings and goings along a familiar and quiet London street, where he lived inside the door marked eleven, though not as householder. In age he was fifty at least, and his habits were as regular as those of a person can be who has no occupation but the ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... petty officer on board ships of war, whose employment was to see that the decks were kept clean. Also, a man formerly appointed to use the swabs in drying up the decks. He was sometimes called ship's sweeper; more commonly ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... help seeing the true state of things. Logic was to her but the smoke that rose from the burning truth; she saw what is altogether above and beyond logic—the right thing, whose meanest servant, the hewer of its wood, not the drawer of its water, the merest scullion and sweeper away of lies from the pavement of ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald

... which he made War upon the Great Turk, routed him Horse and Foot, and was crowned Lord of the Universe in Constantinople: the Conclusion of all his Successes is, that on the 12th Instant, about Seven in the Morning, his Imperial Majesty was deposed by a Chimney—Sweeper. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... been away—sitting on that bench, feeding penny buns to the silly ducks—especially the black one, the one she used to like best. And I make pilgrimages to all the other places we ever visited together, and try to pretend she is with me. And I support the crossing sweeper at Lansdowne Passage because she once said she felt sorry for him. I do all the other absurd things that a man in love tortures himself by doing. But to what end? She knows how I care, and yet she won't see why we can't go on being friends ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... traffic woke with the reviving breeze; and among the rest one Francois, a half-blood, set sail with the first light in his own half-decked cutter. He had held before a court appointment; being, I believe, the Residency sweeper-out. Trouble arising with the unpopular Vice-Resident, he had thrown his honours down, and fled to the far parts of the atoll to plant cabbages—or at least coco-palms. Thence he was now driven by such need as even a Cincinnatus must acknowledge, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... another model of the pillory at Fleet Bridge; and a third of the permanent gibbet at Tyburn. The latter specimen, of his workmanship was adorned with a little scarecrow figure, intended to represent a housebreaking chimney-sweeper of the time, described in Sheppard's own hand-writing, as 'Jack Hall a-hanging.' We must not omit to mention that a family group from the pencil of little Winifred, representing Mr. and Mrs. Wood in ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... means cleaning the floor and the rugs; dusting the walls, the pictures; cleaning, dusting, and sometimes polishing the furniture. Open the windows top and bottom, dust and brush them inside and out; use a soft brush or a dust mop to take the dust from the floor. Use a carpet sweeper for the rugs unless you have electricity and can use a vacuum cleaner; collect the sweepings ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... having looked after the simple cares of her household she was now ready to cast her eyes abroad, and relieve in so far as she might the distress around her. The first object of charity she encountered was an old crossing-sweeper. She addressed him in a matter-of-fact way which was intended to conceal her fluttering self-consciousness. She inquired whether he had a wife; whether he had any children; whether they were not rather poor. And having been answered in the affirmative on all these points, she surprised the old man ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... wheel to our coach was a strikingly ugly person, like a hippopotamus, whose plainness was not diminished by a pair of enormous goggles; this was the harmless necessary sweeper, that pariah among domestics, whose usefulness is undreamed of out ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... of the "moral" in the last line, may possibly have ventured to read the "Chimney-Sweeper" at her annual festival to those swart little people; but we have not space to give the gem a setting here; nor the "Little Black Boy," with its matchless, sweet child-sadness. Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems—all written ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... amongst the wedding guests were Prince Half-a-son's wicked brothers, who were ready to die of spite and envy when they discovered that the happy bridegroom was none other than their despised half-a-boy. So they went to the King, and said, 'We know this lad: he is a sweeper's son, and quite unfit to be the husband of ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... perspiration was out over her face, sparkling forth again after each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women into a ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... corners to gather dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve, and the apartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes of a mechanical sweeper [sucked out by the now-used cleaning-machine.—Author]. The door-frames and window-frames are of metal, rounded and impervious to draft. You are politely requested to turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and forthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and the ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... whisper that the birds in the apple-boughs might have heard, informed Mrs. Van Buren that the new Chinese servant was "no good as a sweeper," and asked what he did with his pigtail when he slept. "It must take him a good part of to-morrer to comb his hair, it is that long," she said. "And wouldn't you better use him up-stairs for an errand-boy altogether now? Sure, you wouldn't be after teaching him any cooking at all?" Nora was an old ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth

... startled. A heap of long-bladed bread knives, French knives, carving knives and cleavers lay in the center of the table. Other knives were thrust into belts or held in the hands of the men. A fat man in the yellow sarong of a cook stood frozen in the act of handing a knife to a tall one-eyed sweeper. ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer

... succeed to the throne, you will pay me," the Baron de Grost said. "If you do not succeed, remember that I am a rich man, and that I shall miss this money no more than the sixpence which you might throw to a crossing-sweeper." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... distinction which exists between those two dark deposits, and making it sufficiently obvious, that melanotic matter is composed of the constituent elements of the blood, and has its origin within the body. There cannot remain a doubt as to the nature of the chimney sweeper's case; for, from the knowledge which we have of his occupation, and from the chemical properties manifest after investigation, I think I am entitled to declare the black matter obtained from the bronchial glands to be carbon inhaled with the air during his labour, and not existing as a ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar

... or big, one thing you can do and be: You can be a man and do a man's work, heart gentle, and fearless feet on the earth, but eyes on the stars. And to be a MAN, in our American meaning of that word, is glory enough for this earthly life. Be a man, be you street-sweeper or the Republic's President, and know that emperor on throne of gold can be no more, and is lucky ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... here met with consisted of a female chimney-sweeper and her children, who, on my sitting down in the kitchen, soon drank to my health, and began a conversation with ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... emancipation of humanity. She no longer wants to be the beast of burden of the house. She considers it sufficient work to give many years of her life to the rearing of her children. She no longer wants to be the cook, the mender, the sweeper of the house! And, owing to American women taking the lead in obtaining their claims, there is a general complaint of the dearth of women who will condescend to domestic work in the United States. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... on a sudden shower, merely to avoid the trouble of unrolling his umbrella, and the sanest of women has been known to cheat a 'bus conductor of a penny, so as to wallow in the gratification of a crossing-sweeper's blessing. When the philosopher asks the Everlasting Why, he knows, if he be a sound philosopher—and a sound philosopher is he who is not led into the grievous error of taking his philosophy seriously—that the question is but the starting ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours. Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... and hale and strong, After the hard day's shearing, passing the joke along: The 'ringer' that shore a hundred, as they never were shorn before, And the novice who, toiling bravely, had tommy-hawked half a score, The tarboy, the cook, and the slushy, the sweeper that swept the board, The picker-up, and the penner, with the rest of the shearing horde. There were men from the inland stations where the skies like a furnace glow, And men from the Snowy River, the land of the frozen snow; There were swarthy Queensland drovers who reckoned ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... steed of Mananan, which was given him to ride over the sea into Erinn. He will refuse you, for he will say that the steed is but lent to him and he may not make a loan of a loan. Then ask him for the loan of Ocean Sweeper, which is the magic boat of Mananan, and that he must give, for it is a sacred ordinance with Lugh not to refuse a ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston

... Gallows had been erected for him at six the same morning. He was richly dressed, in a blue and gold coat, buff waistcoat, trimmed, &c. in full uniform. When brought under the Gallows, he stayed a small space, till his clergyman (a chimney-sweeper) had given him some admonitions: that done, he was drawn, by pulleys, to the top of the Gallows, which was twenty feet high; every person expressing as much satisfaction as if it had been the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle

... usual, none of the natives would defile themselves by touching the dead body. I accordingly gave orders that one of the elephants should drag it about a mile down wind away from the camp. Lord Mayo was brought to the spot, and the sweeper, being of a low caste, attached a very thick rope to the hind legs of the ox; the other end being made fast to the elephant's pad in such a manner as to form traces. The elephant did not exhibit the slightest interest in the proceeding, and everything was completed, the body of the ox being ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... of Cumberland, then a child, being carried to big grandfather on his birthday, the King asked him at what hour he rose. The Prince replied, "when the chimney-sweepers went about." "Vat is de chimney-sweeper?" said the King. "Have you been so long in England," said the boy, "and do not know what a chimney-sweeper is? Why, they are like that man there;" pointing to Lord Finch, afterwards Earl of Winchilsea and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... redress of grievances. This person, nevertheless, not deposed, was suspended from his empire for the day. He was pushed aside; he was forgotten. He was not distinct from the crowd. Like Titus, he had lost a day,—his vocation was gone. This person was the Sweeper of the Crossing! ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and fashions the cloth of his cloak of love out of many colours. Gorgeous colours, blinding, dazzling, in which predominate the scarlet of passion and the emerald of the supreme male's jealousy. And all, from the sweeper to the highest of birth and caste, wear this wondrous garment in India, though not one out of the teeming millions fashions his cloak upon the pattern of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... flung the purse out of the window to a sweeper in the courtyard, and said to his grandson, 'Then they do not teach you to be a ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... part of obvious human history. When people say that a man "in that position" would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion. Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper? In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... Khusru Kheyl will sit quiet when they once know? What will the Mahomedan heads of villages say? How will the police—Muzbi Sikhs and Pathans—how will THEY work under him? We couldn't say anything if the Government appointed a sweeper; but my people will say a good deal, you know that. It's a ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... almost an impertinence to use such a word as "decline" in connection with literature at a date when every crossing-sweeper can read, when free libraries are multiplied, when a new novel is published every day all the year round, and when thousands and tens of thousands of books—scientific, historical, critical—are poured out from the presses. We have several ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... SWEEP, SWEEPER. The name given at Yale and other colleges to the person whose occupation it is to sweep the students' rooms, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... sidewalks, broadening to a strip of superheated shade, a few stirred abroad in the deserted streets; here a policeman, thin blue summer tunic open, helmet in hand, swabbing the sweat from forehead and neck; there a white uniformed street sweeper dragging his rubber-edged mop or a section of wet hose; perhaps a haggard peddler of lemonade making for the Park wall around the Metropolitan Museum where, a little later, the East Side would venture out to sit on the benches, or the great electric tourists' ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... become packed and hard it will be necessary to use considerable force in scraping off the inequalities. A metal cutting edge, such as a hoe or scraper, will be found useful. A court should be swept with a coarse broom to distribute the fine material evenly. Another very good sweeper can be made from a piece of wood about six or eight feet long to which several thicknesses of bagging have been tacked or fastened. The final step in making a court consists in marking it out. Most courts are marked so that they will be suitable either ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller

... he fancied himself mounted upon old Battle, reviewing the Barnstable Invincibles, whom he was berating right soundly for a set of stupid knaves. An invitation from the general to join him and the aid in drinking a morning sweeper, suddenly brought him to his understanding, and, after offering numerous apologies for the distressed state of his person, said he was not aware that the earliness of the hour prevented military men and politicians ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... is upstairs," Hossein said, and led the way to a comfortably furnished apartment. "I think that you might stay here, for months, unsuspected. A sweeper comes, every day, to do my rooms downstairs. He believes the rest of the house to be untenanted, and you must remain perfectly quiet, during the half hour he is here. Otherwise, no one enters the ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty

... do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance. [(Quoted from a review in the "Daily News," October 17, 1871, of the Report on Spiritualism of the Committee ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... but she looked round the untidy rooms, where everything that would hold it had a linen cover with a Cluny-lace edge—all of them soiled and wrinkled. She watched Tufik, chanting about the plains of Lebanon and shoving the carpet-sweeper with a bang against her best furniture; and, with Hannah's salad in mind, she sniffed a warning odor from the kitchen that told of more Syrian experiments with her digestion. Tish surrendered: that morning she wrote to Hannah that Tufik was going back to Syria, ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee

... I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books burned. I am lean with seeing others eat. O, that there would come a famine over all the world, that all might die, and I live alone! then thou ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe

... her industry and skill in 'translating' old boots and shoes, her motherly instincts and efforts to keep her young brother Dick, the crossing-sweeper, honest, because mother had made them promise to be so when she died; the good-natured, agreeable, clever young thief Jenks, the tempter and beguiler of poor Dick; and, above all, the dear dog Scamp, with his knowing ways and soft brown eyes, are all as true to life and as touchingly ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh

... I have always thought some day I'd kape a pig and live pritty in me own house," said Mrs. Kilpatrick. "But I'm the old sweeper yet in Number Two. 'Tis a worrld where some has and more wants," she added with a sigh. "I got the manes for a good buryin', the Lord be praised, and a bitteen more beside. I wouldn't have that if Father Daley was as ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... jumpsome, frisky little beast, but a slug-like crawler with its eyes barely opened and its paws lacking strength or direction—a kitten that ought to have been in a basket with its mamma. Lone Sahib caught it by the scruff of its neck, handed it over to the sweeper to be drowned, and fined the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... so pretty with it, George. Just think how pretty she'd look in a little house, playing with a carpet-sweeper." ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... of "Bleak House" is the pursuit of Lady Dedlock, and the finding of the fugitive, cold and dead, with one arm around a rail of the dark little graveyard where they buried the law-copyist, "Nemo," and where poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper, came at night and swept the stones as his last tribute to the friend who "was very good" to him. There are three striking descriptions of this place in the novel. "A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... Isle in the Irish station. Whisky here again got hold of him, and excess ruined his constitution. On his leave he had married, and on his discharge joined his wife in Birmingham. For some time he worked as sweeper in the market, but two years ago deserted his wife and family, and came to London, settled down to a loafer's life, lived on the streets with Casual Wards for his home. Eventually came to Whitechapel Shelter, and got saved. He is now a trustworthy, reliable lad; has become reconciled to ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that's because you are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of Canterbury's daughter will be married in St George's, Hanover Square, to a crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don't do justice to the climbing and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens. You see a good-looking grey-haired man in evening-dress with a sort of authority about him, you know he is a pillar of the State, and ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... own hands and walls to succour us. And next, we understood, that there was indeed between Le Grand Geoffroy and ourselves war that none could stay with prayer or supplication to men or to God. For whereas he knew we had sent to the duke, the sternest sweeper from land or sea of robber and marauder, to deliver us—so we knew, as we thought of Ralf, that life and life's joy would have for us neither sweetness nor endurance, if he went free, who had been to our ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar

... married to Miss Youghal, but he scented in the telegram a chance of return to the old detective work that his soul lusted after, and next time he came in and heard our story. He finished his pipe and said oracularly, 'We must get at the evidence. Oorya bearer, Mussulman khit and sweeper ayah, I suppose, are the pillars of the charge. I am on in this piece; but I'm afraid I'm ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,

... the general scream. This alarmed Mr Barlow, who, coming up to the place, found his pupil in the most woeful plight, daubed from head to foot, with his face and hands as black as those of any chimney-sweeper. He inquired what was the matter; and Tommy, as soon as he had recovered breath enough to speak, answered in this manner: "Sir, all this is owing to what you told me about taming animals; I wanted to make them tame and gentle, ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... men akin. If men of genius and good works did not find Nobel prizes and honorary college degrees highly gratifying, this custom would have faded long ago. It is as rewarding to them to be called good at their job as it was to the New Jersey street sweeper who pushed his broom so diligently that he swept halfway into the next ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... carriage again, and Lily jumped in too. The little sweeper looked wistfully after them; but the snow was becoming more and more in the way of pedestrians, and she had to work ...
— Harper's Young People, December 16, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... done by the Marshal de Richelieu with a purse he had given to his grandson, and which the lad, not knowing how to use, brought back intact. Money, on this occasion, was at least of service to the passing street-sweeper that picked it up. But had there been no passer-by to pick it up, it would have been thrown into the river. One day Mme. de B—, being with the Prince de Conti, hinted that she would like a miniature of her canary bird set in a ring. The Prince offers to have it made. His offer is accepted, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... evening was exceptional. He had never before seen such an expression on her face. And since it is always the unusual which alarms, Soames was alarmed. He ate his savoury, and hurried the maid as she swept off the crumbs with the silver sweeper. When she had left the room, he filled his glass with wine ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... is May-day, when even the chimney-sweeper, developing the pleasant unconscious poetry of his nature, forgets the flues, wreathes the flowers, and persuades himself that he is Jack-in-the-Green. Jack who? Was he Jack Sprat, or the young swain who mated ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... translation from the French version of Johnson's Rambler, No. 190. MALONE. Mrs. Piozzi relates how Murphy, used to tell before Johnson of the first time they met. He found our friend all covered with soot, like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the Alchymist, making aether. 'Come, come,' says Dr. Johnson, 'dear Murphy, the story is black enough now; and it was a very happy day for me that brought you first to my house, and a very happy mistake ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... to the plowman, Leave the forests to the weary, Leave the heather to the rover, Leave the copses to the stranger, Leave the alleys to the beggar, Leave the court-yards to the rambler, Leave the portals to the servant, Leave the matting to the sweeper, Leave the highways to the roebuck, Leave the woodland-glens to lynxes, Leave the lowlands to the wild-geese, And the birch-tree to the cuckoo. Now I leave these friends of childhood, Journey southward with my husband, To the arms of Night and Winter, O'er the ice-grown seas of Northland. ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... in fencing, and is always represented with his magic Excalibur named Chan-yao Kuai, 'Devil-slaying Sabre,' and in one hand holds a fly-whisk, Yuen-chou, or 'Cloud-sweeper,' a symbol common in Taoism of being able to fly at will through the air and to walk on the ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... they looked fat, sleek, and contented. When, on our return from the trenches, we saw them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied. Between standing waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... white American, the sweeper of Broadway, if there be such a citizen, believe in this perfection of equality amongst men as a fundamental axiom of the rights of man? Place a black sweeper of crossings in juxtaposition, and the question will very soon solve itself. Why, the free and enlightened citizens ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... friendly villager volunteered his services as guide, and led us safely to our destination. After a cheerful evening with H., we persuaded him to accompany us back next day. He took out his dogs, and we had a good course after a hare, killing two jackals, and sending back the dogs by the sweeper. At Burgamma, the outwork, we stopped to tiffin on some cold fowl we had brought with us. The old factory head man got us some milk, eggs, and chupatties; and about three in the afternoon we started for the head factory. In an evil moment F. proposed that, as we were near ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... consulting my expense account for May that during that month alone Alice and I purchased no fewer than thirty devices of an economical character. We have three different kinds of smoke-consumers, an automatic carpet-sweeper, a bottle of lightning polish for plate-glass, a dish-washing machine, a knife-scourer, a potato-parer, two automatic lawn-hose reels, a sewer-gas consumer, a patent ashes-sifter, etc., etc. It has required a ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... slackened. He had been very solitary all day, and even the company of the old road-sweeper ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a singular resemblance to the entrance of nothing at all, to borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this Jondrette had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the same time portress and stair-sweeper: "Mother So-and-So, if any one should chance to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... indeed, I'm loath— Life's deemed a mawkish dish of broth, Without thy aid, old sweeper; So mawkish, few will put it down, Even from the cottage to the crown, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... fresh butter." The information is given in reference to a performance of Othello by the great actor Barton Booth. It was hot weather, and his complexion in the later scenes of the play had been so disturbed, that he had assumed "the appearance of a chimney-sweeper." The audience, however, were so impressed by the art of his acting, that they disregarded this mischance, or applauded him the more on account of it. On the repetition of the play he wore a crape mask, "with ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... soon as a cherry in swaddling-clothes on my walls. The very leaves on the horse-chestnuts are little snotty-nosed things, that cry and are afraid of the north-wind, and cling to the bough as if old poker was coming to take them away. For my part, I have seen nothing like spring but a chimney-sweeper's garland; and yet I have been three days in the country-and the consequence was, that I was glad to come back to town. I do not wonder that you feel differently; any thing is warmth and verdure when compared to poring over memorials. In truth, I think you will be much happier ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... am sure you for one would not be a snob if you had turned chimney-sweeper, and let Tom Underwood nail me to his office; he'll never make ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... a long time since Diamond had seen North Wind or even thought much about her. Now, as his father drove along, he was thinking not about her but about the crossing sweeper. He was wondering what made him feel as if he knew her quite well when he could not remember anything of her. But a picture arose in his mind of a little girl running before the wind, and dragging her broom after her. From that, he recalled the whole ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald

... one of the branches. He caught it, and the next moment was unexpectedly ducked overhead in the icy water. He came up gasping, and then understood. The tree was what in the voyageur's nomenclature is known as a "sweeper." Still held by its roots it bobbed up and down with the current, and the extra strain of his weight and the girl's had sunk it deeper in the water. It still moved up and down, and he had not finished spluttering when a new danger asserted itself. The suck of the current ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... Lascar, to Flag Street, the quarter of punch-houses;—but in Cossitollah all castes and vocations are met, whether their talk be of gold mohurs or cowries; here the Sahib gives the horrid leper a wide berth, and the Baboo walks carefully round the shadow of Mehtur, the sweeper. Therefore, reader, Cossitollah is by all means the street for you to draw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... among the trucks set one of them rolling down into a cellar, and three or four of the little ones were crushed. That was the end. The trucks disappeared. Even Tammany has not ventured to put them back, so great was the relief of their going. They were not only a hindrance to the sweeper and the skulking-places of all manner of mischief at night, but I have repeatedly seen the firemen baffled in their efforts to reach a burning house, where they stood four and six deep in the wide ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... chains? No-o. Troopers do not wear the Arder of Beritish India? No. The Sahib should have been in the Police of the Punjab. I am not a trooper, but I have been a Sahib's servant for nearly a year—bearer, butler, sweeper, any and all three. The Sahib says that Sikhs do not take menial service? True; but it was for Kurban Sahib— my Kurban ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... whisk. A shilling and sixpence were left on the table, which nobody claimed. He was asked if it was his, and said no. Then they said, let us put it to the cards: there was already a guinea. The Duchess, in an air of grandeur said, as there was gold for the groom of the chambers, the sweeper of the room might have the silver, and brushed it off the table. The Pecquigny took this to himself, though I don't believe meaned; and complained to the whole town of it, with large comments, at his return. It is silly to tell you Such silly stories, but in your situation it ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... thou concern thyself?" jeered an old watchman who stood a spectator of the scene. "All that thou cookest will be given to the sweeper's family. Who will eat of thy cooking tonight when the child is ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... German and Italian towns where she had been chiefly educated; the rest she was satisfied to imagine. Above all, she loved to charm those with whom she associated—loved it in a half-unconscious way. Were it to a poor blind beggar woman, or a little crossing sweeper, she would speak as gently and modulate her voice as carefully as to the most brilliant partner or the greatest lady. This might be tenderness of nature, or the profound instinct to win liking and admiration. As ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... a rule of the Whatcheer House that a vacated room was subjected to a "thorough cleaning." Translated this meant a run over the floor with a carpet sweeper and a change of sheets. The door of No. 19 had been left unlocked, and while Mayer sat in the office conning the paper, Jim with the necessary rags and brooms was putting No. 19 in shape for the next tenant. An inside bolt on the door made him secure against interruption, and the bed drawn ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... obeyed and flattered them, for twenty years! By the Gospel, it was black ingratitude that the son of Costantin should be set apart for their priesthood, be made an Englishman, a grand khawajah, whilst Iskender was offered employment—mark the kindness!—as a scullion and a sweeper in their house—Iskender, who had been their ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... an Easter ball, and its reception-rooms thronged by its own exclusive set, and one of its charming and accomplished daughters melting a select party to tears by her pathetic recitation about a little crossing sweeper. ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... partner's washing, scrubbing, mending, and cooking, and saw no degradation in it, was somewhat inconsistently irritated by menial functions in men, and although he gave extravagantly to waiters, and threw a dollar to the crossing-sweeper, there was always a certain shy avoidance of them in his manner. Coming from the theatre one night Uncle Billy was, however, seriously concerned by one of these crossing-sweepers turning hastily before them and being knocked down by a passing carriage. The man rose and ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... holidays are drawing nigh, And that to-morrow's sun begins the week, Which will abound with store of ale and cake, With hams of bacon, and with powder'd beef, Stuff d to give field-itinerants relief. Then I, who have within these precincts kept, And ne'er beyond the chimney-sweeper's stept, Will take a loose, and venture to be seen, Since 'twill be Sunday, upon Shanks's green; There, with erected looks and phrase sublime, To talk of unity of place and time, And with much malice, mix'd with little ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... yet invaded by the revolutionizing influence of the railway, and consequently the dak bungalows are still kept up in form to provide travellers with accommodation. Chowkeedar, punkah-wallah, and sweeper are in regular attendance, and one can usually obtain curried rice, chicken, dhal, and chuppatties. An official regulation of prices is posted conspicuously in the bungalow: For room and charpoy, Rs 1; dinner, Rs 1-8; ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... us all die knows that there is far too much of that battle, but we do not, and so continue worshipping the knife that cuts and the wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast sweeper worships Lal-Beg the Glorified Broom that is the incarnation of his craft. But the sweeper has sense enough not to kill himself, and to be proud of it, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... mercy to get out of these stiff and starched clothes; but I have to be careful of them, for me tailor—bad cess to him!—will give no credit, and there's little of the riddy knocking about. Without good clothes on me back I'd be like a sweeper ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... dairyman, the latter would simply pretend not to see him. Or the rule that he must not enter a hut, if women were within, would be circumvented by simply removing from the dwelling the three emblems of womanhood, the pounder, the sieve, and the sweeper; whereupon his "face was saved." Now wherefore all this lack of earnestness? Dr. Rivers thinks that too much ritual was the reason. I agree; but would venture to add, "too much negative ritual." A religion that is all dodging must produce ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... common rumor is that at night he leaves his body lifeless in a crypt in that Tirthanker temple and flies to heaven, where he fortifies himself with fresh magic. But I know where he goes by night. There comes to me with boils a one-legged sweeper who cleans a black panther's cage. The panther took his other leg. He sleeps in a cage beside the panther's, and it is a part of his duty to turn the panther loose on intruders. It is necessary that they warn this one-legged fellow ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy

... particular, after the worry of yesterday and the day before. I hope Martha had a pleasant visit again, and that you and my mother could eat your beef-pudding. Depend upon my thinking of the chimney-sweeper as soon as I wake to-morrow. Places are secured at Drury Lane for Saturday, but so great is the rage for seeing Kean[283] that only a third and fourth row could be got; as it is in a front box, however, I hope we shall do pretty well—Shylock, a good play for Fanny—she cannot ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh

... yet more deplorable condition; another was nodding over a hearthful of battered pots, pieces of pipes, and oozings of ale. And what was all this, upon enquiry, but a carousal of seven thirsty neighbours—a goldsmith, a pilot, a smith, a miner, a chimney-sweeper, a poet, and a parson who had come to preach sobriety, and to exhibit in himself what a disgusting thing drunkenness is. The origin of the last squabble was a dispute which had arisen among them, about which of the seven loved a pipe and ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... with accounts of similar applications. The veil was removed, all mystery was at an end, and chimney-sweeping had become a favourite and chosen pursuit. There is no longer any occasion to steal boys; for boys flock in crowds to bind themselves. The romance of the trade has fled, and the chimney-sweeper of the present day, is no more like unto him of thirty years ago, than is a Fleet-street pickpocket to a Spanish brigand, or ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... was transfigured in my eyes, and virtue and wisdom beamed from every face I passed. The omnibus-horses were racers, and the drivers—were they not my brothers of the people? The very policemen looked sprightly and philanthropic. I shook hands earnestly with the crossing-sweeper of the Regent Circus, gave him my last twopence, and rushed on, like a young David, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... the son of our one-legged crossing-sweeper, and I need hardly say I owed him a great deal more than seven pounds. He had taken all our love-letters, presents and messages to and fro from morning till night for years past and was a ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... light hammer informed him that the indefatigable Pole was still at work. In truth, old Paul was bending copper tubing—for a firm which said that he had no equal at the task and paid him a wage which would have been despised by a crossing-sweeper. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... wheels often become so badly worn and streched that they fail to grip the carpet firmly enough to run the sweeper. To remedy this, procure some rubber tape a little wider than the rims of the old wheels, remove the old rubber tires and wind the tape on the rims to the proper thickness. Trim the edges with a sharp knife and rub on ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... master went up, and was so won over by Miss Galindo's merry ways, and sharp insight into the mysteries of his various kinds of business (he was a mason, chimney-sweeper, and ratcatcher), that he came home and abused his wife the next time she called the duck the name by which ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell

... a 'sweeper,' children, His deeds all unnoticed, unknown; Yet I think he is one of the heroes God sees and will ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... that hail of fire steamed a little mine sweeper. She looked for all the world like a tugboat. She had a single gun mounted in her bow, and one or two amidships. She had no armor and a rifle bullet probably would have pierced her sides with ease, but she pounded straight toward us; the water ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... on my list, was a lad some twelve years old. His father was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench instead of a cart, before he died. So he sent him to my office as student at law, errand boy, and cleaner and sweeper, at the rate of one dollar a week. He had a little desk to himself, but he did not use it much. Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells of various sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth the whole noble science of the law was contained in a nut-shell. ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville

... more in many churches. We have a black-gowned verger in our towns; a humble temple-sweeper in our villages. The only civil right which he retains is that the prospectors of new railways are obliged to deposit their plans and maps with him, and well do I remember the indignation of my own parish clerk when the plans of a ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... much easier to carry a carpet sweeper if you take hold near the sweeper part than it is if you take hold at ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne

... work for another man called Shumooshag, and to work with Nagish, and with Gasis, and with Ghubar, and with Gushir, and every day working with someone. They were jealous of my having him. 'Odis the sweeper and Abu Butran the stoker, and everyone wanted to have him. In vain I corrected him, but he would not abide corrected and ceased not to do thus until I killed him in the ruin, and I have delivered myself from the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... estate, partly in St. Giles's and Bloomsbury parishes, and partly in that of St. Pancras. Baltimore House, built, towards the northeast of Bedford House, by Lord Baltimore, in 1763, appears to have been the only erection since Strype's survey to this period, with the exception of a chimney-sweeper's cottage still further north, and part of which is still to be seen in Rhodes's Mews, Little Guildford Street. In 1800, Bedford House was demolished entirely; which with its offices and gardens, had been the site where the noble family ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various

... tear his clothes getting birds' nests, and was always playing with a tame bear his father kept. Mopstaff fell in love with one of his father's maids, and used to help her to clean the house. Broomstaff was a chimney-sweeper. The Mopstaffs and Broomstaffs are naturally as civil people as ever went out of doors; but alas! if they once get into ill hands, they knock down all before them. Pilgrimstaff run away from his friends, and went strolling ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... with little tunnels, coated with the dirty clothes of the caterpillars. Flannelly lines ran through the honey-stores, the pollen-larders, the foundations, and, worst of all, through the babies in their cradles, till the Sweeper Guards spent half their time tossing out useless little corpses. The lines ended in a maze of sticky webbing on the face of the comb. The caterpillars could not stop spinning as they walked, and as they walked everywhere, they smarmed and garmed everything. Even where it did not hamper ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... catalogue of nationalities at the Exhibition ought to be somewhat abridged, and not wholly founded upon the variety it presents to the eye; especially as in London, too, we may remember Punch's crossing-sweeper, who, being dressed in Hindoo garb, begged from a passer-by with, "Take pity on ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... was always writing to the Earl of Lollipop, and signing himself his son. The men called him My Lord. He was made to black down the rigging, notwithstanding, and polish up the pots and pans. He was found at last to be a chimney-sweeper's son." ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... Burning with impatience to discuss with the great MacGrawler the feasibility of his project, he quickened his pace almost into a run, and in a very few minutes, having only overthrown one chimney-sweeper and two apple-women by the way, he arrived at the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... for sanity is of no further use to you," said Paul. "Tell them to anyone you can get to believe you—tell the crossing-sweeper and the policemen, tell your grandmother, tell the horse-marines—it will amuse them. Only, you shall tell them on the other side of my front door. Shall I call anyone ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty; The endless soot[532] bestows a tint far deeper Than can be hid by altering his shirt; he Retains the sable stains of the dark creeper, At least some twenty-nine do out of thirty, In all their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... of "The Maid and the Magpie;" the Mac. Edit. does not specify the "Tayr" (any bird) but the Bresl. Edit. has Ak'ak, a pie. The true Magpie (C. Pica) called Buzarai (?) and Zaghzaghan Abu Massah (the Sweeper, from its tail) is found on the Libanus and Anti-Libanus (Unexplored Syria ii. 77-143), but I never saw it in other parts of Syria or in Arabia. It is completely ignored by the Reverend Mr. Tristram in his painfully ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... your lip! Why didn't you come out when you was ordered, instead o' keeping us awake all night? You're no better than my own barrack-sweeper, you white-'eaded old polyanthus! ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling

... two bronzed Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours. Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... emphatically, no. Make what he likes of himself. A crossing sweeper, if he fancies that. Buy him a crossing and a broom, ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... into their bellies. Blood is drawn from the guts to the brain. Though the picture be the veriest mess, the light and movement cause the beholder to do a little reptilian thinking. After a day's work a street-sweeper enters the place, heavy as King Log. A ditch-digger goes in, sick and surly. It is the state of the body when many men drink themselves into insensibility. But here the light is as strong in the eye as whiskey in the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... it—but d'you think he'll believe? Never! Never!] "Our food is cooked for us according to our creeds—Sikh, or Brahmin, or Mussulman and all the rest—When a man dies he is also buried according to his creed. Though he has been a groom or a sweeper, he is buried like some great land-owner. Do not let such matters trouble you henceforth. Living or dying, all is done in accordance with the ordinance of our faiths. Some low-caste men, such as sweepers, counting upon the ignorance of the doctors ...
— The Eyes of Asia • Rudyard Kipling

... North American continent with a dog-whip, it is advantageous to have some knowledge of the game's habits. Mr. Harrington Surtaine's first error lay in expecting to find the editorial staff of a morning newspaper on duty in the early forenoon. So much a sweeper, emerging from a pile of dust, communicated to him across a railing, further volunteering that three o'clock would be a well-chosen hour for return, as the boss would be less pressed upon by engagements then, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the other he clutched at one of the branches. He caught it, and the next moment was unexpectedly ducked overhead in the icy water. He came up gasping, and then understood. The tree was what in the voyageur's nomenclature is known as a "sweeper." Still held by its roots it bobbed up and down with the current, and the extra strain of his weight and the girl's had sunk it deeper in the water. It still moved up and down, and he had not finished spluttering when a new danger asserted ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... London simply because, albeit "unfriendly," it yet appeared to be the only place in the wide world where our poor little talents could earn us a few shillings a week to live on. Music and literature! but I fancy the nearest crossing-sweeper did better, and could afford to give himself a more generous dinner every day. It occasionally happened that an article sent to some magazine was not returned, and always after so many rejections to ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... cook steal a moiety of everything that passed through his hands—every one in that black underworld stealing, lying, back-biting, cheating, intriguing (and all meanwhile strictly and stoutly religious, even the sweeper-descended Goanese cook, the biggest thief of all, purging his Christian soul on Sunday mornings by Confession, and fortifying himself against the temptations of the Evil One ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... the wind; a black cat sat in a patch of sunshine on the path washing itself; somebody opened a lower window, and there was a noise of sweeping, presently made indistinguishable by the chorale sung by the sweeper, no doubt Marie, in a pious, Good Friday mood. "Lob Gott ihr Christen allzugleich," chanted Marie, keeping time with her broom. Her voice was loud and monotonous, but Anna listened with a smile, and would have liked to join in, and ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... straw, with a red-turbaned, blue dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry him ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... the soul made clean, and fit for the King of glory to inhabit. Indeed, this was a most instructive emblem. O that my heart might be thus cleansed, thought Christian, and then I verily believe I could bear my burden with great ease to the end of my pilgrimage; but I have had enough of that fierce sweeper, the Law. The Lord deliver ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... I'd like to be the sweeper in that establishment. But still I don't get you. Where do ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... a little street sweeper, you know, Barefooted, and ragged as one could be; But blue were his eyes as the far-off skies, And a brave-hearted laddie was Tommy Magee. But it chanced on the morning of Valentine's Day Our little street sweeper felt lonely and sad; "For there's no fun," thought he, "for ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... decomposition. As usual, none of the natives would defile themselves by touching the dead body. I accordingly gave orders that one of the elephants should drag it about a mile down wind away from the camp. Lord Mayo was brought to the spot, and the sweeper, being of a low caste, attached a very thick rope to the hind legs of the ox; the other end being made fast to the elephant's pad in such a manner as to form traces. The elephant did not exhibit the slightest interest in the proceeding, and everything was completed, the body ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee

... into the Strand, mingling with all the noise and bustle of a crowded street, where by turns were to be discovered, justling each other, parsons, lawyers, apothecaries, projectors, excisemen, organists, picture-sellers, bear and monkey-leaders, fiddlers and bailiffs. The barber and the chimney-sweeper were however always observed to be careful in avoiding the touch of each other, as if contamination ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... element, and sang and danced with great success, for the arrack was in his veins, and at such times he could be the antipodes of his morose self. His dancing was much applauded. But there was Bhuggoo, the sweeper, from the city, who had a reputation for dancing, and was in great request at weddings in consequence, and he danced against Piroo, and so elegant and ingenious were his contortions that he was voted the better. ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various

... another was in a yet more deplorable condition; another was nodding over a hearthful of battered pots, pieces of pipes, and oozings of ale. And what was all this, upon enquiry, but a carousal of seven thirsty neighbours—a goldsmith, a pilot, a smith, a miner, a chimney-sweeper, a poet, and a parson who had come to preach sobriety, and to exhibit in himself what a disgusting thing drunkenness is. The origin of the last squabble was a dispute which had arisen among them, about ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... force was divided into three columns. The center column was led by the Vindictive, with the Brigadier second and the Iris in tow, followed by the five blocking ships and the paddle mine-sweeper Lingfield, escorting five motor launches for taking off the surplus steaming parties of the blocking ships. The starboard column was led by the Warwick, flying the flag of Admiral Keyes, followed by the Phoebe and North Star, which three ships were to cover the Vindictive from ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake

... have to consider wives and kids as well as V.C.s. The problem of getting the Fleet through or of getting submarines through is a problem of clearing away the mines. With a more powerfully engined type of mine-sweeper and regular naval commanders and crews to man them, the business would be easy. But as things actually stand there is real cause for ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... would only have been rigid justice if I had done so, but I could not bring myself to do it. I had long determined that he should have a show for his life if he chose to take advantage of it. Among the many billets which I have filled in America during my wandering life, I was once janitor and sweeper out of the laboratory at York College. One day the professor was lecturing on poisions, [25] and he showed his students some alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from some South American arrow poison, and which ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Every profession has its unpresentable aspects, which ought not to be seen by out-siders. Think of a sculptor's studio and of the sculptor himself when he is modelling a large figure or group in the clay. He might be a bricklayer or a road-sweeper if you judge by his appearance. This is the tomb I ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... themselves loop hounds. They know everybody by their first name and sometimes they've got all of $6.50 in their pocket at one time. And if you're out some evening with a friend—a regular fella, they pop in the next day and say, 'Hello, Peewee, who was that street sweeper I see you palling with last night? Oh, he wasn't! Well, I had him pegged either as a street sweeper or ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... drawled out in cool, hard tones: "I might remark that that young lady is, I might persoom to say, a friend of mine, which I'm prepared to back up in my best style, and if any blanked blanked son of a street sweeper has any remark to make, here's ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor

... use a patent sweeper daily in rooms which are occupied for sewing and other work, and she says that she does not find it necessary to give her rooms more than a light sweeping oftener than once in six weeks. Of course it would be different if ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various

... was exceptional. He had never before seen such an expression on her face. And since it is always the unusual which alarms, Soames was alarmed. He ate his savoury, and hurried the maid as she swept off the crumbs with the silver sweeper. When she had left the room, he filled his glass with wine ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... street sweeper, who had been leaning on his broom at the curb ever since the onlookers had reached the sidewalk, decided to move on at last. With infinite slowness his foot came up. He poised, swung forward, then, the universal paralysis ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West

... him with equal tenderness when he has failed, and at all times spurring him to live up to the ideal his wife has set for him. To stay aloof from his work inasmuch as it would annoy him, yet to be adviser emeritus, whether the matter involved hiring a new sweeper-out or moving the whole plant to the end of the world. Someone who ministered to the needs of the strong man's very soul in unsuspected, often unconscious and unthanked fashion; such a trifle as a rose-shaded lamp for tired eyes; a funny bundle ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... still to be found within the sound of Bow Bells and Westminster. Those of the Strand and Fleet Street, of the Borough, Bermondsey, Southwark southward of the river, and Bloomsbury in the north, form that debatable ground which is ever busy with hurrying feet. The street-sweeper, though, has mostly disappeared, and the pavements of Whitehall are more evenly laid than were the Halls of Hampton ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... Mountjoy with the deepest awe. It was not at first borne in upon her to believe that Captain Mountjoy Scarborough, an officer in the Coldstreams, and the acknowledged heir to the Tretton property, had vanished away as a stray street-sweeper might do, or some milliner's lowest work-woman. But at last there were advertisements in all the newspapers and placards on all the walls, and Mrs. Mountjoy did understand that the captain was gone. She could as yet hardly believe that ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... must learn to be sweeper to all the beasts of the jungle, and you must serve them for twelve years." So for twelve years King Burtal cleared the grass and kept the jungle clean for all the creatures in it—cows, sheep, goats, tigers, cats, bears. Sometimes he stayed in one part of the jungle, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous

... character for sanity is of no further use to you," said Paul. "Tell them to anyone you can get to believe you—tell the crossing-sweeper and the policemen, tell your grandmother, tell the horse-marines—it will amuse them. Only, you shall tell them on the other side of my front door. Shall I call anyone to ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... better, there was some lamentation. In temperament they were mere children requiring a father. But of one venerable and aged man I would like to record a few things. He was a gaunt, tall, grey-bearded fellow as thin as a stick-insect, and he performed the most menial of all services, being a sweeper by caste. But what he did was done with passionate devotion. He had seen service in France and spoke a few curious French words. Troops on active service in France certainly are taught some strange phrases. All day he toiled with his kerosene tins and brushes and when he ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne

... is only a 'sweeper,' children, His deeds all unnoticed, unknown; Yet I think he is one of the heroes God sees and will mark ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... lay in the center of the table. Other knives were thrust into belts or held in the hands of the men. A fat man in the yellow sarong of a cook stood frozen in the act of handing a knife to a tall one-eyed sweeper. ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer

... importance to a poet of an intellectual insight into all-important pursuits and "seemly arts." But it is not by the mere intellect that we can take in the daily occupations of mankind: we must sympathize with them, and see them in their human relations. A chimney-sweeper, qua chimney-sweeper, is not very sentimental: it is in himself that he is ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... which I do not use, and rum, which I do not drink. He accepted sweetmeats from me. And he called me a name that would make the sahib gulp, a word that I suppose he had picked up from a barrack-sweeper on the Bengal side of India. Then he slapped me on the back, and after that sat with his arm around me while the entertainment lasted. When we left the tent he swore roundly at a newcomer to the front for not saluting me, who am not entitled ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy

... the arbitrariness of things. The thirteen passed pitilessly on. Mr. Curtenty freed the gander from the coiling wire, and picked it up, but, finding it far too heavy to carry, he handed it to a Corporation road-sweeper. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... I returned early to the "Hotel La Perla." Its entire force was waiting for me. This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... the same time to mention, that Hugh rarely made use of a crossing on a muddy day, without finding a half-penny somewhere about him for the sweeper. He would rather walk through oceans of mud, than cross at the natural place when he had no coppers — especially if he had ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... however, discovered that he had translated from the French a "Rambler" of Johnson's, which had been but a month before taken from the English; and thinking it right to make him his personal excuses, he went next day, and found our friend all covered with soot like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the 'Alchymist,' making aether. "Come, come," says Dr. Johnson, "dear Mur, the story is black enough now; and it was a very happy day for me ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... our people have thus come up from the bottom. The head of the factory started as a machinist. The man in charge of the big River Rouge plant began as a patternmaker. Another man overseeing one of the principal departments started as a sweeper. There is not a single man anywhere in the factory who did not simply come in off the street. Everything that we have developed has been done by men who have qualified themselves with us. We fortunately did not inherit any traditions and we are not founding any. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... heroes of our tale had been originally—before his promotion—a chimney-sweeper, it may be only appropriate to offer a passing word on the genial subject of soot. Without speculating on its origin and parentage, whether derived from the cooking of a Christmas dinner, or the production of the beautiful colors and odors of exotic plants ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... shakes his head and says firmly, "An old man, seventy-five come Martinmass knows more o' life than a young chap, stands ter reason"; besides, his epitome of the town life he knows nothing of was a just one as far as it went; and his own son is the sweeper of a Holborn crossing, and many other things that he should not be; but that is the ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless

... of perspiration was out over her face, sparkling forth again after each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women into a tyranny of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... water, and its windows lit up for an Easter ball, and its reception-rooms thronged by its own exclusive set, and one of its charming and accomplished daughters melting a select party to tears by her pathetic recitation about a little crossing sweeper. ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... said Elizabeth, 'that Knecht Ruprecht is the German terrifier of naughty children, the same as the chimney-sweeper in England, or Coeur de Lion in Palestine, or the Duke of Wellington ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge

... went up, and was so won over by Miss Galindo's merry ways, and sharp insight into the mysteries of his various kinds of business (he was a mason, chimney-sweeper, and ratcatcher), that he came home and abused his wife the next time she called the duck the name by which he himself had ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell

... quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... After the hard day's shearing, passing the joke along: The 'ringer' that shore a hundred, as they never were shorn before, And the novice who, toiling bravely, had tommy-hawked half a score, The tarboy, the cook, and the slushy, the sweeper that swept the board, The picker-up, and the penner, with the rest of the shearing horde. There were men from the inland stations where the skies like a furnace glow, And men from the Snowy River, the land of the frozen snow; There were swarthy Queensland ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... ingratitude that the son of Costantin should be set apart for their priesthood, be made an Englishman, a grand khawajah, whilst Iskender was offered employment—mark the kindness!—as a scullion and a sweeper in their house—Iskender, who had been their favourite ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... be freer and more natural than the streets outside. A man goes by gesticulating as though he practiced for a speech. A woman adjusts her stocking on the coping below the fence with the freedom of a country road. A street sweeper, patched to his office, tunes his slow work to fit the quiet surroundings. Boys skate by or cut swirls upon the pavement in the privilege ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... ran to the thornbush where Darzee was singing a song of triumph at the top of his voice. The news of Nag's death was all over the garden, for the sweeper had thrown ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... "I would rather trust a crossing-sweeper with an appreciation of music than a man who comes from a public school." We agree. The former is much more likely to have been a professional ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various

... half anger, half ecstasy, Pinchas galloped toward the fiddling and banging orchestra. A harmless sweeper in his path was herself swept aside. But her fallen broom tripped up the runner. He fell with an echoing clamour, to which his clattering cane contributed, and clouds of dust arose and gathered where erst ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... saucers stacked on the pantry shelves, the cups hung neatly on the appointed hooks in the cupboard, and the silver put away in the sideboard drawer. Then Mrs. Fletcher turned her attention to the tidying of the house. She made innumerable circles and criss-crosses with the carpet sweeper over the parlor rug, and was dusting the big rocker by the bay window when a chance glance up the street revealed two small figures playing far at one end of the strip of macadam. Her son, without doubt, was one of them. No one else wore a cap tilted back at quite so ridiculous ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely

... his life the back of an anarchist that must have been the whole extent of his connection with the underworld. He was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, and he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand, from a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague man in his club, or even, perhaps, from a Minister of State met at some ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... household equipment which keep causing unnecessary pain, labor, and irritation: that leaky faucet, that worn-out washing machine, that broken light switch, that asthmatic vacuum sweeper, that torn rug, that decrepit snow shovel, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... She no longer wants to be the beast of burden of the house. She considers it sufficient work to give many years of her life to the rearing of her children. She no longer wants to be the cook, the mender, the sweeper of the house! And, owing to American women taking the lead in obtaining their claims, there is a general complaint of the dearth of women who will condescend to domestic work in the United States. My lady prefers art, politics, literature, or the gaming tables; ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... little beast, but a slug-like crawler with its eyes barely opened and its paws lacking strength or direction—a kitten that ought to have been in a basket with its mamma. Lone Sahib caught it by the scruff of its neck, handed it over to the sweeper to be drowned, and fined the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... himself with giving a plain Answer to every Article that Trim had laid to his Charge, and appealed to his Neighbours who remembered the whole Affair;—and as he knew there was never any Thing to be got in wrestling with a Chimney-Sweeper,—he was going to take Leave of Trim for ever.—But, hold,—the Mob by this Time had got round them, and their High Mightinesses insisted upon having Trim tried upon the Spot.—Trim was accordingly tried; and, after a full ...
— A Political Romance • Laurence Sterne

... their superior that entire reliance might be placed on their fidelity, and that they knew of three or four other men in Leyden "as firm as trees and fierce as lions," whom they would engage—a fustian worker, a tailor, a chimney-sweeper, and one or two other mechanics. The looseness and utter recklessness with which this hideous conspiracy was arranged excites amazement. Van Dyk gave the two brothers 100 pistoles in gold—a coin about equal to a guinea—for their immediate reward as well as for that of the comrades to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the awful Sunday solitude spread grimly humid all around him. He next entered a street with some closed shops in it; and here, at last, some consoling signs of human life attracted his attention. He now saw the crossing-sweeper of the district (off duty till church came out) smoking a pipe under the covered way that led to a mews. He detected, through half closed shutters, a chemist's apprentice yawing over a large book. He passed a navigator, an ostler, and two costermongers wandering wearily backwards ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... In the old days all five sitting-rooms had been in use. Now four of them were closed, and the drawing-room was everybody's meeting place. Dolly was there working a carpet-sweeper languidly. ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

... know," I answered; "I know there is the sort of idea that it is funny, but somehow it does not strike me more with reference to woman than to ourselves. I mean it does not seem more incongruous than that a man like yourself and an offal sweeper belong to ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... making its way over the long sloping roof in front of them. In the summer, when the sparrows built their nests in the tall chimneys on either side, and were perpetually flying to and fro, twittering, caressing, quarrelling—this was quite a society. When a chimney-sweeper once thrust out his black face from one of these chimneys, and shouted aloud to testify the accomplishment of his ascent, it was an event that brought a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... shop was as truly in a state of slavery as the negro who at that time was working in the fields of Georgia or Carolina. In a sense, of course, it may be said that every one who works for his living, from a Cabinet Minister to a crossing-sweeper, is a slave, for he has to conform to certain rules, and unless he works he will be deprived of many advantages which he wishes to acquire, and may even be reduced to a state of starvation. But speculations of this sort may be left to the philosopher and the sociologist. ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... and sage, Hark to the roar of War! Poet, professor and circus clown, Chimney-sweeper and fop o' the town, Into the pot and be melted down: ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service

... '"The chimney-sweeper's daughter Sue As I have heard declare, O, Although she's neither sock nor shoe Will curl and ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... have it," he began with a laugh, which despite the weariness and anxiety of the past twenty-four hours had forced itself to his lips, "I have been sweeper and man-of-all-work at the Temple for the past few ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... allurements. She was now Lady Bountiful: having looked after the simple cares of her household she was now ready to cast her eyes abroad, and relieve in so far as she might the distress around her. The first object of charity she encountered was an old crossing-sweeper. She addressed him in a matter-of-fact way which was intended to conceal her fluttering self-consciousness. She inquired whether he had a wife; whether he had any children; whether they were not rather poor. And having ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... amount of remuneration and perquisites to be received by the latter (among which regulations I find the following: "Let no man receive anything who has not purchased the office he holds"); the order of precedence of everybody, from the dean of the Sacred College to the last sweeper who enters the conclave with their Eminences,—all subject to minute rules, which would require, one would imagine, a lifetime to make one's self master of, and which, curious as some of them are, it is impossible to find place for here. We must ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... the third on my list, was a lad, some twelve years old. His, father was a carman, ambitious of seeing his son on the bench instead of a cart, before he died. So he sent him to my office, as student at law, errand-boy, cleaner and sweeper, at the rate of one dollar a week. He had a little desk to himself, but he did not use it much. Upon inspection, the drawer exhibited a great array of the shells of various sorts of nuts. Indeed, to this quick-witted youth, the whole noble science ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... understanding this distinction, "that I was not at home when you called upon me. Pray, how do you like my dress? I assure you I think it's the prettiest here. But do you know there's the most shocking thing in the world happened in the next room! I really believe there's a common chimney-sweeper got in! I assure you it's enough to frighten one to death, for every time he moves the soot smells so you can't think; quite real soot, I assure you! only conceive how nasty! I declare I wish with all my heart it would ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney

... now, and in spite of the darkness, wasted very little time in reaching the ravine. All was very quiet. The Turkish guns, which had been firing probably at some mine-sweeper, were silent again. The only sounds of war were an occasional boom far to the south where the British and French faced the Turks entrenched on the ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges

... and found that there were indeed five thousand there—five thousand sheep and several Arab shepherds. On the opposite bank John had a machine-gun, with which he sniped those who approached the water. He killed mules, and wounded several bhisties[28] and a sweeper. There were also people sniping with rifles, and the Indian regiments had casualties. On our side, the cavalry brought in a prisoner. We had the young gentleman caught at night, and one other; the 19th Brigade took a fourth prisoner. So we abandoned the battle, had breakfast ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... says an inscription found in this very theatre [300:1], though not yet set up at the time when the 'town-clerk' spoke. So again, where the same speaker describes the city of Ephesus as the 'neocoros,' the 'temple sweeper,' or 'sacristan of the great goddess Artemis,' we find in these inscriptions for the first time a direct example of this term so applied. Though the term 'neocoros' in itself is capable of general application, yet as a matter of fact, when used of Ephesus on coins and inscriptions (as ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... live, the height of my ambition, small though it be, is only to find my place, though it were but as a sweeper of chimneys. If I dare wish—if I dare choose, it would be only this—to regenerate one little parish in the whole world . . . To do that, and die, for aught I care, without ever being recognised as the author of my own ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people's heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last word was uttered—'Remember.' And think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... to the first crossing-sweeper or match-seller she chanced across after a successful sitting at bridge. This afternoon she had come out of the fray some fifteen shillings to the bad, but she gave two pennies to a crossing- sweeper ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... American, the sweeper of Broadway, if there be such a citizen, believe in this perfection of equality amongst men as a fundamental axiom of the rights of man? Place a black sweeper of crossings in juxtaposition, and the question will very soon solve itself. Why, the free and enlightened ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... and your time is all your own; ergo, you're the very man for this business. The thing is to be done: accept that for a certainty. It's only a question of time. Indeed, when you look at life philosophically, what is there on earth that is not a question of time? Give the crossing-sweeper between this and Chancery-lane time enough, and he might develop into a Rothschild. He might want nine hundred years or so to do it in; but there's no doubt he could do it, if you gave ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... the rest of the tradesmen jealous, as well as Bull and Frog; they hearing of the quarrel, were glad of an opportunity of joining against old Lewis Baboon, provided that Bull and Frog would bear the charges of the suit. Even lying Ned, the chimney-sweeper of Savoy, and Tom, the Portugal dustman, put in their claims, and the cause was put into the hands of Humphry ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot

... Say that the holidays are drawing nigh, And that to-morrow's sun begins the week, Which will abound with store of ale and cake, With hams of bacon, and with powder'd beef, Stuff d to give field-itinerants relief. Then I, who have within these precincts kept, And ne'er beyond the chimney-sweeper's stept, Will take a loose, and venture to be seen, Since 'twill be Sunday, upon Shanks's green; There, with erected looks and phrase sublime, To talk of unity of place and time, And with much malice, mix'd with little satire, Explode the wits ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... be defiled. According to the old rule, if a Brahman touches a man of an impure caste, as a Chamar (tanner) or Basor (basket-maker), he should bathe and change his loin-cloth, and if he touches a sweeper he should change his sacred thread. Now, however, educated Brahmans usually wear white cotton trousers and black or brown coats of cloth, alpaca or silk with the normal allowance of buttons, and European shoes and boots which they ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... he flung the purse out of the window to a sweeper in the courtyard, and said to his grandson, 'Then they do not teach you ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... his pressure, and discharge their pollen on him. Now, in the beach pea, and similarly in the vetches, the style is hairy on its inner side, to brush out the pollen on the visitor who sets the automatic sweeper in motion as he alights and moves about. So perfectly have many members of this interesting family adapted their structure to the requirements of insects, and so implicitly do they rely on their ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... ships in the harbour, and at Spithead, and the ponds dragged in the neighbourhood, to no effect, it was concluded that the Gipsies had stolen him. The boy was found a few years afterwards, at Kingston-upon-Thames, apprenticed to a chimney sweeper. He had been enticed away by a person who had given him sweet-meats; but not ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb

... their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with them. These sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one noble lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a street-sweeper. Conte che non conta, non conta niente, [Footnote: A count who doesn't count (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering Italian proverb; and it would be little less than miraculous if a nobility like that of ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... the woman, Jenny, we found her in her poor little cottage, nursing a vagrant boy called Jo, a crossing-sweeper, who had tramped down from London, and was tramping he didn't know where. Jenny, who had known him in London, had found him in a corner of the town, burning with fever, and taken him home to care for, Seeing that he was very ill, and fearing her husband's anger at her having harbored him, when it ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... bless my heart, the last voyage I had a fellow who was always writing to the Earl of Lollipop, and signing himself his son. The men called him My Lord. He was made to black down the rigging, notwithstanding, and polish up the pots and pans. He was found at last to be a chimney-sweeper's son." ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... Besides the general ugliness, the household presented the picture of misery, for the 'scopatore santissimo' and his numerous family were obliged to live on two hundred Roman crowns a year, and as there are no perquisites attached to the office of apostolic sweeper, he was compelled to furnish all needs out of this slender sum. In spite of that Momolo was a most generous man. As soon as he saw me seated he told me he should have liked to give me a good supper, but there was only ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... nothing, but she looked round the untidy rooms, where everything that would hold it had a linen cover with a Cluny-lace edge—all of them soiled and wrinkled. She watched Tufik, chanting about the plains of Lebanon and shoving the carpet-sweeper with a bang against her best furniture; and, with Hannah's salad in mind, she sniffed a warning odor from the kitchen that told of more Syrian experiments with her digestion. Tish surrendered: that morning she wrote to Hannah that Tufik was going back to Syria, and to come and bring ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... carpet-sweeper wheels often become so badly worn and streched that they fail to grip the carpet firmly enough to run the sweeper. To remedy this, procure some rubber tape a little wider than the rims of the old wheels, remove the old rubber tires and wind the tape on the rims ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... in great part an old-fashioned French city. The France that survives there and all through the province is not the France of to-day, but the France of before the great Revolution. The stranger seeking his way through the streets had better, in most cases, question the first crossing-sweeper he meets in French, and not in English. The English residents are all expected to speak French. But the English residents and the French live on terms of the most cordial fraternity. Little quarrels, local quarrels of race and ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy









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