"Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... placid dignity the mighty collops of his double chin. A bright canary waistcoat of imported kerseymere, with vast mother-of-pearl buttons, and a broad-skirted coat of bright blue cloth, with glittering brass buttons half the size of dollars, covered his upper man, while loose drab trousers of stout double-milled, and a pair of well-blacked boots, completed his attire; so that he looked as different an animal as possible, from the unwashed, uncombed, half-naked creature he presented, when lounging in his bar-room ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... hand to the floor, and he dropped into a chair by the table and sat gazing at the dingy drab and olive pattern of the carpet. She had not written, then; she had not written, and it was manifest now that she did not mean to write. If she had had any intention of explaining her telegram she would certainly, within twenty-four hours, have followed ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... itself, and not a slice off of China; that it raised rice, kimonos and heathen. Otherwise it was only a place on the map. Whatever the new country might hold, at least, I thought, it would open a door that would lead me far away from the drab world in ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... the Chief Inspector was driven westward through the early morning traffic. Fine rain was falling, and the streets presented that curiously drab appearance which only London streets can present in all its dreary perfection. Workers bound Cityward fought for places inside trams and buses. A hundred human comedies and tragedies were to be witnessed upon the highways; but to all of them Kerry was blind as he was ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... advertisement. Jimmy did not know the City, but he knew a good deal of mankind, and he gleaned something of the spirit and traditions of that office, as his eyes wandered from the rows of black, shiny deed boxes to the equally shiny pate of the managing clerk, and then to the drab-looking girl typist, pale-faced and narrow-chested, who seemed to finger the key-board as though the maddening click of her abominable machine had killed any individuality she might once have had, and turned her into a mere part of ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... another minute he was on the ridge. The Gulf opened out, a dead dull gray. The skies were hidden behind drab clouds. The air was clammy, cold, hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... twelve bob a week—was a necessary adjunct to life itself. Of all that "walking out" implied: of love, even as it was understood in Bloomsbury basements, Janie's anaemic little heart suspected very little; but romance was there, fluttering tattered ribbons, luring her on through the drab fog ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... King started for New York, and thence proceeded to New Rochelle. Following the directions they had received, they hired a carriage at the steamboat-landing, to convey them to a farm-house a few miles distant. As they approached the designated place, they saw a slender man, in drab-colored clothes, lowering a bucket into the well. Mr. King alighted, and inquired, "Is this Mr. ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... Great Western from Maiden Newton makes a wide detour northwards to reach Bridport, passing through a very charming and unspoilt countryside where old "Do'set" ways still hold out against that drab uniformity that seems to be creeping over rustic England. In this out-of-the-way region are small old stone-built villages lying forgotten between the folds of the hills and rejoicing in names that makes one want to visit them if only for the ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common pride of simple manhood. But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe: and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the Future. It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly. He would not have it laughed at; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was written the patience and the suffering of the saints. Some un-Italian sense of duty stiffened his hard little legs, gave rigid strength to his back. Willing to trudge on with his load, willing to rest, carrying his head a little bent, blinking mournfully at the world from under the drab hair on his forehead, San Pietro stood as a type of the disciplined and chastened soul. His very way of cropping the grass had something ascetic in it, reminding his mistress of Eustace at a ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... aloft, casting loose the gaff-topsail. From that fine height as the barge began to move I saw the horsemen turning away foiled. I saw the lady's leathered hat, making a little dash of green among the drab of the riding coats. Then an outhouse hid them all from sight. I was in a sea-going barge, bound out, under all sail, along a waterway lined with old reeds, all blowing down with a ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... confessed that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... The glint or flash of a hunting bow will frighten game. I have often seen rabbits or deer stand until the bow goes off, then jump in time to escape the arrow. At first we believed they saw the arrow; later we found that they saw the flash. Bows really should be painted a dull green or drab color. But we love to see the natural grain of ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... quickly pushed together, few waking, and so there was space for spreading cloth and chintz. Stuffs were unrolled and flung aside till many folds and colors draped the motionless sleepers, and at length a choice was made. Unmeasured yards of this drab chintz were ripped off, money treble its worth was thumped upon the counter, and they returned, bearing it like a streamer to the coffin. While the noise of their hammers filled the room, the hearse came tottering to the door, pulled and pushed by twenty men. It was an ambulance ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... pocket a drab-covered notebook. The outside was rough and worn, the leaves discoloured. On the first page were written the initials "J.H.N." and the date "1883." Holmes laid it on the table and examined it in his minute way, while Hopkins and ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not met with every day. If anybody can see that my tuft is dyed, may I be—" When the door was flung open, and a large lady with a curl on her forehead, yellow shawl, a green-velvet bonnet with feathers, half-boots, and a drab gown with tulips and other large exotics painted on it—when, in a word, Mrs. Crump and her daughter ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... having her chin and her knees meeting for age, walking like a bow, leaning on a staff; hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed on her face, having her limbs trembling with the palsy, going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her Pater-noster, and yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab. If she hath learned of an old wife, in a chimney-end, Pax, Max, Fax, for a spell, or can say Sir John Grantham's curse for the miller's eels, 'All ye that have stolen the miller's eels, Laudate dominum de coelis: and all they that have consented thereto, Benedicamus domino:' ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... drab since his eyes opened, gathered to itself the pale glow of awakening interest. Ford rose painfully, inch by inch, until he was sitting upon the side of the bed, got from there to his feet, looked down and saw that he was clothed to ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... the stand; one Crane drove the coach; I saw the gentleman get out of the chaise into the coach, he stepped out of the one into the other; I opened the door, and let down the step for him; he had a brown cap on, a dark drab military great coat, and a scarlet coat under it; I only took notice of the lace under it. The gentleman ordered the coach to drive up to Grosvenor-square; I do not remember that he told me the street in ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... somber but somewhat picturesque costume,—a dark-colored flannel shirt and trousers, which latter were gathered in close round his lower limbs by a species of drab gaiter that appeared somewhat incongruous with the profession of the man. The only bit of bright color about him was a scarlet belt round his waist, from the side of which depended a long knife in a brown leather sheath. A pair of light shoes, and ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... morning I was down to breakfast early, leaving Dorothy to be served in her room. The hotel was drab and decayed exteriorly; but the dining room was a continental elegance of marble, gilt, and mirrors. Douglas was not stopping here, as I had already learned. I concluded that he would be at one of the better known ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... his campaign hat on one of the hooks, Greg doing the same. On account of the heat of the day neither young captain wore a tunic. Each unbuttoned the top button of his olive drab Army shirt before he dropped into ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... a wind-driven storm-petrel on her way. She looked up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray, drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints. They were so like the wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such as the hundred-thousand-dollar house ...
— Options • O. Henry
... liked these confidential errands, though he sometimes doubted the good faith of the man who inspired them. They took him into strange corners of the city, to interview strange characters. They were the one exciting feature of his drab employment. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... to the bottom at dusk. I was too tired to speak. Every muscle set up a separate complaint and I had had nothing to eat since morning, as we had expected to make camp by noon. The world seemed indeed a very drab place. We found the hunters careering around searching for us. They thought they had missed us—as ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... remembered that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. That sign, says Dorothy, was the sign of the cross. Long ago he had written of human life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and even violent colours that took the pattern of the Cross. He saw the Cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right and left: he saw it signed by man as he shaped a paling or ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... were preparing to leave when Barnes, in a drab jacket and trunks, trimmed with green ribbon bows, came forward like the clown in the circus and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... about Greeley's old white coat had some foundation in fact, but not much. He did wear a light drab overcoat when I first saw him, with the full pockets spreading out on each side. As it suited him he wore it many years afterward, and when it was quite worn out he had another one made just like it which he wore many years ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... Imagine, she has taken all that she found in Rouen, even coachmen, yes, Madame, the coachman of the Prefecture; I know it for a fact, because he buys his wine of us. And now that it is a question of getting us out of trouble, she is putting on virtuous airs, the drab! I find that the Officer behaves very well. Possibly he may have abstained for a long time, and here we are three of us whom he certainly would have preferred. But no, he is satisfied with the girl who is public property. He respects married ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... is wind-blown and fly-blown and brown, but the harbour is very pretty, with its crowds of shipping, painted with red hulls, which make a nice bit of colour in the general drab of the hills and the town. There are no gardens and no trees, and all enterprise in the way of town-planning and the like is impossible owing to the Russian habit of cheating. They have tried for sixteen years to start electric trams, but everyone wants too much for his own pocket. The morals become ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... by a handsome woman. She was in the plenitude of fleshly charms. Her dress, disordered, showed her round solidly built shoulders, her ample bust. Some day unless her tastes and her manner of life altered she would end in a bloway drab, every vestige of beauty gone in masses of fat. But at that moment she was the model of a reckless Bacchante, born for the amusement and ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... affected to treat arrogantly. His panic, at the Mohocks is comical; but what strikes one, is bringing before one's eyes the incidents of a curious period. He goes to the rehearsal of Cato, and says the drab that acted Cato's daughter could not say her part. This was only Mrs. Oldfield. I was saying before George Selwyn, that this journal put me in mind of the present time, there was the same indecision, irresolution, and want of system; but I added, "There is ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... out how they can be made so. It is not thought necessary to entice them into goodness by the attractions of eloquence, the charm of imagery, or the fascinations of a brilliant wit. These philosophers have a Quaker style, a dress of plain drab, used only for clothing the thought, not ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on cloudier days. The trampled earth of the river-banks and the peaty stain in the pools did not look drab but glowing umber, and the dark woods astir in the breeze did not look, as usual, dim blue with mere depth of distance, but more like wind-tumbled masses of some vivid violet blossom. This magic clearness and intensity in the colours was further forced on Brown's slowly reviving senses by ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... reception-room for patients. Looking about, Esther wondered why physicians' reception-rooms were invariably so uninviting, so lacking in personality. This one was particularly drab and cold, though she could not say that it was shabby or in more than usual bad taste. It was furnished in nondescript French style, a mixture of periods, with heavy olive-green curtains at the windows shutting ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... mastered by the great fear of physical injury, and oblivious to the people around us. We passed the Underground Station. Our flight down the Euston Road was extraordinary. Sarakoff was in front, his dressing-gown flying, and his pink pyjamas making a vivid area of colour in the drab street. I followed a few yards in the rear, hatless, with ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... blue of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty barrenness of grey and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid heights. Separated by a narrow strip of water, Suroeton, to the west, shows a curved and ridged outline resembling the backbone of a stooping giant. And to the eastward a troop of insignificant islets stand effaced, indistinct, ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... imagination; and that solemn quiet of which the tomb is ever jealous pressed down sadly upon the living. Through the yellow panes at the back of the high altar came a glow suggesting sunshine, baffling the drab of the sky outside; and down in the crypt itself the misty blue ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his teeth. Reflects charming old Lady Tippins on Veneering's right; with an immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon, and a dyed Long Walk up the top of her head, as a convenient public approach to the bunch of false hair behind, pleased to patronize Mrs Veneering opposite, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the grey moustache stepped over the turf with the elastic stride of youth, until at length he halted before a large monument in drab granite, and stood reading the inscription thereon. Featured not altogether in accordance with the Russian type, he had on a dark-blue jacket, a turned-down collar, and a black stock finished off with a large bow—the latter ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... increased my reputation (I really had sense enough to set no particular value on it) and I was soon known by sight to almost everybody in the University. A ridiculous little circumstance aided in this. The former rule of the University (strictly enforced) had been that all students should wear drab knee-breeches: and I, at Mr Clarkson's recommendation, was so fitted up. The struggle between the old dress and the trowsers customary in society was still going on but almost terminated, and I was one of the very few freshmen who retained the old habiliments. This made ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... said Gray, pulling his drab campaign hat down over his eyes to shut out the glare of the westering sun. "But I've got—a ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... the light also was explained by this time. It shone behind a drab-colored blind, and in shape resembled the stem of a wine-glass, broadening out at the foot—an effect produced by the half-drawn curtains within. I came to a halt, waiting for the next ray of moonlight. At the same moment a rush of wind swept over ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... an unaccountable weariness of spirit, I stood within the lobby looking out upon the grayness of London in November. A slight mental effort was sufficient to blot out that drab prospect and to conjure up before my mind's eye a balcony overlooking the Nile—a glimpse of dusty palms, a white wall overgrown with purple blossoms, and above all the dazzling vault of Egypt. Upon the balcony my ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... Dean of St. Patrick's; it is not his own personal experience, but was related to him by a rector in Co. Monaghan, where he used to preach on special occasions. The rector and his daughters told the Dean that they had often seen in that house the apparition of an old woman dressed in a drab cape, while they frequently heard noises. On one evening the rector was in the kitchen together with the cook and the coachman. All three heard noises in the pantry as if vessels were being moved. Presently they saw the old woman in the drab cape come out ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... finished, he stepped to one side, bringing into view of the porch a woman seated upon the head of a barrel in the cart. A poor army drab, left behind in the evacuation, had been decked out in what Janice instantly recognised as her Mischianza costume; and with hair dressed so that it stood up not less than two feet above her forehead, splashed over with white paint, a drink-coloured face, doubly red in contrast, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... suits, and would have had him take his choice. My poor father was quite confounded: for my master saw not any he thought too good, and my father none that he thought bad enough. And my good master, at last, (he fixed his eye upon a fine drab, which he thought looked the plainest,) would help him to try the coat and waistcoat on himself; and, indeed, one would not have thought it, because my master is taller, and rather plumper, as I thought but, as I ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... Cecil had strayed into Betty's room, now no longer boudoir and bedchamber, but just a room, swept, dusted, tidy, with the horrible tidiness of a room that is not used. There were squares of bright yellow on the dull drab of the wall-paper, marking the old hanging places of the photographs and pictures that Betty had taken to Paris. He opened the cupboard door: one or two faded skirts, a flattened garden hat and a pair of Betty's old shoes. He shut the door again quickly, as ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... barracks. The town was an imitation town. The fort, spick, span, in rows, with nicely planted trees and green grass-plats (kept in condition at vast expense to the War Department), stood on the bank of the sluggish river, while just below it and across the stream sprawled the town, drab, flea-bitten, unkempt, littered with tin cans and old bottles, a collection of saloons, gambling-houses and nameless dives, with a few people—a very few—making an honest living by ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... so! I suppose they want to tone in with the cathedral as a special institution. 'Atmosphere,' you know. Some tracts of our great land are rather drab and vacant, remember. Color, ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... 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 ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... wanly, as if it had been a leaden sea. But with the uprising of the sun the familiar glaring white of the alkali blazed out once more. They had left the pinnacled hills and were now traveling over undulating country overgrown with rough brush. It was a sad, drab color, and smelled pungently where the ponies' ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... whole process was gone through to the smallest minutiae, and only an hour after the silvered face of the mirror was deluged with rain-water, and uncle and nephew gazed in triumph at their work, for there was no sign of greyish-drab powder about the mirror, and it was so bright that ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... low hussy! D'ye think I'd let ye 'ave my babby for a hour unless yer paid for 'it? As it is, yer pays far too little. I'm an honest woman as works for my livin' an' wot drinks reasonable, better than you by a long sight, with yer stuck-up airs! A pretty drab you are! Gi' me the babby; ye 'a'n't no business to keep it a minit longer." And she made a ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... the sound of the heavy object being dragged away from the door at the top of the steps. They both sprang to their feet. An oblong patch of drab, gray light appeared ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... think this 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 ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Yes: it is a pity your white beauties have all the same ashy faces, the same colorless drab, the same age. But look at their beautiful noses and little lips! They are physically insipid: they have no beauty: you cannot love them; but ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the Paris Palais de l'Industrie of 1855. Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those occasions on which I dragged—if I must here once more speak for myself only—after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over," ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... crystallized by contact with the plutonics. The formation mostly stands up either in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured by manganese. The ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... 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 ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... laurel bushes—only an uncomfortable bed of equal parts of mould and broken red tiles, in which a withered juniper was dying hard; at the windows were no bright curtain-folds or hanging baskets of trailing fern to give a touch of colour, but dusty wire blinds and hangings of a faded drab. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... charm away the impress of coarseness settled upon it by the loafers, the habitual drunkards and the riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to recommend it ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... pedantry of a great magistrate of a small republic, and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony." Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with "formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, of a Benedicite." The French officers must have been surprised; they were ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... whar I started from, it all makes in the end for that pretty little chap over yonder in the dining-room. Rather puny for his years now, but as sound as a nut, and he'll grow, he'll grow. When his mother—poor, worthless drab—gave birth to him and died, I told her it was the best ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... then to her knees, then to her waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... you must recollect that on closer observation one proved to be the taller, one the plumper, and one decidedly the younger of the three; then, although they were dressed so exactly alike,—according to what be, I suspect, a sumptuary law in England—and although their stout travelling-dresses, drab cloaks, thick boots, the shaggy shawls severally carried by each on one arm, the faded blue cravats tied round their throats, were so precisely alike and had been subjected to so exactly the same amount of wear that you could have sworn each article was its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the New Gallery. We shall pass out of sight of flat dreary London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an enchanted land, a land of angels and aureoles; of crimson and gold, and purple ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Tom, who was on the watch, observed a herd of small deer apparently coming down to drink. He roused up Desmond, and taking their rifles they crept behind two trees. The deer came on in single file. They were graceful little animals of a dark drab colour on their backs and sides, and white underneath, and pretty large antlers. Without hesitation they at once began to cross the stream, passing along close to where the midshipmen were concealed. Tom selected one animal and Gerald another, and both firing ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... its mangy hedges, lay prostrate under the sky in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-colored road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes. At one side of the hotel, the windows looked on a little ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... though typical of the country which he traversed, was distinctive, or it might have been a certain natural grace that made it seem so. He wore a light-gray, soft shirt made of French flannel, a dark-blue silk scarf, leather chaps over olive-drab khaki trousers, black, hand-sewed riding boots which displayed their polish despite a coating of fine dust, silver spurs, and, strapped to his right thigh, was a worn leather holster, natural color, from which protruded the black butt ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... woman had half her body and two gesticulating arms out of the coach window. She was plainly neither a drab nor in liquor. Harry halted out of range of the splashes to examine and enjoy her. She had been comely, and still could hold a man's eye with her curves of neck and bosom. The piquant features must have been adorable before they sharpened and her cheeks faded and the ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... to-day. Her pale face was lined deeper than ever, her drab hair was dragged back tighter. She wore a black calico dress with white huckleberries, and a white calico apron figured in large black apples, each having a stem and two leaves. In dress she was a fruitful person. She had been a surprise ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... dressing-room were like Miss Granger's morning-room. No frivolous mediaevalism here, no dainty upholsterer's work in many-coloured woods, but solid mahogany, relieved by solemn draperies of drab damask, in a style which the wise Sophia called unpretentious. The chief feature in one room was a sewing-machine that looked like a small church organ, and in the other a monster medicine-chest, from ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior powers ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relates to some negro troops who were included in the brigade. That they might readily be distinguished the negroes wore wool hats with the brim and lower half of the crown colored black—the remainder being left drab, or the native color. A company or two of these black soldiers were included in a part of the brigade that was one day being drilled by Col. Rignier, the popular French officer, a large, well-made, jovial fellow, who was acting as Adjutant General. One of the negro soldiers, from inattention, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... could see the drab peaks of the mountains which loomed between the partly dismantled trees. Beyond lay the kingdom. Would they ever reach it? There was only one pass; this they dared not make. Yet if they attempted to cross the mountains ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... in romantic fashion, always the approved fashion of the short story in this country. So Harry Anable Kniffin's "The Tribute" weaves in 1,700 words a legend about the Unknown Soldier and makes emotionally vivid the burial of Tommy Atkins. Commonplace types regarded in the past as insufficiently drab, on the one hand, and insufficiently picturesque on the other are reflected in this new romantic treatment. Sarah Addington's "Another Cactus Blooms" prophesies colour in that hard and prickly plant the provincial teacher at Columbia for a term of graduate work. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... fortunately, was warm and thick. Jameson had carelessly thrown open his coat and vest. Underneath he wore the usual sailor-jersey. Thomas steeled his arms. With one hand he pulled the roll collar away from the man's neck and with the other sought for the string: sought in vain. The light, the four drab walls, the haze of tobacco ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white Greek ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... with women out alone!' A woman's figure in front had induced this thought. Her walk seemed oddly familiar, and when she turned the corner for which he was bound, his heart began to beat. He hastened on to the corner to make certain. Yes! It was Irene; he could not mistake her walk in that little drab street. She threaded two more turnings, and from the last corner he saw her enter her block of flats. To make sure of her now, he ran those few paces, hurried up the stairs, and caught her standing at her door. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... more than one of her cavalier cousins, notably of pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do look so lovely!" Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the drab Cooney milieu. Recent progress in the great game had more than blotted out all memory of ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... win the love and support of such an attractive creature must of necessity have qualifications to spare. She was very beautiful and very clever. Somehow the unforgetable resplendency of my erstwhile typist (who married the jeweller's clerk) faded into a pale, ineffective drab when opposed to the charms of Mrs. Betty Billy Smith. (They all called her ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Hamlet, until then forcibly kept down, now get the mastery over him. He gives vent to them in oaths of which he is himself at last ashamed, when he compares himself to 'a very drab, a scullion,' ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... his head to look at her, and as he did so he found to his great joy that his stiff white collar had disappeared. So, too, had the drab serge suit and the clumsy hob-nailed boots that had hurt him so. Instead, he wore a single garment of some soft brown, the colour of earth, girdled by a broad green belt that felt like velvet. His feet were bare, and ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... New Castile; on the north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other side the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes into one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon. There are no villages sprinkled in the environs to lure the Madrilenos out of their walls for a holiday. Those delicious picnics that break with such enchanting ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... had bad a surprise. The girl who sat laughing into Graham's face was not the Anna Klein he remembered, a shy, drab little thing, badly dressed, rather sallow and unsmiling. Here was a young woman undeniably attractive; slightly rouged, trim in her white blouse, and with an air of piquancy that was added, had he known it, by the large imitation pearl ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Damsons, to Preserve, Deafness, Debility, Bitters for, Decanter, to Remove a Stopper from, Diseases, Summer, Domestics, on the Management of, Dough-nuts, Drab, to Color, Drawn Butter, Dressing, or Stuffing, Dried Beef, Dried Beef, to Stew, Dropsy, Ducks, to Roast, Dumplings, Apple, and Peach, Dumplings, Bacon, Dumplings, Corn, Dumplings, Drop, Dumplings, Large, Dumplings, Light Bread, Dumplings, Rice, Dumplings, Stew, Dumplings, Suet, Dutch-ovens, ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... huge fallen tree and still unaware of my approach, were three grotesque human figures. One was evidently a female; the other two were men. They were naked, save for swathings of scarlet cloth about the middle; and their skins were of a dull pinkish-drab colour, such as I had seen in no savages before. They had fat, heavy, chinless faces, retreating foreheads, and a scant bristly hair upon their heads. I never ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... a distance, through the avenue of elms to church, with their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with gold buckles, strode along, while Cato, dressed in some of the Squire's old clothes, walked close behind him like his shadow. You would have thought my master ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... were, to the rescue. A little ball of black smoke suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is nothing so airy, so piquant, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... manners and the beady black eyes of the Tartar. And one cold grey morning I awaken, worn out with cold and fatigue, to peer with sleepy eyes, no longer down the familiar avenue of ice and pine-trees, but across a white and dreary wilderness of snow. On the far horizon, dividing earth and sky, a thin drab streak is seen which soon merges, in the clear sunrise, into the faint semblance of a city. Golden domes and tapering fire-towers are soon distinguishable, and our driver grows proportionately loquacious as his home is neared. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... blur. We were speeding forward through the years—a thousand years to a second of my consciousness; or a hundred thousand years to a second: I could not say.[2] All the colors, the light and shade of this great changing void, were mingled to this drab monochrome. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... in olive-drab shirt and breeches, leather puttees, and the wide-brimmed hat of her calling with the four careful dents in the top, observed me with friendly curiosity as she ties a corduroy coat to the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... observer, had he been present, might have imagined that the old town was glad to have once again an excuse for some display, and preened itself and showed forth its richest and warmest colours and wondered, perhaps, whether after all the drab and interesting citizens of to-day were not minded to return to the gayer and happier old times. Quite a noise, too, of chatter and trumpets and bells and laughter. Even the Archdeacon forgot his official smile and ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... 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 girl of about sixteen, whom the elder lady called ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... was to be the issue? In the Piazza Santo Spirito, grey and hollow-sounding in the chilly silences, his own footsteps echoed solemnly as he passed by the door of the great ragged church. Through the heavy darkness within lights flickered faintly and went; service was not begun. A drab crew of cripples lounged on the steps yawning and shivering, and two country girls were strolling to mass with brown arms round each other's waists. When Sandro's footfall clattered on the stones they stopped by the door looking after him and laughed to see his ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... the assault on July 1st. Next day guns and limbers passed in a steady stream going south—a sure indication that all efforts were being concentrated in widening the breach already made. That evening the Battalion returned to the huts at Couin much depressed at the prospect of taking up again the drab monotony of trench life after hopes aroused in the last few days. The weather now became very bad with almost incessant rain, and we relieved the 5th Gloucesters on July 8th in trenches waist deep in water, badly damaged by the bombardment, and affording ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... waistcoat, coat, and breeches Were all cut off the same web, Of a beautiful snuff-colour, Of a modest genty drab; The blue stripe in his stocking, Round his neat slim leg did go, And his ruffles of the cambric fine, They were whiter than the snow. Oh! we ne'er shall see the like of Captain ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... man like his father; but there's a difference, Mr. Floyd; I wish he had your true blue yeoman's honour, and the spirit that becomes his father's son: if the lad was mine, I'd cut him off with a shilling, to buy a halter for his drab of a wife. Dang it, Mrs. Floyd, it'll never do to see so queer a Mrs. Jonathan Junior, a standing in your tidy shoes beside this ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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 love for ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... It has always had, in my estimation, a low character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavor of pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against the drab-colored State. It is noted for repudiation of its own debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President to the country, and Cameron as a Secretary of War to the ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... is I don't want to wait that long. Now, for instance, who lives over there on my left; the square white house with the drab blinds?" ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... been left us by the American captain (who, as you know, had cleared the forecastle of the clothes there) consisted of several coats of cut velvet, trimmed with gold and silver lace, some frocks of white drab with large plate buttons, brocade waistcoats of blue satin and green silk, crimson and other coloured cloth breeches, along with some cloaks, three-corner hats, black and white stockings, a number ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... long hours passed, the young collier heard it ring, and wondered. He had nothing to do but listen, and watch the man on the bank who led the horse that was towing the barge; or address a rare remark to his solitary companion—an old sailor, dressed in a sou'-wester, blue jersey, and the invariable drab trowsers, tar-besprent, and long boots, of his calling, who steered automatically, facing the meadows in beautiful abstraction. He would have faced an Atlantic gale, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... nervous stride. A dozen times he looked at his watch—would he be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... strengthen men and women to fight down their lower nature, that will convince them that their higher nature is a reality, and that will give them a living sense of companionship in their difficult lives—lives often as drab and depressing as they ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... squares of almost constant 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 ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... satin. She wore a small sleeveless jacket, a broad blue sash, and around her neck was a tie made of swiss muslin and valenciennes lace. On her head was a straw hat trimmed with blue velvet and black lace. Her hands were covered with flesh-covered kid gloves, and she carried a light drab parasol ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... presently to return with two exceedingly rusty keys tied together with a drab piece of tape. He jingled them on his long, slender forefinger with ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... elongated, sixteen to twenty inches in length, eight or ten inches in diameter, and weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds and upwards; skin thin, easily pierced or broken, of an ash-gray color, spotted, and marked with light drab and nankeen-brown,—the furrows dividing the ribs light drab; stem small; flesh deep orange-yellow, of medium thickness; seeds pure white, broader in proportion to their length than those of the Hubbard ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... properly brewed, produces a natural beverage that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature's own laboratory, and one of the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... row 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 ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... most curious, quaint, and withal nervously excitable and irritable humorist, was thrown into alternate convulsions of laughter and spasms of terror at the portentous female figure, who, with a stick in her hand, a man's hat on her head, and a coachman's box-coat of drab cloth with manifold capes over her petticoats (English women had not yet then adopted a costume undistinguishable from that of the other sex), stalked about the house and grounds, alternately superintending various matters of the domestic economy, and discussing, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... blue and gold and rose, an inexhaustible wardrobe. She blushes, she frowns, she hesitates; she is like a woman in love. She casts abroad her dewy jewels on the leaves, the blades of grass, the tangled laces of the spiders, the drab cold stones. She ruffles the clouds on the face of the sleeping waters; she sweeps through the forests with a low whispering sound, taking a tithe of the resinous perfumes. Always and always she decks herself for the coming ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... bed, drab walls dotted with sporting prints, dusty, rickety furnishings, threadbare carpet and grimy lace curtains, was a dreary, prison-like place. But to Murphy it was the place of his content, as much of a home as he had ever had. He had slept in alleys and deserted shacks and ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... they could see he was hardly more than a boy, perhaps twenty years of age. His lean, gray body was nearly naked. Around his waist he wore a drab-colored tunic, of a substance they could not identify. His feet and legs were bare. On his chest were strapped a thin stone plate, slightly convex. His thick, wavy, black hair, cut at the base of his neck, hung close about his ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... smothered delight in the loveliness of the spring-time found a hiding-place anywhere in the well-ordered chambers of his heart, it never relaxed or softened the straight, inflexible lines of his face. As easily could his collarless drab coat and waistcoat have flushed with a sudden gleam of purple ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... garland of verdant wild creepers drooping from a spot at the gable, the same two small windows without any sashes in the front wall, the same narrow rutty pathway from the road, the same sort of yellow hen cackling heatedly, her legs quivering as she clutched the drab half door, the same scent of decayed cabbage leaves in the air. Denis Donohoe took a sack of hay from the top of the creel of turf, and spread some of it on the side of the road for the donkey. While he did so a woman who wore a white cap, a grey bodice, a thick woollen red petticoat, under which ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... the country nurse The poor that else were undone; Some landlords spend their money worse, On lust and pride at London. There the roys'ters they do play, Drab and dice their lands away, Which may be ours another day; And ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... more thrilling fifteen minutes. The trees were tossing and bending in the thrilling blue air. There was a bronzy tint in their foliage, as though they were putting on olive drab in honour of the general. Great balloons of silver clouds scoured across the cobalt sky. At one minute to 11 Pershing appeared at the top of the stand. The whole square, massed ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... revolution. They made a favourite of Courtenay, but they desired to marry him to the queen, not to Elizabeth: Gardiner told the young earl that he would sooner see him the husband of the vilest drab who could be picked out of the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... eliminated, she had only the pleasantest memories of the people she had met in the smoky city. It was as if in a dark forest of lofty trees she had found a pleasant mead on which the warm sunlight fell. The mellow charm of the studios was made all the more appealing by reason of the drab and desolate waste through which she was forced to pass to attain the light and laughter of ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... used to consider my brother Rupert the most especial dandy I had ever seen; but that, evidently, was my limited experience: even Rupert cannot display so perfect a fit in bottle-green coats, so faultless a silken stock, buckskins of such matchless drab!" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Sit tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat (infrequently). He could fancy Frazer there, pale and stern. "I'm glad I spied on 'em. Might have been able to put Frazer wise to something definite if I could just ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... forty miles south of Santa Catalina, out in the Pacific, open to wind and fog, scorched by sun, and beaten on every shore by contending tides. Seen from afar, the island seems a bleak, long, narrow strip of drab rock rising from a low west end to the dignity of a mountain near the east end. Seen close at hand, it is still barren, bleak, and drab; but it shows long golden slopes of wild oats; looming, gray, lichen-colored crags, ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... track made by the horses and tumbrils in use at the Toft and at Tallington's Fen farm, Grimsey, a track often quite impassable after heavy rains. There was neither hedge nor ditch to act as guide, no hard white or drab road; nothing but old usage and instinctive habit kept those who traversed the way from going off it to right or left into the oozy fen with its black soft peat, amber-coloured bog water, and patches of bog-moss, green in summer, creamy white and ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a scold, unpack my heart with words, And fall a cursing, like a very drab, A scullion! Fye upon't! fye! About, my brains![72] I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... and he who under the old regime of Austria would style himself Count von Potts and Kettlehausen is now called plain Mr. Potts. Other titles, those that have been won by individual achievement and cannot be inherited, still remain in use to brighten our drab existence. Most common amongst these is "Doctor"; you may be a doctor of any or many more or less exact sciences; Professor seems to come next in quantity; again you may profess anything you like. This title ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... best people away; Washington Square, cool under the trees, lovely and desirable despite the presence everywhere of alien neighbors from the district to the South. I long for home with an ardent longing; never was London so cruel, so hopeless, so drab, in my eyes. For, as I write this, a constable sits at my elbow, and he and I are shortly to start for Scotland Yard. I have been arrested as a suspect in the case of ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... Police had detached itself from the rear of the Division. They were deeply-burned, hard-bitten men, emaciated to a curious uniformity, mounted on horses as gaunt as their riders. A sergeant was in command of the party, and a drab-painted wooden cart drawn by a high-rumped, goose-necked chestnut mare, pitifully lame on the near fore, had an Engineer for driver. His mate sat on the rear locker, and a mounted comrade rode by ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... limit for the army, but I am sorry to say I have marched a good many years even beyond that. It is a great opportunity, an opportunity that only comes once in many centuries to the children of men. For most generations sacrifice comes in drab and weariness of spirit. It comes to you today, and it comes today to us all, in the form of the glow and thrill of a great movement for liberty, that impels millions throughout Europe to the same noble end. [Applause.] It is a great war for the emancipation ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... melted from the crack of the iron casket. Mr. Beale's eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened them ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... general or admiral | |or member of a governor's staff or other person | |holding the right to wear a uniform was so | |intensely proud as to expose his ornamentation | |uncovered and take a risk at pneumonia. | | | |It was, as a matter of fact, a pretty drab-looking | |crowd that began to file into the Polo grounds a | |little after noon. You can't get much local color | |out of a gum shoe and a mackintosh.... | | | | The Game Play by Play | | | |It was 2.15 when the navy squad ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer |
