"Decrepit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... March there were many indications of the opening campaign on the Clifford farm. There was the overhauling and furbishing of weapons, otherwise tools, and the mending or strengthening of those in a decrepit state. A list of such additional ones as were wanted was made at this time, and an order sent for them at once. Amy also observed that practical Leonard was conning several catalogues of implements. "Len is always ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... and often, when nearly finished, tore it angrily to shreds, scattering the remnants to the winds of heaven. As personifications of time, the Norns were represented as sisters of different ages and characters, Urd (Wurd, weird) appearing very old and decrepit, continually looking backward, as if absorbed in contemplating past events and people; Verdandi, the second sister, young, active, and fearless, looked straight before her, while Skuld, the type of the future, was generally represented as closely veiled, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... East One Hundredth Street is a house decrepit with a disease of the aged. Its windowed eyes are rheumy. It sags backward on gnarled joints. All its poor old bones creak when the winds shake it. To Average Jones' inquiring gaze on this summer day it ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... cannot imagine. There are women who are by accident more degraded physically. Mutatis mutandis, there are none more degraded, morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however silly, and however evil, who can ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... burros were dreamily blinking at vacancy, their grizzled fronts expressive of that ineffable peace found only in the faces of saints and donkeys. In the middle of the enclosure a rude windlass coiled with rope stood stretching forth a decrepit lever-arm. The whippletree, dangling from the end over the beaten circular track, seemed cracked with heat and age. The stout rope that stretched tautly from the coil passed over a wooden wheel, and disappeared through a broad-framed ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... with relics of past luxury. Fine pictures, in tarnished frames, hung on the dingy walls, and worn rugs covered the floor. The furniture was old mahogany, beautifully cared for, but decrepit, nevertheless, and the ancient square piano, outwardly, at least, showed every year of ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... appointed time, Scyld deceased, very decrepit, and went into the peace of the Lord. They ... bore him to the sea-shore as he himself requested.... There on the beach stood the ring-prowed ship, the vehicle of the noble ... ready to set out. They laid down the dear prince, the distributer ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... to think I am a decrepit old woman," answered Madame Patoff, impatiently, as she rose from ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... as Mr. William Beresford, whose wife I have the honour to be. Physically the type is vigorous, or has the appearance and gives the impression of being vigorous, because it has never the time to be otherwise, since it is always engaged in nursing its ailing or decrepit relatives. Intellectually it is full of vitality; any mind grows when it is exercised, and the brain that has to settle all its own affairs and all the affairs of its friends and acquaintances could never ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... strictly a prisoner at the Bar T ranch-house, for this had been found impracticable from a number of standpoints. He had the run of the ranch, an old, decrepit cow pony to ride, and could go in any direction he chose under the supervision of a cowboy who carried a Winchester and was known to have impaled flies on cactus spines at ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... economy of the frame of human bodies, together with the history, both of those who have lived abstemiously, and of those who have lived freely, that indulging in flesh meat and strong liquors, inflames the passions and shortens life, begets chronical distempers and a decrepit age. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... accompanied her worth, when he says that "besides discharging excellently well her own and all tender offices becoming the female character; ... besides being a faithful friend, an amiable companion, and a tender nurse, [she] could likewise supply the wants of a decrepit husband and occasionally perform his part." That Fielding suffered socially by the fact of his second marriage is probable. But the fact is proof, if proof were needed, of his courage in reparation, and of the unworldly spirit in which he ultimately ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... alone is the lawful successor of the Prophet." A prudent explanation restored his tranquillity, and he passed to a more familiar topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadi. "Fifty years." "It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here," continued Timur, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors of their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 1849, during their short career. Some hundreds of the beggars were hired at the rate of a few baiocchi a day to carry on excavations in the Forum and in the Baths of Caracalla. The selection was most appropriate. Only the old, decrepit, and broken-down were taken,—the younger and sturdier were left. Ruined men were in harmony with the ruined temples. Such a set of laborers was never before seen. Falstaff's ragged regiment was a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Shrimplin seemed not so sure of this. The settling of the handy-man's difficulties had been one of the few extravagances he had permitted himself. His glance now fell on the small occupant of the decrepit baby carriage, and he gave a ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... vomited their population into the Lane. Fat girls clad in shawls sat around the slum opening nursing their babies. Old women crouched in decrepit doorways, fumbling their aprons; skipping ropes whirled in the roadway. A little higher up a vendor of cheap ices had set up his store and was rapidly absorbing all the pennies of the neighborhood. Esther and Sarah turned into a dilapidated court, where a hag argued the price of trotters ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... my juniors die, that my friends when they do not hear of me may well fancy that I am decrepit and declining. That is not true; only my muscular strength is less. I cannot walk so far nor work so much, but no vital organ seems to fail; nor can I write so much ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... forgive each other!" said Wagner. "You can now understand the meaning of the inscription beneath my portrait. 