"Cast-off" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shoulders. It was not strange that he looked pale and haggard; for he had passed through three judicial ordeals since the last sunset, besides being scourged with the flagellum horrible and exposed to the rude buffeting of the midnight guard. He had been clothed in the cast-off purple of the Roman procurator and wore a derisive crown of thorns. But, as he issued from the Hall of Judgment, such was his commanding presence that the multitude was hushed and separated ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... came into Tode's head with that suit of new clothes with which he presently arrayed himself. Not particularly new, either. Tom Roberts was in college, and they were his cast-off attire, worn before he, too, in his way became a butterfly; and he would not have been seen in them—no, nor have had it enter into the mind of one of his college mates that he ever had been seen in them, for a considerable sum ...
— Three People • Pansy
... once offered to sell me a figurehead he happens to have in his yard somewhere. He got Smith, my mate, to talk to me about it. 'Mr. Smith,' says I, 'don't you know me better than that? Am I the sort that would pick up with another man's cast-off figurehead?' And after all these years too! The way some of you ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... ceremonies. For when Miss Kemp went to see the palace of the King all the decoration she saw there was a simple table and chair. A Tibetan kitchen was a very popular slide. In that country they apparently use a golf-bag to brew tea in, and cast-off bicycle wheels for plates. There prevails in Tibet some element of democracy, for Miss Kemp's cook was also a J.P., a Civil Servant, and held other such offices of fame. One of her assistants was a positive marvel—a human ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... court-yard, I was so strongly impressed with the favour and mercies of God Almighty, on remembering how I was sent away the last time I saw this house; the leave I took; the dangers I had encountered; a poor cast-off servant girl; and now returning a joyful wife, and the mistress, through his favour, of the noble house I was turned out of; that I was hardly able to support the joy I felt in my mind on the occasion. He saw how much I was moved, and tenderly ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... impossible, was it not, to take a child who had lived in a den of iniquity in among my own children? And I considered myself very kind and good, because he was a care, not to me, but to the servants in the kitchen, and because not I but the cook fed him, and because I gave him some cast-off clothing to wear. The boy staid a week. During that week I said a few words to him as I passed on two occasions and in the course of my strolls, I went to a shoemaker of my acquaintance, and proposed that he should take the lad as an apprentice. A peasant who was visiting me, invited him to ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Emma Taylor's voice was at this moment heard so distinctly, from the other side of the boat that Mr. Wyllys looked up from his paper, and Mr. Ellsworth smiled. It was very evident the young lady had inherited the peculiar tone of voice, and all the cast-off animation of her ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... grew slower and his shoulders drooped lower until at last his soul, which had always been strong and beautiful, passed out of his worn old body into the life beyond, and the cast-off body was buried by some villagers who felt kindly towards the old man, but who never dreamed that he had ever done any real service for them or their children. And soon his very name was forgotten. But the tiny apple ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... field was a tiny hut, hardly big enough for a shepherd's shelter. It looked as if it had been built of discarded things, scraps and fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains, by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material. ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... "if only I had known that!" He laughed. "Well, I'll leave you. Six o'clock—what's this?" as he stooped and picked up Maurice's cast-off hussar jacket. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... her! Dependency had dropped from her, like a cast-off cloak, and beside her fresh, melancholy charm, the airs and graces of a child of fashion and privilege like the little Duchess appeared almost cheap and trivial. Poor Julie! No doubt some social struggle was before her. Lady Henry was strong, after all, in this London world, and the solider ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from wearing Kedzie's cast-off clothes or from disguising as Jim's wife, but her downcast eyes revealed her bare shoulders and arms and her delicate evening gown. They had been exquisitely appropriate to night and night lights, but they were ghastly ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... chains Clipt of the means of self-revenge on those Who lay on him what they deserve. And I, Who taunted Heaven a little while ago With pouring all its wrath upon my head— Alas! like him who caught the cast-off husk Of what another bragg'd of feeding on, Here's one that from the refuse of my sorrows Could gather all the banquet he ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... wavered. She drew out her hanky, muttering 'how I hate him!'—and blew her pretty nose. Then she clenched her hands and set her teeth. Then she went lax again. Then—oh, dear! he had even insulted her by leaving her to pick up the cast-off ring!—for, of course, she could not leave it there for Miss Tod or ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... vanitas vanitatum [Lat.], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity^; triviality &c (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum [Lat.], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. litter, rubbish, junk, lumber, odds and ends, cast-off clothes; button top; shoddy; rags, orts^, trash, refuse, sweepings, scourings, offscourings^, waste, rubble, debris, detritus; stubble, leavings; broken meat; dregs &c (dirt) 653; weeds, tares; rubbish heap, dust hole; rudera^, deads^. fruges consumere natus [Lat.] [Horace]. &c (drone) 683 V. be ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... I was unhinged. I had been smoking too many cigarettes during these three weeks, and the vampire thought continued to flit obscenely between me and the pure seascape. I saw myself the inheritor of Trewlove's cast-off personality, his inelegancies of movement, his religious opinions, his bagginess at the knees, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tweed suit he displayed for my inspection. "Nay," I said, "I care nothing for the plague, but find me something better than the cast-off clothing of a brandy-soaked Englishman. I would rather wear the motley garb of a fellow who ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... a cast-off camp-stool, and a pair of old boots to dispose of, he instantly appropriated them as graceful souvenirs, and clasping his hands, declared with effusion that he would seat his infant upon the so-useful stool, and offer the charming ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... prostitutes of Bontoc, the cast-off mistresses of Spanish soldiers, have syphilis, or na-na. Formerly one civilian was afflicted, and at present four or five of the Constabulary soldiers ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... sorry for a married man, Harvey," said he, "as I do for a half-starved dog. I'm always going out of my way to feed some of these cast-off dogs around town, so why shouldn't I do the same for a poor devil of a husband? I'll make you comfortable until you get into Davis', but don't you ever let on to these damned women that you're a failure, or that you're strapped, ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... Long which have recently come my way would alone convince me, apart from the evidence of his record and his writings, that here was a very sterling and very independent "character" of whom much more should be known. Some day I hope to know more. Meanwhile I relate one of the stories. An appeal for cast-off clothing for the poor clergy being made, some one took the line that such an appeal was infra dig. Long smoked, pondered, and thus delivered himself: "But is it not paramount that these gentlemen should ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... strong in the deeps of the lustrous night, Cold and splendid as death if his dawn be bright; Cold as the cast-off garb that is cold as clay, Splendid and strong as ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... near our district lady who sent me to the Orphanage, for fear she should send me back. And I thought of old Sally Blackburn, who used to live next door to us in Westminster, and made a living with buying and selling cast-off clothing and she was good to us,—and when father came in very drunk, she would take us children into her little place to be out of the way. So I hunted her up; and then, Mother Agnes, I did a very wrong thing. She is old and stupid, and very poor, and I could not take food ...
— Daybreak - A Story for Girls • Florence A. Sitwell
... "that Powhatan hath a sense of humor and doth wish to show us that his coronation hath so increased his importance that his cast-off garments have perforce won new value ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... into a new province. This truly American product will probably be found to-day in every continent and nearly every country in the world, but one ventures to prophesy that Vellore is the only spot on the habitable globe where its cast-off tires have been metamorphosed into models of human organs! Every student not working over an actual mother or baby is busy performing on these home-made rubber models the operations she may some day be called to do upon ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... a time a prairie mouse busied herself all fall storing away a cache of beans. Every morning she was out early with her empty cast-off snake skin, which she filled with ground beans and dragged home ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... arrangements. He might as well have provided them for a squirrel or a magpie. The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old shoes, ribbons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of vertu, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... as that sum was spent, the Thenardiers grew accustomed to look on the little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity; and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thenardier brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest had left—a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat. Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... The robes we thus bartered did not long remain in the hands of the Jews, and there must have been a great demand for them among the belles of Mayence, for I remember a ball there at which the Empress might have seen all the ladies of a quadrille party dressed in her cast-off clothes.—I even saw German Princesses wearing them" (Memoires de ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... explore the mysteries of that dark garret. There perhaps he saw the cat, with "eyne of burning coal, crouching 'fore the mouse's hole." Doubtless in this old garret were wonderful mysteries to him, curious stores of old cast-off goods and furniture, and rats, and mice, and cobwebs. I fancied the indignation of some belligerent grandmother or aunt, who finds Willie up there watching a mouse hole, with the cat, and has him down straightway, grumbling ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... go a long way in the labourer's cottage; and with regard to clothes—it is doubtful if anything new is bought, in many families, from year's end to year's end. At "rummage sales," for a few pence, the women are now able to pick up surprising bargains in cast-off garments, which they adapt as best they can for their own or their children's wear. Economies like this, however, still hardly suffice to explain how the scanty resources are really spread out. Apart from a few cases of palpable destitution, it is not obvious that any families in the village suffer ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... didn't buy it at all! I knew you both needed something to keep you warm, so I went into a fine house and asked if they hadn't any cast-off things, and there was a young lady—she gave me this—and she was so kind. No, I didn't know at all what was in the bundle—I really didn't know, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... still. He looked so gentle, and yet so weary and weak, as he clung to the arm of his younger companion. They were not dressed like Italians, nor like any style of persons in particular, for their costume was evidently made up of cast-off garments that had seen better days. Their faces, though, were dark and thin, and there was a southern fire in the eyes of the younger man as he said at once in tolerable Swedish, "Pietro here is tired. He cannot ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... center stood the deaf and dumb child, dressed in a white frock, with a little silk mantilla over it, made from a cast-off garment belonging to one of the ladies of the circus. She wore a plain straw hat, ornamented with a morsel of narrow white ribbon, and tied under the chin with the same material. Her clear, delicate complexion was overspread by a slight ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... reminded the king "was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiation of some of his greatest judgments," passed by, and the ex-chancellor died at Rouen. He had begun his history in exile as the faithful servant of a dethroned prince; he ended it in exile, as the cast-off servant of an ungrateful monarch. As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has given us the form and color of the time. The book is in title and handling a Royalist history. Its faults are manifest: first those of partisanship; and secondly, those which spring from his absence, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... a question an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons, Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... every step I've climbed in the struggle of life, was with your face smiling on me from the past. All my hopes and ambitions I owe to you. The last message you spoke to me has been my guiding star. And when this man threw you from him as a cast-off garment—you, the beautiful queen of my soul—I would have killed him but for the fierce joy that ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... "there are tears enough in this world, and we need not deposit a few more in the heart of man. These," said he, showing the verses, "are the cast-off, useless feathers of my soul; it has moulted since then, and spread its bolder wings for eternity!" He then continued to burn and destroy, while I looked out of the broken window ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... sister was being ill-treated, and went off to Fiji to see if it was true. It was true. He stood by her, cheered her solitude, and by a great yam and banana plantation he turned the bush into a fruitful garden. The king of Fiji heard of it, went and made up matters with his cast-off wife, as he much wished the yams, which were scarce at the time, and hence the proverb: "Do you call them friends who are but friendly to the yam?" The king named the fertile spot Fitiuta, and when Taeotangaloa returned to Manu'a he changed the name ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... decked with flowers and rich with rare perfumes, And when the queen was gently laid thereon, As in sweet sleep, and the pile set aflame, The king cried out in anguish; when the sage Again appeared, and gently said, "Weep not! Seek not, O king, the living with the dead! 'Tis but her cast-off garment, not herself, That now dissolves in air. Thy loved one lives, Become thy deva,[9] who was erst thy queen." This said, he vanished, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... flush of hope that some trifling temporary help would be hers. Madame Dalmas called herself a French-woman, and signed herself "Antoinette," but she was really an English Jewess of low extraction, whose true name was Sarah Solomons. Her "profession" was to purchase—and sell—the cast-off apparel of ladies of fashion; and few of the sisterhood have carried the art of double cheating to so great a proficiency. With always a roll of bank notes in her old leathern pocket-book, and always a dirty canvas bag full of bright sovereigns in her pocket, she had ever the subtle ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... in rusty black, with a long pale face, and a countenance expressive of care and fatigue, which might either be attributed to the extent of his family or the anxiety of his feelings. His opponent appeared in a cast-off coat of the captain's—a blue coat with bright buttons; white trousers, and that description of shoes familiarly known by the appellation of 'high-lows.' There was a serenity in the open countenance of Bung—a kind of moral dignity in his confident ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the short ones. Joseph on his side was equally satisfied with the arrangement, so far as he knew it, and gave himself up to the sweet influences of fancy. He saw a glorified edition of himself, attired in my lord's cast-off garments, and engaged in the act of stretching out the laced waistcoat in the kitchen at the Hall. The prospect grew so glorious that he could not hold his own joy and gratulation. It welled over in ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... they started, Vincent leading the horse and Tony carrying the bundle of food and his cast-off uniform. The woman led them by farm roads, sometimes turning off to the right or left, but keeping her way with a certainty which showed how well she was acquainted with the country. Several times they could hear the dull sound of bodies of cavalry galloping along the roads; but this died away as ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... And now in the light it could be perceived that he bore the stamp of many years of vagabondage. He had none of the tidiness of the calculating and shrewd professional tramp. His wardrobe represented the cast-off specimens of half a dozen fashions and eras. Two factories had combined their efforts in providing shoes for his feet. As you gazed at him there passed through your mind vague impressions of mummies, wax figures, Russian exiles, and men lost on desert islands. His ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... in a stupor. Could it be that he was dead! If he had been less of an object of her thoughts, less of a motive for her labours, she could sooner have realized it. As it was, she followed his poor, cast-off, worn-out body as if she were borne along by some oppressive dream. If he were really dead, how could she ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... an impression. Let the reader imagine to himself, if he can, the effect of a sudden transition from the pomp and splendour of a great capital into a suburb of mean and narrow streets, choked up with the litter of old rags, broken furniture, and cast-off clothes hung out for sale; where are aged women asleep in their chairs,—young ones nursing infants, or, it may be, perfecting their own unfinished toilets; men, squalid and filthy, with long beards, flowing robes, and all the other ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... customary for the person kept to receive from them that keep; but if I should be a wife, all I had then was given up to the husband, and I was henceforth to be under his authority only; and as I had money enough, and needed not fear being what they call a cast-off mistress, so I had no need to give him twenty thousand pounds to marry me, which had been buying my lodging ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... o'clock he put on a gray wig and some old cast-off clothes, and walked to the door. Mrs. Bishop, a pale, weary-looking woman opened it. The poor old man requested permission to enter and rest a while, saying he was very tired with his long journey, for he had walked ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... vast, shadowy borderland where earth and heaven mingled; and gusts of wind which, as they roared by over a thousand straining trees and passed off with hoarse, volleying sounds, seemed to mimic the echoing thunder. And the leaves—the millions and myriads of sere, cast-off leaves, heaped ankle-deep under the desolate giants of the wood, and everywhere, in the hollows of the earth, lying silent and motionless, as became dead, fallen things—suddenly catching a mock fantastic life from the wind, how they would all be up and stirring, every leaf with a hiss ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... appealed to the taste of the untutored savage, and I had kept this fact prominently in mind when purchasing the goods which I intended to use as presents and for the purposes of barter; therefore, among other things, I had bought several cast-off British uniforms of various descriptions, these being designed especially for presentation to the several savage monarchs with whom I expected to be brought into contact. So now, after due consideration, I drew forth a drum-major's ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyed little boys and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best drew of some happier child, a gay little garment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that appeared, when they had crawled out of their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... exclaimed the beetle. "Fly about as a butterfly, indeed! what of that. I have come out of the Emperor's stable, and no one there, not even the Emperor's horse, who, in fact, wears my cast-off golden shoes, has any idea of flying, excepting myself. To have wings and fly! why, I can do that already;" and so saying, he spread his wings and flew away. "I don't want to be disgusted," he said to himself, "and yet I can't help it." Soon after, he fell down upon an extensive ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... it has precedence of its fellows in financial success as well as in time, having cleared a hundred and seventy-odd thousand pounds, and left the Kensington Museum as a memorial of that creditable feat, besides sending its cast-off but still serviceable induviae to Sydenham, where it enshrines another museum, chiefly of architectural reproductions in plaster, in a sempiternal coruscation of fountains, fireworks and fiddle-bows. The palace of industry has become the palace of the industrial—abundantly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... untrammeled son of the forest. Over one shoulder a blanket, negligently but gracefully thrown, disclosed a bare and powerful breast, decorated with a quantity of three-cent postage-stamps which he had despoiled from an Overland Mail stage a few weeks previous. A cast-off beaver of Judge Tompkins's, adorned by a simple feather, covered his erect head, from beneath which his straight locks descended. His right hand hung lightly by his side, while his left was engaged in holding on a pair of pantaloons, which ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... were made for the highest order of usefulness and excellency. They must soon know that if in Girlhood they regard themselves as playthings and pets, in womanhood they will have to be drudges or the cast-off dolls of their boyish husbands, or the hangers-on to a society they would but can not be a part of. Is life a preparation for eternity? so is Girlhood a preparation for womanhood. Do effects follow their causes? so will Girlhood send its life and character into womanhood. If a girl would be ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... of bringing the flash and heavy, dull report of the old, cast-off military muskets which the Malays were using; and as these weapons flashed, the defenders of the various buildings seized the opportunity to return the fire, guessing at the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... Cirripede and larva, there has been no great change in the relative positions of the parts: the rudimentary eyes, however, of the former are developed posteriorly to (or above, as applied to a Cirripede,) the cast-off compound eyes of the larva; but the position of the mouth, of the antennae, and of the several coloured marks in the corium, prove to demonstration, the correspondence in both of part to part. The case is rather different ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... junk. Even the big forty-five had a broken hammer, and the pistol, Keith thought, might have stunned a fly at close range. He pawed the things over with the cold chisel, and the last thing he came upon—buried under what looked like a cast-off sport shirt—was a pasteboard shoe box. He raised the cover. The box was ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... Elizabeth's moderate and reasonable requests. They mistook Mrs. Mellen's quiet manners for pride, and held her in slight favor in consequence; so dazzled by Elsie's manner, that when she gave them a cast-off garment or a worthless ornament, it seemed a much greater boon than the real kindness Elizabeth invariably displayed when they were in ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... seems to be changing under our eyes. It was only yesterday that the worker in literature, sculpture, painting, or music was a sickly, morbid, anaemic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at sight by the average man, and a shining mark for all the cast-off wit of the world. Gilbert never tired of describing him in "Patience." He was a "foot-in-the-grave young man," or a ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... eking out of syllables, the supplying of epithets, the colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was a lady's waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery: his prose is a beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook, looks round her, abashed at the admiration her charms have excited! The grand secret of the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... mists streaming along the ravines. He told her—or rather he made her understand, for his language was simple—how at sudden outer influences his whole being fired, and from so trivial a thing as a cast-off horseshoe on the highway he was compelled to picture the rider, and set him upon the saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin's court that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter tale. How the joy ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... breath. Thus he wrought me up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers on one side represented in lively figures, and indeed, heightened by my imagination of being turned out to the wide world a mere cast-off whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such, with little to provide for myself, with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world, out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay. All this terrified me to the last degree, and he took care upon all occasions ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... the wardrobe were called in, and they carried all away in a heap, in the taffety wrappers, to the tirewoman's wardrobe, where all were folded up again, hung up, examined, and cleaned with so much regularity and care that even the cast-off clothes scarcely looked as if they had been worn. The tirewoman's wardrobe consisted of three large rooms surrounded with closets, some furnished with drawers and others with shelves; there were also large tables in each of ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... wore home-made clothes, the material woven on the looms in the clothes house. In the winter we had woolen clothes and in summer our clothes were made from cast-off clothes and Kentucky jeans. Our shoes were brogans with brass tips. On Sunday we fed the stock, after which we ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Maryland Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... had a colored valet by the name of George. George received nearly all the colonel's cast-off clothing. He had his eyes on a certain pair of light trousers which were not wearing out fast enough to suit him, so he thought he would hasten matters somewhat by rubbing grease on one knee. When the colonel saw the spot, he called George and asked if he had noticed it. George said, "Yes, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... navigators, who fitly name it the lord of the stormy seas. In the desolate regions where it lives the sailors hail its appearance with delight, as it comes sailing around the ship with majestic, careless flight, rising, sinking, now swooping down to seize some cast-off mouthful of food, now poising high above the mast-head, moving with the ship at the most rapid speed, and yet with scarcely a perceptible ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... furniture referred to, a few cast-off garments of the owners were flung on one side, while some additional pieces of venison lay upon, or rather among, a mass of leaves, where they could be found when needed. The smoke from the fire found its way through the opening in the roof, and the vapor from the pipe of the Osage, after slowly ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... conceivable attitude, and, uncovering their feet, commenced pelting each other with the cast-off leathers. When the sport had lasted a few ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... safety. Lady's-maids can't keep their rooms without questions being asked; and if I pretended to be ill, very likely Lady Turnour would discharge me on the spot, and leave me behind as if I were a cast-off glove. Yet if I flitted about the corridors between my mistress's room and mine, I might run up against the enemy ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... legs also, for he or she wore nothing but a small shirt. The next in size had a shirt supplemented with a trousers-like garment reaching to the knees; and so on, progressively, up to the biggest boy, who wore the cast-off parental toggery, and so, instead of having too little on, was, in a sense, overdressed. I asked this youngster for a can of water to quench my thirst and a stick of fire to light my cigar. He ran into the ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... street seemed full of Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... himselfe in philosophying, for who doth otherwise seemeth to say, that either the season to live happily is not yet come, or is already past." Yet would I not have this young gentleman pent-up, nor carelesly cast-off to the heedlesse choler, or melancholy humour of the hasty Schoole-master. I would not have his budding spirit corrupted with keeping him fast-tied, and as it were labouring fourteene or fifteene houres a day poaring on his booke, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... beloved haunts at the Grange, but I liked the garret best. It was a roomy old place, big enough to have comfortably housed a family in itself, and was filled with cast-off furniture and old trunks and boxes of discarded finery. I was never tired of playing there, dressing up in the old-fashioned gowns and hats and practising old-time dance steps before the high, cracked mirror that hung at one end. That old garret was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... goes over to fireplace, where he stands looking at Mrs. Gladstone, who is now beginning to "cast-off" a completed piece of knitting. The rattle of ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... fashion to laugh at the dude and his high collar, at the darky in his master's cast-off clothes, aping style and fashion. Better the dude, better the colored dandy, better even the Bowery "tough" with his affected carriage, for they at least are reaching blindly out after something better than their surroundings, striving after ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... of!" I said, half aloud—"I am not my true self to-day,—some remnant of a cast-off pride has arisen in me and made me less of a humble student. I must not yield to this overpowering demand on my soul,—it is surely an evil suggestion which asserts itself like the warning pain or fever of an ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... her in Apartment C, was after givin' me one of her ould worn-out waists. But I took her down a peg as quick as a wink. I'm a lady, I am, and me mother was a lady before me, and I don't accept cast-off ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... near the schooner the boat cast-off, Senhor Silva saying that he would go on board, and send ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... he exclaimed, "Bernadine has scored, indeed! Your friend has a sense of humor which overwhelms me. Imagine it. He has delivered the two heads of our great Society into the hands of one of its cast-off branches! Bernadine is a ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... three-hour job, but when I was through I'd renovated up that cast-off toggery so that it looked as good as if it had been just picked from the bargain counter. Then I waited for things to turn up. The brigands opened the ball as soon as it was dark. They'd rigged up a battering-ram and allowed they meant ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... to call on him. I went to his office in a lemon grove on a hill at the edge of the town; and there I had a surprise. I expected to see one of the usual cinnamon-colored natives in congress gaiters and one of Pizzaro's cast-off hats. What I saw was an elegant gentleman of a slightly claybank complexion sitting in an upholstered leather chair, sipping a highball and reading Mrs. Humphry Ward. I had smuggled into my brain a few words of Spanish by the help of Izzy, and I ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... the new God done for him? Was his work lighter? No! Was the food not the cast-off's still, fouled by the touch and the tongues of others and by the dirt of the pen? Yes. If the new God was good, why had He not saved ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... and an orangeade, Thus heaping honors on two noble men. (Exit muchacho) Quezox: But thought hath strayed like an unbridled steed, And I must harness it to work my will. This Bonset: Francos seems to love him well And may him thrust in Carpen's cast-off shoes; My bowels gripe me with suspicion dire That plans are rip'ning to this very end; Hence we must pour in an unwilling ear A weighty protest ere the scheme matures. An open opposition were not wise ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... important truth. But the teachings of history or of philosophy never reach the ears of the multitude; they are drowned by the din of selfish rogues or of blind enthusiasts. Poor stupid humanity goes round and round like a mill-horse in a dreary ring of political follies. The cast-off sophisms and rhetorical rubbish of a past generation are patched up, scoured, and offered to the credulous present as something novel and excellent. People do not know how often the rotten stuff has been used and thrown away, and accept it readily. After a while, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... long been steeped in that penetrating personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his very phrases, mannerisms, and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter's discarded coats. If the painter's letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory, and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... God before their eyes"; that is, the greatest part of men are utterly destitute of this godly jewel, this treasure, the fear of the Lord. Poor vagrants, when they come straggling to a lord's house, may perhaps obtain some scraps and fragments, they may also obtain old shoes, and some sorry cast-off rags, but they get not any of his jewels, they may not touch his choicest treasure; that is kept for the children, and those that shall be his heirs. We may say the same also of this blessed grace of fear, which is called here God's treasure. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... picture, link in hand, pausing to look back with a smile of suppressed amusement at some of his victims. It seems very odd to find Cupid in such surroundings, and especially to see the little god hampered by the clumsy garments of mortals. They are old and ragged, the cast-off finery such as is picked up by street gamins. The child's hair is tossed about his head in unkempt locks, and altogether he looks the part ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... civilisation met together. The former dress of the men was the taro, a kilt joined between the legs, so as to form a wide and very short pair of breeches. Some to this now add a blue shirt, sometimes with the tails tucked in, sometimes flowing gracefully. Some wear cast-off coats, or jackets, or trousers, of Europeans; but few of the common people have more than one of these garments on at a time, and still fewer ever encumber themselves with shoes and stockings. The women had on generally long blue chemises, or gowns and bonnets of every variety ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... please, sir," said Tommy, entering, and depositing his bag on the counter, "have you got any cast-off clothes you ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... back to his indigent rooms in the Alle Petit Chat, and washed and dressed. (Fortunately, he had at no time a heavy beard, so did not have to shave in the evenings.) Well-dressed he was not, even in his evening clothes, which were a cast-off of his brother's, and not, as evening clothes should be, faultless; but still they passed, and Henry always looked ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... relatively handsome, they wore linen much finer than that of the richest peasant women. On fete-days they appeared in dresses that were really pretty, obtained, Heaven knows how! For one thing, the men-servants at Les Aigues sold to them, at prices that were easily paid, the cast-off clothing of the lady's-maids, which, after sweeping the streets of Paris and being made over to fit Marie and Catherine, appeared triumphantly in the precincts of the Grand-I-Vert. These girls, bohemians of the valley, received not one penny in money from their parents, who gave ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... with about four pounds of shortbread and as much various tucker as they could conveniently carry; a pretty good suit of cast-off tweeds; a new pair of 'lastic-sides from the store stock; two bottles of patent medicine and a black bottle half-full of home-made consumption-cure; also a letter to a hospital-committee man, and three shillings to help him on his way to Palmerston. He also got about half ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... to his neighbour, "I hope thou admirest the magnanimity of our sovereign, who deems he is performing a most generous action in presenting Manuel with his cast-off mistress, who has tried to poison him, and with whom he has been at his wits' end what to do, and in dowering her ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... costumes as might most effectually disguise them, so that they would be able still, even in secret and by stealth, to administer the rites of their religion to the poor and neglected of their own creed. Some were dressed in common frieze, some in servants' cast-off liveries—however they came by them—and not a few in military uniform, that served, as it were, to mark them staunch supporters of the very Government that persecuted them. A reverend archdeacon, somewhat ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... twenty-five cents a day. For this sum he can have sufficient food, and as for clothing, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he never buys any. At various stages in his career he becomes possessed by a stroke of fortune of some article of cast-off clothing, which he wears, as it were, for life. Ordinarily, the poorest blousard has a new blouse once in five or ten years, and a new pair of wooden shoes in the same time; but the scavenger's apparel is for ever old, and he never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... the trustee of a stream of germ-plasm which produces a child whenever the proper conditions arise. Or as Sir Michael Foster put it, "The animal body is in reality a vehicle for ova or sperm; and after the life of the parent has become potentially renewed in the offspring, the body remains as a cast-off envelope whose future is but to die." Finally to quote the metaphor of J. Arthur Thomson, one may "think for a moment of a baker who has a very precious kind of leaven; he uses much of this in baking a large loaf; but he so arranges matters ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... daring to complain. The suite of the youngest boy in particular, formed a very amusing groupe, few of them exceeding five years of age. One bears his master's bornouse, another holds one shoe, walking next to the boy who carries its fellow. Some are in fine cast-off clothes, with tarnished embroidery, whilst others are quite or nearly naked, without even a cap on their heads, and the procession is closed by a boy, tottering under the weight of his master's state gun, which is never ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... a long look from head to foot The dress was a poor enough velveteen and had a cast-off air, but it clung to her figure finely, and its sleeves were picturesque with puffs at the shoulder and slashings of white,—indeed the moonlight made her all black and white; her eyes, which were tawny brown by day, were black ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... real anxiety was lest I should be wet through." Thereupon she settled in her mind to begin loving Aunt Maitland from that hour. She did not ring for her maid till she was nearly dressed, and, when Rosa came and exclaimed at the condition of her cast-off robes, she laughed and told her it was nothing—the Rhine was nice and warm—pretending she had been in it. She ordered her to dry the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... certainty came and the looking and longing and waiting were over, after the solemn services of the church had been said and the cast-off earthly garments of her precious boy hidden away from sight for ever, the mother's hold upon life grew feebler every day. She was slowly drifting out from the shores of time, and no hand was strong enough to hold her back. A sweet patience smoothed away the lines of suffering which months ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... stereotype-plates of the 'old revelation' and delivered mankind from their bondage, do not proceed to express yourself only in fragments from them; if you profess freedom of soul, and the possession of the pure truth, do not appear to be so poverty-stricken as to array your thoughts in the tatters of the cast-off Bible." ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... house up yonder, Wood; but I daresay you have many a time inclined your ear to gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some have whispered to you that she is my bastard half-sister: some, my cast-off mistress. I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I married fifteen years ago,—Bertha Mason by name; sister of this resolute personage, who is now, with his quivering limbs and white cheeks, showing ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the better products of needle, silk and floss, of which the Chinese have been masters for centuries, than the city of the court. The population consists largely of great officials and their families, whose cast-off clothing, toned down by the use of years, often without a blemish or a spot, finds its way into the hands of dealers. The finest furs,—seal, otter, squirrel, sable and ermine,—are brought from Siberia, Manchuria and elsewhere, for the officials and the court, and can be secured for less ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... the interval—or mayhap it was only the hardships and distresses of the captive flight—had changed her woefully. Yet now, as when we had stood together at the bar of Colonel Tarleton's court, I saw her pass from mood to mood in the turning of a leaf, her natural terror slipping from her like a cast-off garment, and a sweet dignity coming to clothe her in a queenlier robe, making her, as I would think, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... composed of the coarsest materials, generally hung in tatters about his tall spare figure, and he had been known to wear the cast-off shoes of a beggar; yet, in spite of such absurd acts, he maintained a proud and upright carriage, and never, by his speech or manners, seemed to forget for one moment that he held the rank of a gentleman. His hands and face were always scrupulously ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... were stained with mud. The sedate chairs that usually lined the walls were pushed aside and left to stand crooked and awry, the very mockery of their former dignity. Here and there a roll of parchment, an ink-stained pen, a cast-off cloak littered the hall and looked curiously provocative and out of place—an insult to the majesty of the dead and mighty Caesar, who had caused the stately columns to be reared, and the massive walls to raise their pure lines ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... purse, the wandering damsel was at her last sou. They journeyed together to London, and for the next year or two Thistlewood had the honour of working himself almost to death to support a very expensive young woman, who cared no more for him than for her cast-off shoes. Happily, some richer man was at length found who envied him his privilege, and therewith ended Thistlewood's devotion to the joys of a bohemian life. Ever since, his habits had been excessively ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Eastern ideas, was in the position of a superior receiving an unfortunate inferior. She was the latest acquired—the darling, the reigning queen—confronted with the poor cast-off, old, unattractive first wife; and being of a nature equally noble as the type of her beauty, she felt it incumbent on her, in such a situation, to treat the unfortunate with every consideration, gentleness, ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... gently winding, so that but little of it could be seen at a time, and going up and down small mounds, now plunging into a denser shadow and now emerging from it. Part of the way it was strewn with the dusky yellow leaves of white-pines,—the cast-off garments of last year; part of the way with green grass, close-cropped and very fresh for the season. Sometimes the trees met across it; sometimes it was bordered on one side by an old rail-fence of moss-grown cedar, with bushes sprouting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... elevator on the first floor of the building and went up together to the apartment of Simeon Dodge. Anne had lifted her veil,—a feature in her smart tribute to convention,—and her lovely features were revealed to the cast-off sister- in-law. For an instant they stared hard at each other. Then Anne, recovering from her surprise, bowed gravely and held out ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... that M. Fortunat's clerk did not appear to the best advantage on this occasion. In order to watch M. de Coralth, he had again arrayed himself in his cast-off clothes, and with his blouse and his worn-out shoes, his "knockers" and his glazed cap, he looked the vagabond to perfection. Still, strange as it may seem, Mademoiselle Marguerite did not once doubt the devotion of this strange auxiliary. Without an instant's ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... for quotation is peculiar to literature. We do not glory to quote our costume, dress in cast-off court robes, or furnish our houses from the marine store. Neither are we proud of alien initials on the domestic silver. We like things new and primarily our own. We have a wholesome instinct against infection, except, it seems, in the matter of ideas. An ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... and the escape. In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak. "Antony," they tell me, was "the greatest literary event of its time," was a restoration of the stage. "While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the last degree ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... and hungry-eyed little boys and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd, involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best dress of some happier child, a gay little garment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... blessings. As babies, clothed in shapeless garments, they launched upon the green slime their tiny fleet of chips, and, grown a little older, it was here they waded in the happy summer days. The very dump-carts came and went like perpetual argosies, bringing riches—discarded furniture and cast-off clothing—to ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... suddenly become empty—empty except for a row of tumbled beds and nine little tired-out, cast-off bodies. They had been shed as easily as a boy slips out of his dusty, uncomfortable overalls on a late sultry afternoon, and leaves them behind him on a shady bank, while he plunges, head first, into the cool, dark waters of the swimming-pool just below him, which have been ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... provided they took his advice, and followed the plan which he would afterwards impart to them in confidence at the proper time, he could almost take it upon himself to say, that in a short time, no tyrannical usher, or cast-off tutor of the Squire, should venture to show his face, with or without tawse or ferule, within ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... a few servant girls are now wearing the cast-off aigrettes of their mistresses; but they are only as one in a thousand. At Atlantic City there is said to be a fine display of servant-girl and ladies-maid aigrettes. In New York and New Jersey, in Pennsylvania for everything save the sale of heron and egret ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... stage with black was to prepare it for tragedy. The costumes of the players were sometimes less niggardly than the furnishing of the stage, for it was an age of rich and picturesque apparel, and it was not difficult to procure the cast-off clothes of fine gentlemen for stage use. But there was no lavishing of expense. I am recalling these details to show that the amusement was popular and cheap. The ordinary actors, including the boys and men who took women's parts (for women did not appear on the stage ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Circle. There is always a Ladies Sewing Circle! But, somehow, the making up of barrels of cast-off clothing for unfortunate missionaries in the West, or up in Canada, or the sewing together of innumerable ill-cut garments, which must, of course, be "misfits" for the unknown infants for whom they were intended,—all this never could seem sufficient ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... expression, and the part of the ghost in the play offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse—whose frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... is the PICTURE GALLERY. It is said to receive the overflowings of the gallery of Munich—which, in turn, has been indebted to the well known gallery of Dusseldorf for its principal treasures. However, as a receiver of cast-off apparel, this collection must be necessarily inferior to the parent wardrobe, yet I would strongly recommend every English Antiquary—at all desirous of increasing his knowledge, and improving his taste, in early German art—to pay due ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... musical training in strict privacy, so far as that was possible, and, in no case, should be moved from his personal supervision, a condition that Olympia accepted with delight, for, after a month or two, she began to feel the presence of her cast-off husband something of a restraint, and regarded the quick growth and blooming loveliness of the young girl as almost a wrong to her own ripe beauty. Still she would not loosen her hold as a parent on the girl's ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... "The Young Duke," the most unexceptionably genteel book ever written, being the principal favourite. It makes the young Jew ashamed of the young Jewess, it makes her ashamed of the young Jew. The young Jew marries an opera-dancer, or if the dancer will not have him, as is frequently the case, the cast-off Miss of the Honourable Spencer So-and-so. It makes the young Jewess accept the honourable offer of a cashiered lieutenant of the Bengal Native Infantry; or, if such a person does not come forward, the dishonourable offer of a cornet of a regiment of crack hussars. It makes poor Jews, male and ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... Memphis knew no higher ambition than a competency for embalming his body. Men loved unto death and beyond it the physical house in which the soul dwelt. Every instinct of refinement and self-respect revolted from the thought of discarding the body like a cast-off garment or worn-out tool. In his dying hour it was little to Rameses that his career was to be pictured on obelisk and preserved in pyramid, but it was very much to the King that the embalmer should ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... is he? The form I used to see Was but the raiment that he used to wear. The grave, that now doth press Upon that cast-off dress, Is but his wardrobe locked;—he ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... two-roomed house in which the Warrens lived was across the road from the schoolhouse, and Mrs. Warren's voice was penetrating. Lem was accepted throughout his school-life at the home estimate. The ugly, overgrown boy, clad in cast-off, misfit clothing was allowed to play with the other children only on condition that he perform all the hard, uninteresting parts of any game. Inside the schoolroom it ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... to the dry on this wayside bank, Too plainly of all the propellers bereft! Quenched youth, and is that thy purse? Even such limp slough as the snake has left Slack to the gale upon spikes of whin, For cast-off coat of a life gone blank, In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine; And thine to crave and to curse The sweet thing once within. Accuse him: some devil committed the theft, Which leaves of the portly a skin, No more; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to apply himself to the task given to him with his usual conscientiousness of duty, and presently acquired a certain manual dexterity in the operation. It was "good fun" to throw the cast-off husks into the mighty unfathomable void before him, and watch them linger with suspended gravity in mid air for a moment—apparently motionless—until they either lost themselves, a mere vanishing black spot in the thin ether, ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... seeing that we find her bound hand and foot; a chain-shot fastened to her foot, and a sentry menacing her with his bayonet. The next volume shows us the Prince President in the act of being measured by his military tailor, while he offers money to his cast-off mistress Liberte, her mother (France) looking indignantly on. Immediately behind, a priest (in allusion to the support which the Papal party were receiving from this "eldest son of the Church") helps himself from a plate of money which stands ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... they seem to be two persons." [416] Mr. Kitts states that "the men are by profession story-tellers and mimics, imitating the voices of men and the notes of animals; their male children are also trained to dance. In payment for their entertainment they are frequently content with cast-off clothes, which will of course be of use to them in assuming other characters." [417] Occasionally also they dress up in European clothes and can successfully assume the character of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... do believe that the greatest terror poverty holds for me is the knowing that I must wear seedy hats and threadbare coats, and trousers a year behind. Maybe Grey will sometime send me a box of his cast-off clothes. ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... woolly pate, who spoke French fairly well, and seemed much inclined to come to an understanding with us and open up his country to trade and civilisation. He came to call on me in great state, dressed in the handsome uniform of a general of the French Republic, the cast-off garments of some performer at the Cirque Olympique. He had a tricolour plume in his hat, a gold laced coat with lapels turned back on the chest, white breeches, and top boots. He wore the decoration of the Legion of Honour, which he had been given for some service or other he had done ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... upon the sharp look-out to gammon the flats. The former obtains his present livelihood by gambling—spends the most of his time in playing cards with greenhorns, always to be picked up at low flash houses, at fairs, races, milling-matches, &c. and is also in the holy keeping of the cast-off mistress of a nobleman whose family he was formerly in as a valet-de-chambre. The other pretends to teach sparring in the City, and occasionally has a benefit in the Minories, Duke's Place, and the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... whizzing wheels, Rend and ravel and tear and pick; What can resist these hooks of steel, Sharp as the claws of the ancient Nick? Cast-off mantle of millionaire, Pestilent vagrant's vesture chill, Rags of miser or beggar bare, All are 'grist' for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the goddess herself. Most of the garments are the chiton or tunic, flowing to the feet; the chitoniskos, a shorter and more ornamental garment worn over it; and the mantle, himation. Pieces of cloth or rags are also mentioned among the entries; these were probably the remnants of cast-off garments dedicated by their wearers. Some of the dresses are described as embroidered with ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... you are!" exclaimed the stag-beetle. "Fly about as a butterfly, indeed! I've come out of the stable of the emperor, and no one there, not even the emperor's favourite horse—that by the way wears my cast-off golden shoes—has any such idea. To have wings to fly! why, we can fly now;" and he spread his wings and flew away. "I don't want to be annoyed, and yet I am annoyed," he said, as he ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... else. A man who has soldiered for nearly fourteen years isn't fit for civil life. Now, make your citizen's clothes into a bundle and take them around the corner to a little Jew store you will find there. Mose buys all the recruits' cast-off clothing. He'll not give you much for them, but the little he will give you will keep you in gingerbread as long as you stay ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... where a body of red embers would after a little while invite them to place their frying-pan and coffee-pot on the iron grating they carried for the purpose, and which was really the gridiron-like contrivance belonging to a cast-off ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... look like a cross between a waiter and an undertaker; and he also supported on his cranium a very tall top-hat with an extra wide brim, suggesting in its antediluvian shape a former close acquaintance with cast-off clothing stores. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli |
