"Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the green gate to meet us. She had a soft, drab dress and a long thin neck, and her hair was drab too, and it was screwed ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... renders the body of the carriage much lighter than usual, and more elegant in appearance. Another 'innovation' is the painting. It has hitherto been usual to paint the under part of the carriage white or drab, relieved by the same colour as the body, but in the present case the whole vehicle has been painted a dark green, the family colour of the Lord Mayor elect, relieved by large lines of gold upon the body, and ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... which disfigured the countenance of the other; nor, though roguish enough, a certain evil expression which that of the other bore, and which the face of the woman possessed in a yet more remarkable degree. For the rest, he wore drab breeches, with certain strings at the knee, a rather gay waistcoat, and tolerably white shirt; under his arm he bore a mighty whip of whalebone with a brass knob, and upon his head was a hat without ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... your case, though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, when reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall* in bed: "Well, I really must ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... this smoky little den on a drab November day, sick at heart. The winter. He tried to face it, and at what he saw he ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... death-rattle of the streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always are. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... when we made our second appearance. "There," was our reply, pointing at the same time to a well-cushioned and genially sequestered seat at the north-west corner, and we were ushered into it with becoming decorum. In two minutes afterwards five women and a festive infant, dressed in a drab cloak, and muffled all over to keep the cold out, stopped at the pew door. We stepped out; three of the females, with the baby, stepped in; the remainder went into the next pew; and after condensing our ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... parts where a good shower of rain has fallen, the stridulous piercing notes of the cicadae are perfectly deafening; a drab-colored cricket joins the chorus with a sharp sound, which has as little modulation as the drone of a Scottish bagpipe. I could not conceive how so small a thing could raise such a sound; it seemed to make the ground over it thrill. When ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... coats were too hot, and you can't climb with your arms held by coat-sleeves. We had our coats in the packs, for emergencies. We wore blue flannel shirts with the Scouts' emblem on the sleeves, and Scouts' drab service hats, and khaki trousers tucked into mountain-boots hob-nailed with our private pattern so that we could tell each other's tracks, and about our necks were red bandanna handkerchiefs knotted loose, and on our hands were gauntlet gloves. Little Jed Smith, who ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... big loafer, you, just because you put one over me when I was a starved stage door drab don't think I am that same kind or that sort of thing goes with me now." She spit the words at him as she half yielded to his nonchalant ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... all," I said, deciding to feed his stomach before I really tried to convince him. "It all comes under the heading of the drab, routine duties of a housewife. ...
— Sorry: Wrong Dimension • Ross Rocklynne
... unharmonious, when contrasted with the sky. Represent water by shades of a blue grey: the sky should be a serene blue, with much closeness, and mingled with clouds composed of varying tints of a white and a yellow drab. If mountains are seen in the distance, they should be of a grey lavender tint, and some living animal should, in nearly all cases, be introduced. The presence of a cow, sheep, &c., gives life and animation to ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... searching glances. He was now determined to take the whip hand, and to keep it. His accents were staccato as he said, "Tell me now who you are, and what you wish of me!" A clock, hung high over them on the dreary, drab walls, ticked away brusquely, as the angered woman ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... styled the Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, with strings and rosettes to each knee; and it was de rigueur ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... at some inconvenience, a large public meeting, because I heard that Lucretia Mott was to speak. After several addresses, a slight lady, with white cap and drab Quaker dress, came forward. Though well in years, her eyes were bright; her smile was winsome, and I thought her face one of the loveliest I had ever looked upon. The voice was singularly sweet and clear, and the manner had ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... are silent, and have been rather sad, you know, Miss Vernon, and the blue is the glimmer of sky above your old, dull life. Do wear the drab with blue ribbons." ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... presently appeared, brought not as usual by the footman, in scarlet and drab, but by the old butler, in threadbare but well-brushed black, who, as he was placing it on the table, said—'If you please, Sir Christopher, there's the widow Hartopp a-crying i' the still room, and begs ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... said Bess, still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... things were coming too easy, persisted through his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small house behind the store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... centre, possesses a truly noble aspect, and the visitor could not select a better place to begin his tour of the city. Due to the monotonous regularity of the streets and the all-pervading soft coal smoke, Chicago presents on the whole a somewhat drab appearance, but the view from Grant Park or from the lake front (with Michigan Ave. in the foreground) is nearly, if not quite, as fine as anything N.Y. has to offer. In Michigan Ave. are the Public Library (with a beautiful interior), the Art Institute (with fine collections ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... stopped at one of those frank little restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... contrary is strongly suggested. A gloomy day, in a drab room, sparsely tenanted by listeners, invites platform disaster. Everyone feels it in the air. But let the speaker walk squarely up to the issue and suggest by all his feeling, manner and words that this is going to be a great gathering in every vital sense, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys: the unlovely uncombed Wherrys, who were the "poor" to ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we might complain that he sometimes—rarely—writes, not by vocation of the ancient Muses, who were daughters of Memory and immortal Zeus, but of those Muses in drab and scoop-bonnets who are daughters of Memory and George Fox. Some lines of the "Brown of Ossawatomie" we are thinking of now. We can regard them only as a reminiscence of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... town seems lacking in all the things that season life, but a home which virtue, intelligence, thrift, and courage transform into a garden of roses and a type of heaven. I do not justify neglect of the finer material things of life, nor plead for drab and homespun as passports to the courts of excellence; but I insist that the plainness, simple living, absence of luxury, lack of polish that may be met with in the country, do not necessarily accompany a condition barren of the essentials of the ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... "Um-m-m! No suspicions, eh?" "Said, 'No, no suspicions!'" "Uh! I'll have a word with him." He waddled off, shaking his drab silk suit into shape and twisting a leather watch-guard ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... be allowed that the personality of everyone inclines to being drab or flamboyant, his may be compared to fireworks. Thomas Stukely, who was born about 1530, was for a younger brother unusually well endowed, 'but his profluous prodigality soon wasted it; yet then, not anyway dejected in mind, he projected to people Florida, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... pantaloons; two active youths, of the ages of seventeen and fifteen respectively, in precisely similar costume; a man-servant in pepper and salt, and a little thin timid boy in blue, a sort of confidential page without the buttons. All of them wore drab gaiters and shoes of the thickest conceivable description. From the inside of the coach there issued a delicate elderly lady, who leaned, in a helpless manner, on the arm of a young, plain, but extremely fresh and sweet-looking ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... garments, brewing the herbs, raising the children, dressing the warrior's wounds, looking after the herds, and any other light and airy trifle which might come to her notice. But all this was in the background. Plain useful work has always been considered dull and drab. ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... He frequently repeated to himself, or composed perhaps, for a good while, and often smiled or raised his hand, seeming completely occupied and amused. His neighbor, a vastly scientific and rather grave professor, in a smooth drab Benjamin and broad-brimmed beaver, cast many a curious sidelong glance at him, evidently suspecting that all was not right with the upper story, but preserved perfect politeness. The poet was, however, discovered by the captain of the vessel in which we crossed the Channel;—and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... her hair, then again, ornaments and a jacket on, and her hair neatly dressed with ribbons. At another time she had a silk shawl, a victorine around her neck, a small crucifix attached to a necklace, and little ribbons above the wrists. She had drab gloves on and her bed ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... the outer door. Out of the drab recesses leaped dusky shadows. There seemed to be a large number of jostling men; perhaps only three or four were at hand by actual count; the insufficient lighting and their shocking and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... to the Gaite to see the performance of "La Grace de Dieu." Quenu, in a frock-coat and drab gloves, with his hair carefully pomatumed and combed, was occupied most of the time in hunting for the names of the performers in the programme. Lisa looked superb in her low dress as she rested her hands in their tight-fitting white gloves on ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... a straight figure, and was dressed in drab tunic and hose. His dark hair was long and straight, and his face held a dreaming strength, altogether different from the battered visages of the soldiers or the changeless mask of the Inquisitor. The latter regarded the prisoner ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... something you don't want," Maria went on, peering into the corners of the room. "Look-a-here what Mister Grannis gi' me," and she held out the yellow pitcher. Instantly Miss Baker was in a quiver of confusion. Every word spoken aloud could be perfectly heard in the next room. What a stupid drab was this Maria! Could anything be more trying than ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Lieutenant Armitage, in a marine's drab shirt and overalls, stood among a silent group of mechanics on a pier near the Goat Island lighthouse. A few hundred feet out lay a small practice torpedo boat, with the rays of a searchlight from the bridge of the parent ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Raymounts were one by one assembling to break their fast, was discolored and dark, whether with age or smoke it would have needed more than a glance to say. The reds had grown brown, and the blues a dirty slate-color, while an impression of drab was prevalent. But the fire was burning as if it had been at it all night and was glorying in having at length routed the darkness; and in the middle of the table on the white cloth, stood a shallow piece ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... use brought him any balm. He loafed aimlessly about the streets. He wandered in the Park and out again. The Park bored him. The streets bored him. The whole city bored him. A city without Sally in it was a drab, futile city, and nothing that the sun could do to brighten ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... of figures in dark blue uniforms with scarlet facings, drab breeches and heavy riding boots, silent and immovable, with fixed bayonets like so many automatons lining the room all round; at some little distance from the central table and out of the immediate circle of light, a small group composed of five ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... now beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling as of death—the death of the soul—stirred in his heart. His thoughts no longer even beat vainly for escape. The end was near, and ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... ownership plainly shown by the record of his name in full, Natale Ripaldi, inside the cover—was a commonplace note-book bound in shabby drab cloth, its edges and corners strengthened with some sort of white metal. The pages were of coarse paper, lined blue and red, and they were dog-eared and smirched as though they had been constantly turned over ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... texture. Their durability certainly would have been prodigious; for in thickness, coarseness, and strength, I never saw any cloth in the smallest degree to equal them. His coat was a frock coat, of a yellowish drab colour, with wide sleeves. It is tweeled, milled, and thicker than a carpet. I cut off two of the skirts and brought them with me. His vest was of striped serge, such as I have often seen worn by country people. It was lined and backed with white stuff. The breeches ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... him, but without much success. The "poor spirit" of the bailiff was a perpetual astonishment to the American, in the prime of his own life and vigour. Existence for Hastings was always either drab or a black business. If the weather was warm, "a bit of cold would ha' been better": if a man recovered from an illness, he'd still got the "bother o' dyin' before him." He was certain we should lose the war, and the rush of the September victories did not affect ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which to draw renewal of its strength, Has most of all, perhaps, estranged our King. I blame you not, I say but what is true. I pray you, then, to waive your own desire, But if it please you otherwise, then speak! What flow'ry fate, what flatt'ring punishment, Is suited to the sin this drab ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of a long, straight, brick-built street in the far East End of London—one of those lifeless streets, made of two drab walls upon which the level lines, formed by the precisely even window-sills and doorsteps, stretch in weary perspective from end to end, suggesting petrified diagrams proving dead problems—stands a house that ever ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... degree below the burlesque houses. They were constituted of bad air and unchaperoned young women accompanied by youths who dangled cigarettes from a lower lip, all obviously of the lower class, including the cigarette; and of other women, sometimes drab, dragged of breast and carrying children who should have been in bed hours before; or still others, wandering in pairs, young, painted and predatory. She was not imaginative, or she could not have lived so long in Anthony Cardew's house. She never saw, in the ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... way, but to suffer it was his too-frequent lot. From first to last he was protesting against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of English life. "The [Greek: euphnes] is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnes] on the other hand is our Philistine." "I do not much believe in good being done by a man ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... out? And just think of having both the lamp and the shade for one day's work! Aren't you glad you wore your pink gingham now, even if mother did make you put on flannel underneath? You do look so pretty in pink and red, Rebecca, and so homely in drab and brown!" ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... holding in her slender throat a key that would unlock the doors of the whole world, and beside her the little boarding-house help, equally young, and with all youth's big demands pent up within her, yet ahead of her only a drab vista of other boarding-houses—some better, some worse, mayhap—but always eating the bread of servitude, her only possible way of escape by means of matrimony ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Her appearances are fitful; she keeps to the hearth when the grandees hold the floor. You see nothing of her at Holland House, which Tom may use as his inn, or at Bowood, if she can help herself, which in the country is his house of call. She is the Jenny Wren of this little cock-robin; she wears drab, too often mourning; but you find that she counts for very much with Tom. He loves to know her at his back, loves to remind himself of it. He is always happy to be home again in her faithful arms. Through all the sparkle and flash, under all the talk, through all the tinklings ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... said Gray, pulling his drab campaign hat down over his eyes to shut out the glare of the westering sun. ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... these fish had been placed in the cistern, it became necessary to clean the latter, and the fish were taken out. They were of a dusky drab color when first taken out, but soon regained their vivid tints when placed in a white vessel containing clear water. They had evidently changed color in order to harmonize with the black walls and bottom ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... carbuncles. Apathetic as he had become, he was surprised at her absence. It was either caprice or serious illness. She had dwindled to a skeleton, with a maleficent smile. Her teeth were yellow, her hands become claws, the scarlet of her clothes a drab hue, the plumes on her hat gone. Ambroise wondered. About midnight a mean-looking fellow entered and asked for him. A lady, a very ill lady, was in a coupe at the door. He hurried out. It was Aholibah. Her eyes were glazed and her lips black and cracked. She ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... precious dreams had just melted into drab reality—his mother was compelled to go back ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... final retribution and doom of the wicked harassed his slumbers. Suddenly he awoke, and dismal groans and unearthly rumblings struck his terrified ear. "Sally! Sally!" said he, leaping from bed and giving his sleeping spouse a vigorous shake, "why sleepest thou? arise and don thy drab camlet and high-crowned cap, and prepare to meet thy Lord; for ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... rather bent, but evidently more from habit than from weight of years. He wore a long blue coat which plainly spoke of years gone by, and bore in many places unmistakable evidence that Tommy was no friend to tailors; beneath this an old crimson plush waistcoat, that had long since done its duty, some drab knee-breeches, and a pair of dark grey stockings which hid their lower extremities in a pair of shoes about large enough to make two leather cradles; on his head a hat that scorned to shine, and in his hand he carried an oaken staff; his small grey eyes glistened with a spark of latent wit, whilst ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... newspapers in the dim light or dashing off letters home on any scrap of paper she had at hand, thinking gratefully of her sister Mary who in addition to her work as superintendent of the neighborhood public school, supervised the household at 7 Madison Street. Hotel rooms were cold and drab, the food was uninviting, and only occasionally did she find to her delight "a Christian cup of coffee."[316] She often felt that the Lyceum Bureau drove her unnecessarily hard, routed her inefficiently, and ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... "seven distinct diseases, but am otherwise pretty well"—the indefatigable pamphleteer had not yet done with controversy. In 1842 he published three Letters on the Mismanagement of Railways,[141] and in 1843 two on a tendency displayed by the "drab-coloured men of Pennsylvania" to repudiate the interest on their State's bonds. On the 18th of December 1843 ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany—full of great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom—in all these summer or winter nests he was always at home ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... hands were perfectly formed, and so doubtless were her feet, although these last were hidden by heavy laced-up boots. On the whole, she was an extremely picturesque figure, quite comforting to the artistic eye amidst the drab ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... Rose in doubt. "Soldiers don't wear blue clothes. They are dressed in khaki or olive-drab. Like Captain Ben was when he first came ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... their merry measure, till the music stops and the Italian passes on to raise Fairyland in the next slum. Music has given them a glimpse of something outside their dull and prosaic surroundings, it has touched their hearts with a glamour which is a glint of spiritual sunshine in a drab world. ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Lark and Sandy Rowl came to the crest of Black Cliff, a drizzle of rain was falling in advance of the fog. The wind was clipping past in soggy gusts that rose at intervals to the screaming pitch of a squall. A drab mist had crept around Point-o'-Bay and was spreading over the ice in Scalawag Run. Presently it would lie thick between Scalawag Island and the mainland of ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... came to the conclusion that if I was to see any patients that evening at all I must at once get back to my unpalatable rooms. I began to go along the pier, and passed into the shadow of the Sea Queen, now sunk in quiet, and drab and dark. As I went, a port-hole in the stern almost on the level of my eyes gleamed like a moon, and of a sudden there was an outbreak of angry voices, one threatening volubly and the other deeper and slower, but equally hostile. ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... have drawn the first lot. So the rest lean against the rails of the stage, and Joe and the dark man meet in the middle, the boards having been strewed with sawdust, Joe's white shirt and spotless drab breeches and boots contrasting with the gipsy's coarse blue shirt and dirty green velveteen breeches and leather gaiters. Joe is evidently turning up his nose at the other, and half insulted at having ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... almost inaccessible to Wilson's cattle its undergrowth was rank and high, and as it was sheltered from the sun's rays and watered in part by a tiny spring, it was often the one green oasis in a weary land of crackling yellow and drab. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... beyond Foy, the land openeth a large sandie drab Bay, for the Sea to ouer-flow, which, and the village adioyning, are therethrough aptly termed Trewardreth, in English, The Sandie towne. Elder times, of more deuotion then knowledge, here founded a religious house, which, in King Henrie ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... down; and your party no sooner won some power than your women-folk tried to form a "social set" of their own—you don't know women. You are as ignorant of their desires as you are of your own. You do not know it is woman's instinct to be something more than a drab. There is more of the divine spark in the woman than in the man. It should be so with the producers of men. She yearns for uplift, even if it be the sneered-at "society" ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... changing of garments and moving from one show to another. Tuesday was Viceroy's Cup Day at the races, a very pretty sight. One side of the ground was crowded by pretty women in lovely gowns, and on the other side the natives sat in their hundreds and chattered, not the drab-coloured crowd we produce, but gay and striking as a ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... means," he whispered. "Why you wept in the station, why you invented the story of the actress, why you came here to brighten my drab exile—what this whole comedy of Baldpate Inn amounts to, anyhow? I assure you I am as innocent of understanding it as is the czar of Russia on his ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... the hill Eric met a shambling, old gray horse drawing an express wagon which had seen better days. The driver was a woman: she appeared to be one of those drab-tinted individuals who can never have felt a rosy emotion in all their lives. She stopped her horse, and beckoned Eric over to her with the knobby handle of a ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... boy told the stranger, who proved to be Colonel Meade, once of Washington's staff, that the General was abroad on the estate and pointed out what direction to take to come upon him. "You will meet, sir, with an old gentleman riding alone in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, a hickory switch in his hand, and carrying an umbrella with a long staff, which is attached to his saddle-bow—that ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... in which horses are exercised. They looked offensively modern, and I wondered why our Army had not got field artillery with fixed ammunition and 8,000 yards range. Some officers and men of the Staats Artillerie, dressed in a drab uniform with blue facings, approached us. The commander, Adjutant Roos—as he introduced himself—made a polite salute. He regretted the unfortunate circumstances of our meeting; he complimented the ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... dye-bath with 20 lb. Cross-dye drab, 5 lb. soda crystals and 80 lb. salt, work at the boil for an hour, then lift, wash well and dry; this can be chromed ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... in this spirit and as mind had affected the colour of the Puritans' clothes, so in turn the drab clothes, prescribed by their new creed, helped to remove colour from the New England mind ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... with springy pine needles, and squirrels and birds were everywhere. We walked past rows and rows of white tents pitched in orderly array among the pines, the canvas village of fifty or more road builders. By and by we came to a drab gray shack, weather-beaten and discouraged, hunched under the trees as if it were trying to blot itself from the scene. I was passing on, when the Chief (White Mountain) ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... in auld red rags, [next] Ane sat, weel brac'd wi' mealy bags, An' knapsack a' in order; His doxy lay within his arm; [mistress] Wi' usquebae an blankets warm [whisky] She blinket on her sodger; [leered] An' aye he gies the tozie drab [flushed with drink] The tither skelpin' kiss, [smacking] While she held up her greedy gab, [mouth] Just like an aumous dish; [alms] Ilk smack still did crack still Just like a cadger's whip; [hawker's] Then, swaggering an' staggering, He roar'd ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... quiet enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round at the vine-fields, framed in purple lines, and dominated by the nest of grey and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape of a crowning rock—"if you think this spot quiet enough, you can speak to him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to speak ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... lasted about forty minutes altogether, and through it all the little destroyers—don't forget them—were weaving in and out among the big ships; and on the big ships were thousands of troopers, white life-belts around their olive-drab uniforms, standing steadily by life-boats ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... station, he must make his household live plainly in every way; but without thinking them right feelings, she had some pity for little Bessie's weariness and discontent in never seeing anything pretty. The three girls came in dressed for church, in the plainest brown hats, black capes, and drab alpaca frocks, rather long and not very full; not a coloured bow nor handkerchief, not a flounce nor fringe, to relieve them; even their books plain brown. Bessie looked wistfully at Miss Fosbrook's pretty Church-service, and said she ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the post. The sun and the leaves made spots come down; I looked close at him through the fence; The post was drab and ...
— Under the Tree • Elizabeth Madox Roberts
... well—that the girl was a "duster." Having exhausted the usual commonplace topics in the course of a monologue that induced no reaction whatever, he voiced a perfectly natural remark about the wonder of sudden riches. He was, in a way, thinking aloud of the changes wrought in drab lives like the Briskows' by the discovery of oil. He was surprised ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... against the bow. This day had God been very good to me. This was life as I would have it; work to do for brain and brawn, and a woman to do it for who was worth the uttermost that was in me. Romance had flushed the drab night of my life with a rosy dawn, and my heart was lifted up within me. If it faded away, there would at least be the memory of it. But it might not fade. I was under no illusions as to the stiffness ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... uncomfortable hour's wait, while the low smoke-stack belched black vapours into the dirty drab mist that lay oppressively upon everything about the harbour. From time to time the sound of the shovelling of coal arose from the engine-room. One at a time five or six passengers came on board, porters carrying their luggage. The saloon was nothing more ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... about her slim, inspiriting figure. Her face shone through the drab fog like an undimmed star of purest light. He bounded up the steps toward her, drawn as by magnet against which there was ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... when brown stone was the only builders' medium New York must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but for the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is, I suppose, that ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... that my imagination had been running in conventional channels and that my hopes had always been drab stuff. I had envisaged a command as a result of a slow course of promotion in the employ of some highly respectable firm. The reward of faithful service. Well, faithful service was all right. One would naturally give that for one's own sake, for the sake of the ship, ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... Denzil would have been a Hercules instead of a long, thin, nervous man, looking too brittle and delicate to be used even for a pipe-cleaner. The narrow oval of his face sloped to a pointed, untrimmed beard. His linen was reproachable, his dingy boots were down at heel, and his cocked hat was drab with dust. Such are the effects of a ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... knees meeting for age, walking like a bow leaning on a shaft, hollow eyed, vntoothed, furrowed on her face, hauing her lips trembling with the palsie, going mumbling in the streetes, one that hath forgott[e] her pater noster, and hath yet a shrewd tongue in her head, to call a drab, a drab. If shee haue learned of an olde wife in a chimnies end: Pax, max, fax, for a spel: or can say Sir Iohn of Grantams curse, for the Millers Eeles, that were stolne: All you that haue stolne the Millers Eeles, Laudate dominum de coelis: And all they that haue consented thereto, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... had arrived at near my present growth of six feet, and with my hair in buckle, a handsome lace jabot and wristbands to my shirt, and a red plush waistcoat, barred with gold, looked the gentleman I was born. I wore my drab coat with plate buttons, that was grown too small for me, and quite agreed with Captain Fitzsimons that I must pay a visit to his tailor, in order to procure myself a ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... curve of the hill, which was very narrow under Mr. Glenthorpe's window, but widened as the hill fell away, was covered with a russet-coloured clay, which contrasted vividly with the sombre grey and drab tints of the marshes. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... to describe how we were dressed to enter on this winter campaign. We wore moccasins of our own make. I had a buckskin jumper, and leggins that came up to my hips. On my head a drab hat that fitted close and had a rim about two inches wide. In fair weather I went bare-headed, Indian fashion. I carried a tomahawk which I had made. The blade was two inches wide and three inches long—the poll two ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war had then died out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were high. Surely the time was gone ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... the stars were like diamonds. Not in the light of swirling, angry, red suns, not upon the surface of any planet, so drab when you drew too near. Only in the sterile purity of remote space where he could maintain and nourish the essential purity of his day-dreams. But of course one could not explain this to the Board of Examiners; least of ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... fact that must be noted in connection with the vast majority of such depictions. Punk or bona roba, lorette or drab—put her before an artist in letters, and, lo and behold ye! such is the strange allure emanating from the hussy, that the resultant portrait is either that of a martyred Magdalene, or, at the very least, has all the enigmatic piquancy ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... sprays and a trunk naked for one-third to one-half its height and from one to six feet in diameter, with a smooth bark, silvery or whitish in young trees, becoming thick and heavily fissured into rounded ridges on old trunks, and gray or drab-brown in color, it is readily distinguishable, with its companion, the red fir, by the regularity of construction of trunk, branch and branchlet. As Smeaton Chase expresses it, "The fine smooth arms, set in regular formation, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James |