'His last day thus' signifies that it was the last day on which I wore that aged, decrepit, and sinking form." ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... disgrace to gods and men," I demanded, "for your name must never be mentioned among refined people. Did I deserve to be lifted up to heaven and then dragged down to hell by you? Was it right for you to slander my flourishing and vigorous years and land me in the shadows and lassitude of decrepit old age? Give me some sign, however faint, I beg of you, that you have returned to life!" I vented my anger in ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... where labor does not oppress, nor luxury enervate the human frame, and where harassing cares are unknown, we are led to expect that disease and suffering should be comparatively rare, and that the functions of nature should not reach the close of their gradual decay till an extreme old age. The decrepit and shriveled forms of many American Indians would seem to indicate that they had long passed the ordinary time of life. But it is difficult or impossible to ascertain their exact age, as the art of counting is generally unknown among them, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... me, there's no contending; but, will you set your strength against a decrepit, poor, old man? [Takes the Purse.] As I said, 'tis too great a bounty; but Saint Dominick shall owe you another scape: I'll put him in ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... terrible questionings, the terrible strugglings of this great, awful, blessed time—feeling no more the pulse of the great heart of England stirring me? I used, as I said, to call it the curse of circumstance that I was a sickly, decrepit Cockney. My mother used to tell me that it was the cross which God had given me to bear. I know now that she was right there. She used to say that my disease was God's will. I do not think, though, that she spoke right there also. I think that it was the will of the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... stand a-doddering at me like that as if you were a decrepit old idiot instead of a boy; but just reach down your hat and bustle along," said old Joe; and if Worble, after looking feebly and hopelessly up at the hat on the high peg—the hat he had not worn for years—didn't hop up on a wooden chair and fetch it down, and dash ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of her journeyings she visited the Luray Caverns as a matter of course, and enroute came upon picturesque, deserted, decrepit Leslie Manor, and fell as enthusiastically in love with it as it was given to her repressed nature to fall ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... applying the fire to his pipe, he returns me his thanks in a volume of words and smoke. What a wrinkled and unshorn old man! Can age and neglect do so much for any of us? This ruinous person was associated with a hand-cart as decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful; for though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from far within the wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had preceded him with a very lugubrious creak. It groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was to learn from the old man that ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... broken-backed appearance of the other, which still retains its legibility although the t's have begun to lose their crossing, we can say that the one was a young man and the other was advanced in years without being positively decrepit." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of this breed. A like, though less considerable, evil is shown in the fancy breeds of dogs, pigeons, and some other petted animals, where for amusement and as an indication of his power man has raised up many decrepit and sickly varieties, which are not likely to have a fair share in the pleasure of life which their natural breeding ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... wizened with the passage of, as it seemed to me, hundreds of years. Yet, although in appearance a very Methuselah in age, this individual had a pair of piercing black eyes that glowed and sparkled with all the fire and passion of early manhood, and, bowed as he was, and decrepit as he appeared to be, he tottered across the intervening space with extraordinary agility, and seated himself in the second chair. Thus I found myself in the presence of the two most powerful men in the district, namely, King Banda and Mafuta, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... to dress!" She rose and bent forward in the firelight to peer at the clock. "Goodness! Do you creatures think I'm going to give Eileen half an hour's start with her maid?—and I carrying my twelve years' handicap, too. No, indeed! I'm decrepit but I'm going to die fighting. Austin, get up! You're horribly slow, anyhow. Phil, Austin's man—such as he is—will be at your disposal, ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... means for all, usually pointing himself to those he wished to honour. And his choice always surprised people by its unexpectedness. Passing by the wealthy and the high-placed, he sometimes pitched upon a peasant or some decrepit old woman. Another time he would pass over the beggars to honour some fat wealthy merchant. Tea was served differently, too, to different people, sugar was put into some of the glasses and handed ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at Sydney from South America, I was much struck with the strange contrast its extensive and at the same time youthful appearance presented to the decrepit and decaying aspect of the cities on that continent. We had then been visiting colonies and settlements founded centuries ago, by a nation at that time almost supreme in European influence, and planted with every circumstance of apparent advantage upon the shores of a fertile and luxurious ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing size of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... trellis. The seats were of varnished cane, and the doors of natural wood. All things about the place carried out the patriarchal air which emanated from the inside as well as the outside of the house. The genius of the provinces preserved everything; nothing was new or old, neither young nor decrepit. A cold precision ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... but at least I am already the possessor of a duly certified Marquesan calabash, oblong in shape, curiously carved, over a century old, from which has been drunk the blood of two shipmasters. One of those captains was a mean man. He sold a decrepit whale-boat, as good as new what of the fresh white paint, to a Marquesan chief. But no sooner had the captain sailed away than the whale-boat dropped to pieces. It was his fortune, some time afterwards, to be wrecked, of all places, on that particular island. The Marquesan chief ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... suffered from some obvious and intolerable disqualification. Either he had a wife already and was vague about his ability to get rid of her, or he was drunk when he was brought to his proposal and repudiated it or forgot it the next day, or he was a bankrupt, or he was old and decrepit, or he was young and plainly idiotic, or he had diabetes or a bad heart, or his relatives were impossible, or he believed in spiritualism, or democracy, or the Baconian theory, or some other such nonsense. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... grinned sadly in the sunlight, shaking with cold. Others were sad and still. Charley, subdued by the sudden disclosure of the insignificance of his youth, darted fearful glances. The two smooth-faced Norwegians resembled decrepit children, staring stupidly. To leeward, on the edge of the horizon, black seas leaped up towards the glowing sun. It sank slowly, round and blazing, and the crests of waves splashed on the edge of the luminous circle. One of the Norwegians appeared to catch sight ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... of Thine only Son, in a Christian house, a good member of Thy Church, educated her in Thy fear. Yet for her good discipline was she wont to commend not so much her mother's diligence, as that of a certain decrepit maid-servant, who had carried her father when a child, as little ones used to be carried at the backs of elder girls. For which reason, and for her great age, and excellent conversation, was she, in that Christian family, well ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... and would like to paint the same subject over again.' The sky in this picture is nobly done, but it reminds one too much of Wilson. The only fault however, of any consequence, is the female figure, which is too old and decrepit for one likely to frequent an eminence on ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and buffeted with them. I pushed three old ladies to one side to snatch my ticket before they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing of infinite beauty and peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the lurching, trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the great river and the swamp was cut up into walled enclosures, as a rule,—abandoned warehouses and cotton-presses, moss-grown one-storied frame structures, standing in the midst of desolate fields and decrepit fences. Only among the peaceful shades of the Ursuline convent and the warlike flanking towers at the barracks was there aught that spoke of anything but demoralization and decay. Back from the levee a block or two the double lines of strap-iron stretched over a wooden causeway between parallel ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... confess, however, that I feared the possible passing by of the two decrepit cronies, when Carlotta stood at my open French window this morning. She is really indecently beautiful. She was wearing a deep red silk peignoir, open at the throat, unashamedly Parisian, which clung to every salient curve of her figure. I wondered where, in the name of morality, she ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... how old he was himself, although he did know that no person in his tribe had been alive when he was a young boy in the village. He remembered the days when some of the old men, still alive, had been born; and, unlike him, they were now decrepit, shaken with palsy, blear-eyed, toothless of mouth, deaf of ear, or paralysed. All his own faculties remained unimpaired. He even boasted a dozen worn fangs of teeth, gum-level, on which he could still chew. Although he no longer had the physical endurance of youth, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... reached the hotel, it had to take its place in a long line of crawling vehicles, most of which were motor cars. Ramon felt acutely humiliated to arrive at the ball in a decrepit-looking rig when nearly every one else came in an automobile. He hoped that no one would notice them. But the smaller of the two horses, which had spent most of his life in the country, became frightened, reared, plunged, and finally backed the rig into one ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... interesting problem. At last, I came to the conclusion—to which I still adhere—that their so long wearing only one epaulet (for to only one does their rank entitle them) was the infallible clew to this mystery. And when any one reflects upon so well-known a fact, that many sea Lieutenants grow decrepit from age, without attaining a Captaincy and wearing two epaulets, which would strike the balance between their shoulders, the above reason ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... shot from the wall when there was occasion to put the apparatus of death in requisition. Fearful as this elevated gallows appeared, and unique in its character, it was not more so than the finisher of the law who then generally officiated upon it. No decrepit wretch, no crime-hardened ruffian, no secret and mysterious personage, who was produced occasionally disguised and masked, plied his dreadful trade here. Who, think you, gentle reader—who now, perhaps, recoils from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... music-stands were set up, the music began. I have already mentioned that Fustov played the zither extremely well, but that instrument has always produced the most distressing impression upon me. I have always fancied, and I fancy still, that there is imprisoned in the zither the soul of a decrepit Jew money-lender, and that it emits nasal whines and complaints against the merciless musician who forces it to utter sounds. Mr. Ratsch's performance, too, was not calculated to give me much pleasure; moreover, his face became suddenly purple, and assumed ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Pierre Caribou, and the squaw glided out of the cabin. There were two couches of the kind they used to call ottomans inside, which had evidently once formed part of the chateau furnishings for their faded splendour accorded little with the decrepit interior ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... fall from YOUR lips, sire. To you life must present a bright array of hopes and useful deeds. None but an old and decrepit man should take such gloomy ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... up apparently from the sea-shore. It was that of a woman, seemingly well advanced in life, and dressed in the garb of the lower orders: there was nothing particular in her appearance, except that in her gait and figure she was more decrepit than from her countenance might have been expected. The tears were streaming rapidly down her face, however; and though she suddenly paused on perceiving the stranger, she could not command those tears from ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... others over his shoulders; the occupant sits with his legs over the rim of the basket, and his back almost resting against the head of his bearer, who, bending forward under the weight of his load, and grasping a long stick, looks like some decrepit old man—a delusion which vanishes the instant you commence the ascent of a mountain by his side, when his endurance and vigour astonish you, if they do ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... the cosmopolitan character of our population. It is a fact, however, that the best blood of the old world came to us until within ten years—not the decrepit, not the maimed, not the aged; for over fifty per cent. of those who came were between fifteen and thirty, and have grown up to be honorable citizens in the composition of our constitutional society. They came not as paupers. Many of ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, Dungeons, or beggary, or decrepit age! Light, the prime work of God, to me 's extinct, And all her various objects of delight Annul'd, which might in part my grief have eas'd, 187 MILTON: Samson Agonistes, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... Catiline," the sublimity, against the vileness of Rousseau's Confessions. It is something akin to, but something more than these predominant partial tones of Hawthorne—"the grand old countenance of Homer; the decrepit form, but vivid face of Aesop; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais' smile of deep-wrought mirth; the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes; the all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for allegoric structure; the severe divinity ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... taxation would be equal, and money would not be wrung from the hard-working miners to support governors and other officials in luxury. While Mr. Charley was shouting with all his might, and trying to infuse a little of his own warmth into his hearers, a little, decrepit old man, with long, gray hair and shabby clothes, edged towards us, as though to ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... not tell you that I was going to make love to you? That I was old and hideous and had everything against me? That it was all a comedy for your amusement? That there was to be nothing but deception from beginning to end? That I was like a decrepit owl screeching at the moon, and many other ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... he said after some hesitation induced less by consideration of the expense than by the sheer novelty of the proceeding. Ere she could respond he was gone. Not without trouble and a thorough drenching he discovered a decrepit four-wheeler. ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... might still have been retrieved. But softness and irresolution were the characteristics of Austria's generals no less than of her rulers.[213] The Hapsburg armies were still led with the old leisurely insouciance; and their counsels swayed to and fro under the wavering impulses of a seemingly decrepit dynasty. Francis had many good qualities: he was a good husband and father, and his kindly manners endeared him to the Viennese even in the midst of defeat. But he was capricious and shortsighted; anything outside of the well-worn ruts of routine vexed and alarmed him; and it is ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... sun's benevolent warmth, and tempering, with the closed lid, the hot rays that were directed to her sightless orbs. She had no power to move, and was happy in the still enjoyment of the lingering and lovely day. She might have been a statue for her quietness—but there were curves and lines in the decrepit frame that art could never borrow. Little there seemed about her to induce a love of life, and yet a countenance more bright with cheerfulness and mild content I never met. The healthy and the young might read a lesson on her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... especially that one whose name has ever since stood as a sort of proverb of honesty, Nathaniel Macon. By the representations of these friends, he was led to believe that their new State capital, Raleigh, where there was only a very decrepit specimen of journalism, would afford him at once a surer competence and a happier life than Philadelphia. Coming to this conclusion, he disposed of his newspaper and printing-office, and removed to Raleigh, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Article my Liedge your selfe must breake, For well you know here comes in Embassie The French Kings daughter, with your selfe to speake: A Maide of grace and compleate maiestie, About surrender vp of Aquitaine: To her decrepit, sicke, and bed-rid Father. Therefore this Article is made in vaine, Or vainly comes th' ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... ain't you, Heiny, so long as I give you a bit of sugar now and then?" he said to his decrepit old guardian in his ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor. That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... a brilliant figure on the London Press. He turned often from his tiresome writing to gaze out of the office window. The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures—on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... did not count. The large window looked on the garden, and the room opened at the back into the drawing-room, and at one side into the dining-room. On the rug slept the short-haired black collie, whom David had once protected from Louie's dislike—old, blind, and decrepit, but still beloved, especially by Sandy, and still capable of barking a toothless ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we and our children shall have been consigned to the house appointed for all living, may love of country and pride of country glow with equal fervor among those to whom our names and our blood shall have descended! And then, when honored and decrepit age shall lean against the base of this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered around it, and when the one shall speak to the other of its objects, the purposes of its construction, and the great and ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... sake accepted a fifth-rate position. On my motioning him to proceed (he seemed much inclined to affect a good deal of etiquette) the fellow led off, through a long dark passage, crowded with empty Genessee flour barrels, champagne baskets, boxes of cast off pipes (breathing redolent of tobacco), decrepit arm-chairs, old foils and boxing-gloves, numerous empty beer-bottles, a lot of worn-out dancing slippers, and a quantity of second-hand nightgowns and side-saddles. What use diplomacy had for these abused relics we leave the reader to conjecture. Opening a door on the left, my ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... had a beautiful wife, who died; but the mother, a decrepit old dotard, remained a fixture in his house, because of the dowry. He was teased to death by her company; but, from the circumstance of the dower, he had no remedy. In the meantime some of his ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Abbas Hilmi," or "The Chicago Tribune's special steamer General Gordon," and never dreamed that the young men in sun-helmets and white linen who were writing those despatches were comfortably seated under the awnings of the same decrepit stern-wheeler, which they had chartered jointly, but on which, in order to lend importance and dignity to his despatches, each correspondent ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... earnest. It was not yet very heavy, but heavy enough, with the wind at its back, and she with no defense but her parasol, to wet her thoroughly before she could reach any shelter, the nearest being a solitary, decrepit old hawthorn-tree, about half-way across the common. She bent her head to the blast, and walked on. She had no desire for shelter. She would like to get wet to the skin, take a violent cold, go into a ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... senesce. Adj. aged; old &c. 124; elderly, geriatric, senile; matronly, anile|; in years; ripe, mellow, run to seed, declining, waning, past one's prime; gray, gray-headed; hoar, hoary; venerable, time-worn, antiquated, passe, effete, decrepit, superannuated; advanced in life, advanced in years; stricken in years; wrinkled, marked withthe crow's foot; having one foot in the grave; doting &c. (imbecile) 499; like the last of pea time. older, elder, eldest; senior; firstborn. turned of, years old; of a certain age, no ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... dreamland. Nevertheless, here is simulated a great natural ravine in all its wild grandeur: here are caverns, abrupt rocks, a torrent, a cascade, islands. The trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process of which we have not the secret, have tiny little leaves on their decrepit and knotty branches. A pervading hue of the mossy green of antiquity harmonizes all this medley, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... whose name I had known since I was a lad at school. It seemed incredible to me that this man, whose intelligence had so early dominated mine, this great abstraction, should suddenly realise itself as this decrepit, familiar figure. I daresay every young fellow who has suddenly fallen among celebrities has felt something of my disappointment. He told me now of the future that the feeble streams of his life would ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... that desperate ride now with feelings akin to horror. Surrounded with murderous savages, with only a decrepit mule to ride and fourteen miles to go, it seemed impossible that I could get through safely. My companions said good-bye to me as though I were a scaffold victim about to be executed. But get through I did—how I do not know—and the chillingly weird war-calls of the Indians howling at me ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... primarily a storing place for food, and not an asylum for hopelessly maimed and decrepit furniture. If there is any which is mendable, mend and use it; if not, consign it to the kindling pile at once, there to round out its career of usefulness. Odds and ends of rubbish collect very quickly and make a cellar unsightly and ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... is weak) for want of a settled art and language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness—the set limbs of the warriors on horseback—the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments—the people ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Greece, the Danubian States, Hungary, Turkey, etc. A climate of surpassing quality, a soil so luxuriant and fertile as is hardly found in the best regions of the United States, will some day furnish an abundance of food to unnumbered people. The decrepit political and social conditions of those countries cause hundreds of thousands of our own people to prefer crossing the ocean rather than to settle in those much nearer and more comfortably located States. Soon as rational social conditions ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... sons who hear Newly their mother's history, unthought Before, and say—'She is not as we dreamed: Ah me! we are beguiled!' What art thou, then, That art not our conceiving? Art thou not Too old for thy young children? Or perchance, Keep'st thou a youth perpetual-burnishable Beyond thy sons decrepit? It is long Since Time was first a fledgling; Yet thou may'st be but as a pendant bulla Against his stripling bosom swung. Alack! For that we seem indeed To have slipped the world's great leaping-time, ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... Being of the same stock and speaking their language, Benezet took upon himself the task of serving as mediator between this deported group and the community. A man of high character and much influence, he easily obtained a relief fund with which he provided asylum for the decrepit, sustenance for the needy, and employment for those able to labor. He attended the sick, comforted the dying, and delivered over their remains the last ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... in so rude a man, smiled, drew up the least decrepit bench she could find, and sat down, in spite of the angry mutterings of her irritated host. Then she opened her satchel, took out the small bottle of gold, and handed it to him without a word. The old man received it somewhat contemptuously, shook ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... not to be diverted but by tippling as often as they can fall into company in the day, and conclude with downright drunkenness at night. These gentlemen never know the satisfaction of youth, but skip the years of manhood, and are decrepit soon after they are of age. I was godfather to one of these old fellows. He is now three-and-thirty, which is the grand climacteric of a young drunkard. I went to visit the wretch this morning, with no other purpose but to rally ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... its own hands. The mercantile instinct of the nation was flattered with the prospect of gain, the martial quality of its patrician and of its plebeian blood was eager to confront danger, the great Protestant mutiny. Against a decrepit superstition in combination with an aggressive tyranny, all impelled the best energies of the English people against Spain, as the embodiment of all which was odious and menacing to them, and with which they ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unbelievers of bad faith because they sometimes waver in their principles, changing opinions during sickness, and retracting them at the hour of death. When the body is diseased, the faculty of reasoning is generally disturbed also. The infirm and decrepit man, in approaching his end, sometimes perceives himself that reason is leaving him, he feels that prejudice returns. There are diseases which have a tendency to lessen courage, to make pusillanimous, and to enfeeble the brain; there are others which, ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... to a few bathrooms a Continental hotelkeeper has a decrepit elevator he makes more noise over it than we do over a Pompeian palmroom or an Etruscan roofgarden; he hangs a sign above his front door testifying to his magnificent enterprise in this regard. The Continental may be a born hotelkeeper, as has been frequently claimed for him; but ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... I told you, Walter," he answered, looking round, with the old look of decrepit fear usurping his face, which had brightened for ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... our gold disappearing? Our bonds and stocks, Government and corporation, are scattered broadcast over the whole of Europe, and those decrepit titles, that were dying out, have been put on their feet again by American money, and are now living off the interest of American bonds of one ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... perfect which, like the British and Austrian Empires, include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them. Those in which no mixture of races has occurred are imperfect; and those in which its effects have disappeared are decrepit. A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government The theory of nationality, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... which you cannot overpass; the sensitive reader feels himself insulated, and a sea of wonder and mystery flows round him as round the spell-stricken ship itself. It was a sad mistake in the ablest artist— Mr. Scott, we believe—who in his engravings has made the ancient mariner an old decrepit man. That is not the true image; no! he should have been a growthless, decayless being, impassive to time or season, a silent cloud—the wandering Jew. The curse of the dead men's eyes should not have passed away. But this was, perhaps, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... entire system. He had grown very thin; his cheeks were hollow and his eyes inflamed. Those who knew his age shuddered as they saw him pass, bent and decrepit as a man of eighty. The trembling of his hands had so increased that some days he was obliged to use them both in raising his glass to his lips. This annoyed him intensely and seemed to be the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... whose death caused such universal lamentation in the city of London, was for many years a wanderer from God, and was at length converted by means of a tract, given him by the "way-side," by an old and decrepit woman. ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... but none spoke to him, for he was known now, as each stranger who stays long in Naples is known, summed up, labelled, and either ignored or pestered. The touts and the ruffiani were aware that it was no use to pester the Frenchman, and even the decrepit and indescribably seedy old men who hover before the huge plate-glass windows of the photograph shops, or linger near the entrance to the cinematograph, never peeped at him out of the corners of their bloodshot eyes ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... the "Envious Sisters," the girl, the youngest of the three children, plays the part of the usual hero of folk-tales of this class. There is, generally, a seemingly wretched old man—a hideous, misshapen dwarf—or an ugly, decrepit old woman—who is treated with rudeness by the two elder adventurers, so they do not speed in their enterprise; but the youngest addresses the person in respectful terms—shares his only loaf with him—and is rewarded by counsel which enables him to bring his adventure to a successful end. In the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... the Almighty.' May not these particulars, too, be meant to have some symbolic significance? Night hung over the nation. The spiritual eye of the priest was dim, and the order seemed growing old and decrepit, but the lamp of God had not altogether gone out; and if Eli was growing blind, Samuel was full of fresh young life. The darkest hour is that before the dawn; and that silent sanctuary, with the slumbering old half-blind priest and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I cannot but think there is some small dull perception, whereby they are distinguished from perfect insensibility. And that this may be so, we have plain instances, even in mankind itself. Take one in whom decrepit old age has blotted out the memory of his past knowledge, and clearly wiped out the ideas his mind was formerly stored with, and has, by destroying his sight, hearing, and smell quite, and his taste to a great degree, stopped up ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... cannot, with all his wealth and splendor, awaken her love, either sentimental or sensual; love, whatever its nature, will always prefer the apple-tree and the shepherd lover to the vain desires and a thousand times divided attentions of a decrepit king, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the conquerors of this, and the terror of all the other islands, we expected to see a chief young and vigorous, with an intelligent countenance, and an enterprising spirit: We found, however, a poor feeble wretch, withered and decrepit, half blind with age, and so sluggish and stupid that he appeared scarcely to have understanding enough left to know that it was probable we should be gratified either by hogs or women.[46] He did not receive us sitting, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... wars, or in Armida's bowers; Mr. Poet has spied a wrinkle; the brush is for the rose in its season. She turns to her Old Dog then. She hugs him; and he, who has subsisted on a bone and a pat till there he squats decrepit, he turns his grateful old eyes up to her, and has not a notion that she is hugging sad memories in him: Hero, Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one! Then is she buried, and the village hears languid howls, and there is a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man was living amongst these Patagonians; a miserable, decrepit-looking fellow, who said he came from the United States, but he spoke English very imperfectly, and the explorers took him to be a German-Swiss. Niederhauser, so he called himself, had gone to seek his fortune in the United States, and that ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... child's cradle, that they had been near forgetting, whereon baby would be tucked in securely and hoisted to the top of the load, where he reposed serenely among a grove of legs of chairs and upturned tables. At the back of another cart was the decrepit old grandfather tied with cords to a wardrobe, and he was hauled away for all the world as if he had been one of the family chattels. Then there were those who did not own a vehicle, so they piled their household goods haphazard on a wheelbarrow, while others carried an armful of clothing, and ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... I was in the crowd at the east front of the Capitol, and, at the time appointed, Mr. Buchanan came forth and took the oath administered to him by the Chief Justice, Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland. Though Taney was very decrepit and feeble, I looked at him much as a Spanish Protestant in the sixteenth century would have looked at Torquemada; for, as Chief Justice, he was understood to be in the forefront of those who would fasten African slavery on the whole country; and this view of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... themselves counted the education of Philopoemen, thinking they had done a general good to Greece, by giving him the nurture of philosophy. And indeed all Greece (which looked upon him as a kind of latter birth brought forth, after so many noble leaders, in her decrepit age) loved him wonderfully; and, as his glory grew, increased his power. And one of the Romans, to praise him, calls him the last of the Greeks; as if after him Greece had produced no great man, nor who deserved ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... now returned, leading two extra ponies from the stable. One was a bay, accoutered with a man's deep Mexican saddle, whereon was secured a coiled lasso; the other was a wiry little roan mare, with a somewhat decrepit but otherwise sound side-saddle tightly cinched ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... bring destruction on the innocent; and then, when these things were mentioned before the bench, where neither law, nor religion, nor equity were present to separate truth from falsehood, those whom they thus accused, though utterly void of offence, without any distinction, youths, and decrepit old men, without being heard in their defence, found their property confiscated, and were hurried off ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the iron railings. As most of the experiments took place at the North London Hospital, Euston-square was his chief point of attraction, and when he was removed, it was always found necessary to break off the railings and take them away with him. This accounted for the decrepit condition of the fleur de lys that surround the inclosure, which was not, as generally supposed, the work of the university pupils residing in Gower-place. Perfect insensibility to pain supervened at the same time, and his friends took ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... who lay below them had lately quitted. It was a relief to the somewhat studied and formal monotony of the well-ordered woodland,—every rood, of which had been paced by visitors, keepers, or poachers,—to find those decrepit and bending tombstones, lurching at every angle, or deeply sinking into the green sea of forgetfulness around them. All this, and the trodden paths of the villagers towards that common place of meeting, struck him as being more human than anything he had left behind ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... I will explain the matter to you all, children, youths, grown-ups and old men, aye, even to the decrepit dotards. My master is mad, not as you are, but with another sort of madness, quite a new kind. The livelong day he looks open-mouthed towards heaven and never stops addressing Zeus. "Ah! Zeus," he cries, "what are thy intentions? ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... been a scald wolf or a cat-o'-mount[FN289] at bay and, taking the saloon key, left Ali Shar prostrate and ran off to rejoin his brother. And the cause of his so doing was that the Nazarene's brother was the same decrepit old man who purposed to buy Zumurrud for a thousand dinars, but she would none of him and jeered him in verse. He was an Unbeliever inwardly, though a Moslem outwardly, and had called himself Rashid al-Din;[FN290] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... does ta fat havril want?" Uncertain steps not long after sounded along the creaking passage; the door was opened, and presented to the impatient glance of the new proprietor the visage of the grumbling Gael. He was an old decrepit man, with bright ferocious eyes gleaming through his elf-locks. If he had succeeded in making a "swap" of his habiliments with any scarecrow south of the Tay, he would have had by far the best of the bargain, for his whole toilet consisted in a coarse blue kilt ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... truth of this argument. I, amongst others, belonging to a large party who were waiting at a railway station for the train that was to carry us down to a garden party at one of the many lovely places on the Thames, saw an old man, a decrepit creature, bowed and palsied, making his way to where the third-class compartment would be. His arms were full of bundles of various sizes. Coming near a truck, the old man, who was half blind, marched against the edge of it, and all his little bundles fell helplessly to ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford
... question of his love, and perhaps bribe to his service. As with this resolution he was hovering round the mansion, he beheld, stealing from a small door in one of the low wings of the house, a bended and decrepit form: it supported its steps upon a staff; and, as now entering the garden, it stooped by the side of a fountain to cull flowers and herbs by the light of the moon, the Moor almost started to behold a countenance which resembled that of some ghoul ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... woman easily discouraged. She turned her steps towards the noble medieval street called the Judengasse—then thickly inhabited; now a spectacle of decrepit architectural old age, to be soon succeeded ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... alive, or plunged into caldrons of boiling oil. [95] To a point of honor Motassem had sacrificed a flourishing city, two hundred thousand lives, and the property of millions. The same caliph descended from his horse, and dirtied his robe, to relieve the distress of a decrepit old man, who, with his laden ass, had tumbled into a ditch. On which of these actions did he reflect with the most pleasure, when he was summoned by the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... very fascinating when he liked, so that the first, and indeed very intelligent surmise of the sensible parents that Svidrigailov had probably had so much to drink that he did not know what he was doing vanished immediately. The decrepit father was wheeled in to see Svidrigailov by the tender and sensible mother, who as usual began the conversation with various irrelevant questions. She never asked a direct question, but began by smiling and rubbing her hands and then, if she were obliged to ascertain something—for instance, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... chap I had put to flight. The mysterious new paper parcel lay opened on the seat next him, filled with different sorts of victuals, of which he ate as he sat. I immediately wanted to go over and ask pardon for my conduct, but the sight of food repelled me. The decrepit fingers looked like ten claws as they clutched loathsomely at the greasy bread and butter; I felt qualmish, and passed by without addressing him. He did not recognize me; his eyes stared at me, dry as horn, and his face did not move ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... instructions to Morton, therefore, and directed him to take two men as a body-guard, and to set off at once. Ronald selected Truefitt and Doull, the first for his steadiness and the other for his cool courage, and having procured a guide and a horse, and two wretched mules which had been too decrepit for the enemy to carry off, ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... raised in Powers Pond Place," said decrepit Estella Jones, "and, though I warn't but nine years old, I 'member dey had a nuss house whar dey put all de young chillun 'til dey wuz old enough to work. De chillun wuz put at dis nuss house so dey Ma and Pa could work. Dey had one old 'oman to look atter ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... young man in the splendour of his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of tears, or the choking sob; to allow ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... rose within me against the deceased Uncle Thomas, and against this other decrepit ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... been born a Hewish and had lately visited at Halberton House. In that mild climate people remain alive, or, if you prefer it, asleep, longer than in any other part of England, and the visitors who came flocking to Lapton were, for the most part, in a stage of decrepit or suspended life. They drove through the steep and narrow lanes in all sorts of ancient vehicles, in jingles, victorias, barouches and enormous family drags. Their coachmen, older and more withered than themselves, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... Behind its mud-and-Masonry decrepit wall that guards only the seaward side, Adra straggles quite a distance desertward; and there are winding streets enough to hide an army in, provided that the army did not mind the fleas. Scamp, view-halloaing his utmost, led that most amazing hunt a quite considerable circuit before ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... recollects His wandering spirits, and with anger checks His coward fears; resolved now to outdare The worst of dangers, whatsoe'er they were; He eyed her o'er and o'er, and still his eye Found some addition to deformity. An old decrepit hag she was, grown white With frosty age, and withered with despite And self-consuming hate; in furs yclad, And on her head a thrummy cap she had. Her knotty ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... he ended, I could have laughed myself to scorn to find In that decrepit man so firm a mind; God, said I, be my help and stay secure, I'll think of thee, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley |
