"Moth-eaten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looked with some curiosity round the gloomy oak-paneled chamber, where the fire-light flashed on the carved four-poster, with its faded yellow damask curtains, and lit up the moth-eaten tapestry that adorned a portion of the upper part of the walls, but scarcely illumined the dark corners which lay beyond. There were quaint old presses and chests roomy enough to hide a dozen ghosts in, and a portrait of a gentleman in the elaborate costume of the Stuart period seemed ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... bookes he contemnes, as a novelty of this latter age; but a manuscript he pores on everlastingly; especially if the cover be all moth-eaten, and the dust make a parenthesis ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... hands down from his shoulders and drew his face away from the mouldy-smelling old shawl, he looked toward the door, and Ruth stood in the entrance. Her eyes blazed with wrath, but as she saw the faded and bedraggled dress and moth-eaten shawl and looked into the tear-stained motherly old face she burst ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... Sunday after Sunday he sat down and stood up with that small company, heard the voice of Mr. Torrance leaping like an ill-played clarionet from key to key, and had an opportunity to study his moth-eaten gown and the black thread mittens that he joined together in prayer, and lifted up with a reverent solemnity in the act of benediction. Hermiston pew was a little square box, dwarfish in proportion with the kirk itself, and enclosing a table ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... anything. At his first glimpse of the emu he cried ecstatic, "Look, there's a—," and paused, not knowing what on earth to call it. Then rapidly to cover up his ignorance he pointed confidently to a somewhat similar fowl and said sagely, "And there's another!" The curious moth-eaten and shabby appearance that captive camels always exhibit was accurately recorded in his addressing one of them as "poor old horsie." And after watching the llamas in silence, when he saw them nibble at some grass he was satisfied. "Moo-cow," he stated positively, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... five-legged kittens, mangy lynxes, moth-eaten coyotes, and dancing bears I returned courteous but uncompromising refusals—of course, first submitting all such letters, together with my replies, to ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... upon the table. The liquor stood, with two glasses and a jug of water, between the Coomstock family Bible, on its green worsted mat, and a glass shade containing the stuffed carcass of a fox-terrier. The animal was moth-eaten and its eyes had fallen out. It could be considered in no sense decorative; but sentiment allowed the corpse this central position in a sorry scheme of adornment, for the late timber merchant had loved ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... drawn such a charming picture in her imagination. It consisted of three small bedchambers, which were more like what she had been used to call closets; a parlour, the walls of which were, in many places, stained with damp; and a kitchen which smoked. The scanty, moth-eaten furniture of the rooms was very different from the luxury and elegance to which Angelina had been accustomed in the apartments of Lady Diana Chillingworth. Coarse and ill-dressed was the food which Betty Williams with great ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... tearful, his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her. Afterwards the dream became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had been so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and he awoke before he could answer her, and for a long time he was full of unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd. She had spoilt ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... had been designated as the Queen's Court. Dr. Gamble's costume did not quite fit him; his sleeve ruffs were halfway up to his elbows and his doublet had an unfortunate tendency to creep. The St. Elizabeths men, all four of them, looked just a little like moth-eaten versions of old silent pictures. Malone looked them over with a somewhat sardonic eye. Not only did he have the answer to the whole problem that had been plaguing them, but his costume was ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... Miss Lavinia's room in reviewing the events of the last half century by means of the reminiscences which were inspired by one unearthed heirloom after another. Pete and Shoofly were happy on the floor enveloping themselves and each other in long wisps of moth-eaten yarn that Miss Amandy had unearthed in a bureau drawer and donated to their amusement. Mrs. Poteet had with her usual happy forgetfulness of anything but the very immediate occupation, lost sight of the fact that she had left young Tucker asleep ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... pass through a breeding-herd of camels, browsing on the short grass. The old ones are in the process of the spring moulting; their thick, matted hair is peeling off in large flakes, like fragments of a ragged, moth-eaten coat. The young ones are covered with pearl-gray wool, soft and almost downy, like gigantic goslings with four legs. (What is the word for a young camel, I wonder; is it camelet or camelot?) But young and old have a family ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... had entered. There was an equally deep silence within the room—and for a moment she glanced a little fearfully at the recumbent figure in the old, deep-backed chair. Pratt had stretched himself fully in his easy quarters—-his legs lay extended across the moth-eaten hearth-rug; his head and shoulders were thrown far back against the faded tapestry, and he was so still that he might have been supposed to be dead. But Esther Mawson had tried the effect of that particular drug on a ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... observation of spiritual tides, winds and currents can be ignorant of the fact that the devout men and women of the present are earnestly inquiring, "What is sanctification? What does holiness mean?" They are demanding of the pulpit and of the church editor something more than the time-worn and moth-eaten excuses for not teaching a deeper work of grace. The "seven thousand" who have not "bowed the knee" to the modern Baals are insisting that, if God's Word teaches entire sanctification for the disciple ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... do the actresses an injury, if not give them corns. Let theatre-goers insist that the stockings be changed oftener, in these plays that sometimes cover half a century, and the stockings will not become moth-eaten. Girls, look to the little details. Look to the stockings, as your audiences do, and you will ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... goodly size, very showily finished like a hotel with veneered panels, which already showed signs of wear. Imitation antique chairs stood about, and in front of the fireplace, which was certainly never intended to contain a fire, was spread a somewhat moth-eaten polar bear skin. Still it was grand after a fashion, and the old man in his hand-me-downs looked oddly out ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... unscoured^, unswept^, unwiped^, unwashed, unstrained, unpurified^; squalid; lutose^, slammocky^, slummocky^, sozzly^. nasty, coarse, foul, offensive, abominable, beastly, reeky, reechy^; fetid &c 401. [of rotting living matter] decayed, moldy, musty, mildewed, rusty, moth-eaten, mucid^, rancid, weak, bad, gone bad, etercoral^, lentiginous^, touched, fusty, effete, reasty^, rotten, corrupt, tainted, high, flyblown, maggoty; putrid, putrefactive, putrescent, putrefied; saprogenic, saprogenous^; purulent, carious, peccant; fecal, feculent; stercoraceous^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to give something, even Silas, who sent home for a stuffed wild-cat killed in his youth. It was rather moth-eaten and shabby, but on a high bracket and best side foremost the effect was fine, for the yellow glass eyes glared, and the mouth snarled so naturally, that Teddy shook in his little shoes at sight of it, when he came bringing ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... nagged at his four horses incessantly and never was known to beat one of them; a garrulous, soft-hearted stage driver who understood very well how lonely these two young folks must be, and who therefore had some moth-eaten joke ready for whoever might be waiting for him at the macaroni box. Whenever Helen May apologized for the favor she must ask of him—which was every time she handed him a list—the stage driver invariably a nasal kind ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... way for which a fine old painted ceiling had been ruthlessly knocked away. On the walls were pinned and pasted all sorts of rough sketches and studies in color and crayon. In one corner lolled a despondent-looking lay-figure in a moth-eaten Spanish cloak; in another lay a heap of plaster-casts, gigantic hands and feet, broken-nosed masks of the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Hercules Farnese, and other foreigners of distinction. Upon the chimney-piece were ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... 'On the Dogs of Venice.' Her ladyship assured him that she was not in possession of the volume; but, on his insisting, conducted him to her library, (six shelves, one and a half by four,) where he seized upon a moth-eaten volume, illustrated on the front page by a man of obesity, clad in very flowing robes, and an immense crown, in the act of casting a ring into a black little stream ornamented by six rushes and two ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... her talents as an artiste and politician palled upon his old rum-soaked and emaciated brain, and ennui, like a mighty canker, ate away large corners of his moth-eaten soul, she would sit in the gloaming and sing to him, "Hard Times, Hard Times, Come Again No More," meantime accompanying herself on the harpsichord or the sackbut or whatever they played in those days. Then she instituted theatricals, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... of wheels on the gravel. The old dilapidated cab from Clinton with its ricketty windows and moth-eaten seats that smelt of straw and beer was standing at the door, the horse puffing great breaths of steam into the frozen air. Her aunt had arrived. Maggie, standing behind the window, looked out. The carriage door opened, and a figure, that seemed unusually tall, appeared to straighten ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... upon the dashboard. Behind the curtain of a passing quilez you can catch a glimpse of brown eyes, raven hair, and olive-tinted cheeks, displayed with all the coquetry of a Manila belle. A Filipino family in a rickety cart, tilted at an impossible angle, are drawn by a moth-eaten pony, mostly bones. Public conveyances—if these are not indeed a myth—are most exasperating. You can never find one when you want it, even at the "Public Carriage Station." If by chance you come across one in the street, the driver will ignore your signal ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... quickly, and saw a tall young man coming toward her, with long strides. Instantly, she forgot Simeon Harp, and did not even see him as he hobbled away, pulling on to his head the moth-eaten cap of squirrel fur which he always wore, summer and winter, as if for a sign ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... to a rough embrace than a soft caress. She reserved her favors for those who wrested them from her...she had no patience with the soft delights of persuasion. It was strange how much rough-hewn vitality had poured into her embrace from the moth-eaten civilization of the Old World. Starratt was only a generation removed from a people who had subdued a wilderness ... he was not many generations removed from a people who wrestled naked with God for a whole continent—that ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... William?' And right there in the early dawn, almost in front of the garage that contained his touring Chauvinnais and my gray roadster, father stood in his velvet dressing-gown and admired the two moth-eaten old animals. Now, I honestly ask you, Matthew, could a woman of heart refuse at least to attempt to see those two great old boys through the rest of their lives in peace and comfort together? Elmnest is roof and land and that is about all, ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... I want you to mark my words—Deutschland is going to spring at Europe like a tiger. The army and navy are ready for the onslaught. When they spring, it will be farewell to civilization—except the German—unless something like a miracle supervenes. The French army is being moth-eaten by the Socialists, the British navy has dry rot. I look to see Wilhelm practically the ruler of the earth. If not, he will cause it to pay a cost that will make the next ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... upright, together with certain spasmodic contractions of his fingers and the nervous "uh-ah, uh-ah" which punctuated his insecure phrases like uncertain commas, combined to offer the suggestion of a rooster; a rather moth-eaten rooster, which took itself tremendously seriously and was showing off to an imaginary group of admiring hens situated somewhere in the background ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... accessories was a trifle different. The red cherries, for example, no longer bobbed at the peak of the roof; they now hung jauntily from the rear eaves, so to speak. The purple grapes had also moved and peeped coyly from a thicket of moth-eaten rosebuds. The wearer of this revamped millinery triumph seemed a bit nervous, even anxious, so it seemed to Martha Phipps, who, like Cabot and Galusha, was looking at her. Marietta kept hitching in her seat, pulling at her gown, and glancing from time to time at the gloomy countenance of Captain ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the tramp, "if this ain't a wild-goose chase I dunno what you calls it. Here you've gone an' took me away from my happy home, an' brought me across the ragin' Atlantic, an' dumped me in a moth-eaten little village where there ain't nothin' fit to drink, all because I happened to chum with ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... to begin soon after daybreak, and before that time Rankin and Ben Blair were at the Baker house. They wore their ordinary clothes of wool and leather, but Scotty appeared in a wonderful red hunting-coat, which, though a bit moth-eaten in spots, nevertheless showed glaringly against the brown earth of ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... care of her and made much of her. He took her into the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in the sunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning on her arm. It delighted him to see her in good spirits. Often, to amuse her, he would take down a moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to remember a fragment of some part that had gone from his memory. The mere sight of this little maid and her white cap was like a ray of returning youth to him. In his old age, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and a stained uneven floor. On a divan lay a pile of "properties"—limp draperies, an Algerian scarf, a moth-eaten fan of peacock feathers. The janitor had forgotten to fill the coal-scuttle over-night, and the cast-iron stove projected its cold flanks into the room like a black iceberg. Ned Stanwell, who had just added his hat and great-coat to ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the shocking fact of her flight, but dwelt far more upon the badness of her behavior to them from the first, the rapidity with which she had deteriorated, and the ghastliness of their convictions as to the depth of the degradation she had preferred to the shelter of their—very moth-eaten—wings. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... rich men, weep and lament for the miseries which are coming upon you. [5:2]Your riches have decayed, and your garments are moth-eaten, [5:3]your gold and silver are destroyed with rust, and their rust will be a witness against you, and consume your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasures for the last days. [5:4]Behold, the wages of the laborers who harvested your fields, kept back by you, cry, ...
— The New Testament • Various
... true, for we had hardly time to look around the dusty and moth-eaten apartment in which we found ourselves before the door opened and a big, clean-shaven bald-headed man stepped lightly into the room. He had a large red face, with pendulous cheeks, and a general air of superficial benevolence ...
— The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seen. Whole families were skimming their way to Haarlem or Leyden or the neighboring villages. The ice seemed fairly alive. Men noticed the erect, easy carriage of women, and their picturesque variety of costume. There were the latest fashions, fresh from Paris, floating past dingy, moth-eaten garments that had seen service through two generations; coal-scuttle bonnets perched over freckled faces bright with holiday smiles; stiff muslin caps with wings at the sides, flapping beside cheeks rosy with health and contentment; furs, too, encircling the whitest of throats; and scanty garments ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... often annoyed by Lawrence Hyde's manner. Not so Jack Bendish, sprawling in a deck chair which had no sound pair of notches: not so his wife, Laura's sister, Yvonne of the Castle, curled up on a moth-eaten tigerskin rug, and clad in raiment of brown and silver which even Mr. Stafford would not have credited to Chapman's General Drapery and Grocery Stores. Isabel was innocently surprised when the Bendishes found they had met Captain Hyde in town. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... crowd clad in every kind of garment, ranging from a moth-eaten General's tunic to practically nothing at all. Indeed, one tall, thin fellow sported only a battered helmet of rusty steel that had drifted here from some European army, a moocha or waistbelt of catskins, and a pair of decayed tennis-shoes through which his ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... fell back upon a standing column, a moth-eaten collection of alleged jests which had been set up years ago to meet the worst emergencies. It was, however, considered a confession of weakness and a degradation to ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... neither realize nor understand. He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand critics who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave over "beauty," "soul," "character," "expression" and "tone" in wretched, dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation such people—whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of inexpressive technical terms of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... he has at his elbow, on this occasion, some high-minded and lofty spirit, some magnanimous and true-hearted monitor, possessing the means of local knowledge, and ready to supply the honorable member with every thing, down even to forgotten and moth-eaten two-penny pamphlets, which may be used to the disadvantage of his own country. But as to the Hartford Convention, Sir, allow me to say, that the proceedings of that body seem now to be less read and studied in New England than farther ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... have been nothing remarkable in finding such clothes in a widow's house had they been clean; or moth-eaten, or creased, or mouldy from long lying by; but that they should be splashed with recent mud bothered Stockdale a good deal. When a young pastor is in the aspen stage of attachment, and open to agitation at the merest trifles, a really substantial incongruity of this complexion ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Noreen were given rooms beside each other and were amused at the heterogeneous collection of odd pieces of furniture in them. The old four-posted beds with funereal canopies and moth-eaten curtains had probably been brought from England a hundred years before. In small chambers off their rooms, with marble walls and floors, and windows filled with thin slabs of alabaster carved in the most exquisite tracery as delicate as lace, galvanised iron tubs to ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... proud of it, and it was so deliciously like the old vicarage way, to endeavour to make everything out of something else, and to rummage out a store of old rubbish, as the first step towards manufacturing a new garment! The treasures which were to contribute towards Esther's trousseau consisted of a moth-eaten Paisley shawl, a checked silk skirt of unbelievable hideousness, a muslin scarf; yellow with age, a broken ivory fan, and a pair of mittens. A vision of Esther figuring as a bride in this old- world costume, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... Caleb's household. In an instant the whole troop had thrown themselves on the motley contents. Stray joints of clumsy fishing-rods; artificial baits; a pair of worn-out top-boots, in which one of the urchins, whooping and shouting, buried himself up to the middle; moth-eaten, stained, and ragged, the collegian's gown-relic of the dead man's palmy time; a bag of carpenter's tools, chiefly broken; a cricket-bat; an odd boxing-glove; a fencing-foil, snapped in the middle; and, more than ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... course?" he said, "and put it to him roundly why he came hither, where neither ghosts nor Jesuit priests, whichever he may be, are wanted. What answered he, eh? Would I had been there to interrogate him! He should have declared how he became possessed of that old moth-eaten, blood-stained, monkish gown, or I would have unfrocked him, even if he had proved to be a skeleton. But I interrupt you. You have not told me what occurred at ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the sunken bricks in the little walled-in yard, blades of vivid green grass had shot up, seeking light out of darkness, and along the grey wooden ledge of the area the dauntless sunflowers were unfolding their small stunted leaves. On the railing of the porch a moth-eaten cat—the only animal for whom Cyrus entertained the remotest respect—was contentedly licking the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... roused in him by surpassing him in his own kind. He cringed to her with a sneer. It was long since he had learned from her society to remember, with the nearest approach to compunction of which his moth-eaten heart was capable, the woman who had forsaken her own rank to brave the perils of his, and had sunk frozen to death by the cold of his contact. For some years he felt far more friendly to the offspring of the high-born lady than to that ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... to know the boy, for about one minute!" snapped one stout, red-faced man, down whose cheeks the tears were trickling. "It's that loutish trick of putting red pepper on a fire. No one but a feeble-minded boy would think of playing an old, moth-eaten trick like that!" ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... parties became "respectable." Indictments were flourished. Hand-cuffs flashed. The clinking feet of workers going to prison rivaled the sound of the soldiers marching to war. And while all this was happening, a certain paunchy little English Jew with moth-eaten hair and blotchy jowls the accredited head of a great labor union glared through his thick spectacles and nodded his perverse approval. But the lumber trust licked its fat lips and leered at its swollen dividends. All was well and the world was ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... caused the bishop to pay particular attention to the other of the two individuals in question. He beheld a stumpy and pompous-looking personage, flushed in the face, with a moth-eaten grey beard and shifty grey eyes, clothed in a flannel shirt, tweed knickerbockers, brown stockings, white spats and shoes. Such was the Commissioner's invariable get-up, save that in winter he wore a cap instead of a panama. He was smoking a briar pipe and looking ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... interested in the next find, which was a complete court suit—silk stockings, buckled shoes, and all. Then came an old uniform, moth-eaten long before Dame Alison's careful hands had folded it away. Its gold lace was tarnished almost beyond recognition, and on it was a label written in the same delicate handwriting, "Worn by General James Hunter at the battle of Waterloo, June ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... up the ghost. It was afterward learned that he had hidden, almost undoubtedly, $6000 worth of registered United States bonds among the books in his sub-cellar den—presumably, concealed between the leaves of some of the moth-eaten volumes of which he was the appointed guardian. Certainly, there could be no better or less-suspected hiding-place, but this was just where the trouble came in for the heirs, in whose interest the books were vainly searched and shaken, when the transfer ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... the morning's crossness I agreed at once, and retired to the fly-blown smoking-room, where there was ample choice of distraction for a writing man between a moth-eaten volume called King's Concordance and a South-Eastern Railway time-table cover, very solidly fashioned, with lots of crimson and gold, but no inside. Here I smoked half a pipe, and would have rested, but that I felt ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... will quit handing all the credit to a lot of moth-eaten, mildewed, out-of-date, old, European dumps, and give proper credit to the famous Zenith spirit, that clean fighting determination to win Success that has made the little old Zip City celebrated in every land and clime, wherever condensed milk and ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... of birch-bark containing these relics inclosed also the skin of a small rodent (Spermophilus sp.?) but in a torn and moth-eaten condition. This was used by the owner for purposes unknown to those who were consulted upon the subject. It is frequently, if not generally, impossible to ascertain the use of most of the fetiches and other sacred objects contained in Mid[-e] sacks of unknown ownership, as each priest adopts ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... still greater. All of the furniture which Louis had not dared to sell stood in the position he left it, but in what a state! All of the tapestry hangings and coverings were moth-eaten and in tatters; nothing seemed left but the dust-covered woodwork of ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... medieval period in some phase of strength and power, at times predominant, at times little more than a title, had received its death-blow from the hands of Napoleon and vanished from the historic stage. It was Bismarck's design to restore the German Empire - not the old, moth-eaten fiction of the past, but an entirely new one - and give Prussia the position it had earned, that of the great center of German racial unity. In this project Austria, long at the head of the old empire, was to have no part, the imperial dignity being conferred ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... of their stuffing and binding, and lay them as nearly as possible in a flat position They must then be subjected to a very brisk brushing, with a stiff clothes-brush; after this any moth-eaten parts must be cut out, and neatly replaced by new ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... and once father illustrated a book on Vienna—that was where I learned my German. Let me see—oh, it's French that I haven't accounted for. Well, we have some French relatives. They love to have us visit them at their funny old chateau, because mother mends their moth-eaten tapestries beautifully, and father paints the ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... touch of his unfaithfulness and his cruelty—for he had been told that he must be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at the walls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze "nudes," the moth-eaten animal-skins and the bedizened bed-and once more the unreality, the impossibility, of all that was happening to him entered like ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... unswept[obs3], unwiped[obs3], unwashed, unstrained, unpurified[obs3]; squalid; lutose[obs3], slammocky[obs3], slummocky[obs3], sozzly[obs3]. nasty, coarse, foul, offensive, abominable, beastly, reeky, reechy[obs3]; fetid &c. 401. [of rotting living matter] decayed, moldy, musty, mildewed, rusty, moth-eaten, mucid[obs3], rancid, weak, bad, gone bad, etercoral[obs3], lentiginous[obs3], touched, fusty, effete, reasty[obs3], rotten, corrupt, tainted, high, flyblown, maggoty; putrid, putrefactive, putrescent, putrefied; saprogenic, saprogenous[obs3]; purulent, carious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pringitan are a number of ornate state beds, hung with scarlet and heavily gilded, evidently placed there for purposes of display, for they showed no evidences of having been slept in. Close by is a large glass case containing specimens of the taxidermist's art, including a number of badly moth-eaten birds of paradise. On the walls I noticed a steel-engraving of Napoleon crossing the Alps, a number of English sporting prints depicting hunting and coaching scenes, and three villainous chromos of Queen Wilhelmina, Prince Henry of the ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... operation, for each in turn helped the other to don his costume, stopping now and then to burst out laughing at the results of their labors. Alan, it is true, made a very attractive young captain, though, with a fine disregard for dates, he was attired in the moth-eaten, faded uniform with tarnished brass buttons and epaulettes which one of his ancestors had worn during the Revolutionary War. But the ancestor had been several sizes larger than his nineteenth century descendant, and the uniform lay in generous folds over the back and shoulders, and was ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... excellent spahi, whom my letter from head-quarters had considerably impressed, busied himself meanwhile on my behalf, and at seven in the morning a springless, open, two-wheeled Arab cart, drawn by a moth-eaten old mule, was ready for my conveyance to Gafsa. In this instrument of torture were spent the hours from 7.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., memories of that ride being blurred by the physical discomfort endured. Over a vast plateau framed in distant mountains we were wending ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Edna and she followed along through the deserted rooms, catching sight of a moth-eaten cover here, a bunch of withered flowers there. Books, long untouched, lay half open on a table in one room, the bed was still unmade in another, and everything ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... can button himself into a make-believe outfit in the twinkling of an eye. In an incredibly short time, the five youngsters were dressed, each to satisfy his own peculiar taste: Joseph as an Indian in blanket and beads, with a crimson band about his head; Jacob, carrying a sword, wore a moth-eaten smoking jacket, a bright sash and crimson Turkish turban; Rachel and Matilda were two dainty ladies in full skirts of blue and pink, with deep bonnets; while Rebecca was rather splendid in a yellow ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... honour!" said the Wind, who wished to say something agreeable to him. He sat boldly up there, and looked down upon the people in the street. There was one stepping along, proud of his purse, another of the key he carried at his girdle, though he had nothing to unlock; one proud of his moth-eaten coat, another of his wasted body. "Vanity! I must hasten downward, dip my finger in the pot, and taste!" he said. "But for awhile I will still sit here, for the wind blows so pleasantly against my back. I'll sit here so long ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... with a white-faced cow that I'm afraid of my life of, and an old horse that looks like a moth-eaten hide trunk we to have in our garret at home when I was a little girl, and belonged to ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... little longer over those implements of chipped flint which have called him into such noisy activity,—and discover, as he will discover, that the assumed inference from the gravel and the bones is fallacious after all[321].—Let the Historian go spell a little longer over that moth-eaten record of dynasties which never were, by means of which he proposes to set right the clock of Time[322]. Let the Naturalist walk round the stuffed or bleached wonders of his museum, and guess again[323]. Theological Science not so! ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... discolored teeth protruding from her upper lip; a high, narrow forehead, resembling somewhat crumpled parchment; a dash of dry, brown hair relieving the ponderous border of her steeple-crowned cap, which she seems to have thrown on her head in a hurry; a moth-eaten, red shawl thrown spitefully over her shoulders, disclosing a sinewy and sassafras-colored neck above, and the small end of a gold chain in front, and, reader, you have the august Mrs. Swiggs, looking as if she diets ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... come and bow down before these alms-begging loblollies. To refuse to make obeisance was treason. The entire public thought of a vast section of the country has revolved around the figure of a worthless old grafter in a tattered gray shirt. Every question is settled when some moth-eaten ne'er-do-well lets out what is known as a 'rebel yell.' The most polished and profound speech conceivable is answered when a jackass mounts the platform and brays out something about the gallant boys in gray. The cry for progress, for ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... before the door. His mother's gown showed proofs of his genius by sundry little round holes, which were considerably increased each time that it returned from the wash. Nay, heretical and damnable as is the fact, his father's surplice was as a moth-eaten garment from the repeated and insidious attacks of this young philosopher. The burning-glass decided his fate. He was bound apprentice to an optical and mathematical instrument maker; from which situation he was, if possible, to emerge into the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... pursued his master, seating himself upon the escritoire and swinging his leg, "I want some old clothes, shabby clothes—moth-eaten, stained, battered, and torn. Also a muffler and an old hat. Can ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... the other end. It opened into a large room of the same size as the kitchen, evidently a dining-room, for a long table stood in the middle, and a solitary, moth-eaten stag's head, with antlers broken, ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... two of them out to the back yard. There were seven Rep Rho Betas on seven moth-eaten ponies which they had dug up from goodness knows where. The rigs they had on represented each fellow's idea of what a cowboy looked like, and would have made a real cowpuncher hang himself for shame. Petey confessed afterward that, of all the Rep Rho Betas, only ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... write even to you, what can I do about my serene Princess Grifoni? Alas! I owe her two letters, and where to find a beau sentiment, I cannot tell! I believe I may have some by me in an old chest of draws, with some exploded red-heel shoes and full-bottom wigs; but they would come out so yellow and moth-eaten! Do bow to her, in every superlative degree in the language, that my eyes have been so bad, that as I wrote you word, over and over, I have not been able to write a line. That will move her, when she hears what melancholy descriptions I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... her with comforts; we have too many rooms, too many carpets, too many vases and knick-knacks, too much china and silver; she has too many laces and dresses and bonnets; the children all have too many clothes: in fact, to put it scripturally, our riches are corrupted, our garments are moth-eaten, our gold and our silver is cankered, and, in short, Marianne is sick in bed, and I have come to the agency office for distressed women to take you out ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... [He looks up at MR BLY, struck by his large philosophical eyes and moth-eaten moustache] ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have rushed away. Helen caught him, he yielded, and allowed her to lead him into the room. There she lighted a candle, and as it came gradually alive, it shed a pale yellow light around, and revealed a bare chamber, with a bedstead and the remains of a moth-eaten mattress in a corner. Leopold threw himself upon it, uttering a sound that more resembled a choked scream than a groan. Helen sat down beside him, took his head on her lap, and sought to soothe him with ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of his mother, he rode forth, sad at first for leaving her in sorrow and tears, but afterwards glad that now he was going into the world to become a knight. And for armour he had a rough jerkin, old and moth-eaten, and for arms he had a handful of sharp-pointed sticks of ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... in the midst of a curious litter. Clusters of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, and all among them were clumps of old boots, shriveled skins, battered pans, scrap-iron, sheep-skins, useless touloupes, and on the floor musty old clothes, moth-eaten furs, and sheep-skin coats that even a moujik of the swamps would not have deigned to wear. Here and there were old teeth, ragged finery, dilapidated hats, and jars of strange herbs ranged upon some rickety shelving. Between the set ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... acknowledged the compliment, and the guest flushed with pleasure. To perception less fine, there would have been food for unseemly mirth in his attire. Never in all her life before had Dorothy seen rough cow-hide boots, and grey striped trousers worn with a rusty and moth-eaten dress-coat in the middle of the afternoon. An immaculate expanse of shirt-front and a general air of extreme cleanliness went far toward redeeming the unfamiliar costume. The silk hat, with a bell-shaped ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... inside a cupboard full of old lumber. The dust was thick, and surely had not been disturbed for years. Some broken chairs with moth-eaten seats were piled together, and some ancient boxes lay full of rubbish. Straw, old books, hanks of rope, and other miscellaneous things occupied the corner. There was a door opposite, without either latch or knob. Raymonde ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... bagatelle-table in one room, all moth-eaten, and a few old pictures still on the walls—a knight and his lady with Elizabethan ruffs, and a portrait of a greyhound. From a top window the farmer showed them ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... 'A merchant in a moth-eaten bowler started warbling to a certain extent with me. It was all very trying for a man of culture. He was a man who had, I should say, discovered that alcohol was a food long before the doctors found it out. A good chap, possibly, but ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... was shedding its hair and presented a most dilapidated, moth-eaten appearance; moreover, it had just been feeding on the carcass of a dead camel, which subsequently we discovered a mile away. When we reached camp I directed the two taxidermists to prepare the skeleton of the wolf, but to keep well away from ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... what shall we drink? and wherewithal shall we be clothed? We have no prophet of the Lord at whose prayer the meal and oil will not waste. As to wardrobe, I have learned to darn like an artist. Making shoes is now another accomplishment. Mine were in tatters. H. came across a moth-eaten pair that he bought me, giving ten dollars, I think, and they fell into rags when I tried to wear them; but the soles were good, and that has helped me to shoes. A pair of old coat-sleeves—nothing is thrown away now—was in my trunk. I cut an exact pattern from my old ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... moth, had made its appearance in Virginia, for in goods accounted for, are four pairs of moth-eaten hose and a ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... party were about to sally forth on their perilous path to safety, Gyng stood and cried angrily: "Well, why hasn't some one bundled up that moth-eaten Caliban? Curse it all, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... be ragged, Tatter'd and jagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rusty, moth-eaten, Yf ye take welle therewithe, It hath in ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... loneliest and remotest of fanes. So lonely and remote that the violent hand of Puritanism had almost passed it by, had been content at least with a rough blow or two, defacing, not destroying. Above the moth-eaten table that replaced the ancient altar there still rose a window that breathed the very secreta of the old faith—a window of radiant fragments, piercing the twilight of the little church with strange uncomprehended things—images that linked the humble chapel and its worshippers with the great ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mind everything gained in sanctity by its age: the moth-eaten furniture was hallowed by tradition. The rheumatic old dog of uncertain breed, to which he had never vouchsafed a caress became now, when banished to the stable, a tried and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... and mellow. On the stone bench by the porter's lodge, hard by the gate, sat the old Florentine and O'Mally. From some unknown source O'Mally had produced a concierge's hat and coat, a little moth-eaten, a little tarnished, but serviceable. Both were smoking red-clay pipes with long ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... dying. The natives crossed themselves on passing this conveyance, and would no more have ridden in it than in a hearse, but we found "the extreme unction" very comfortable and heard no groans or death-bed confessions in its rusty creak, neither saw aught in its moth-eaten tapestry but that it had once been very handsome. To our frivolous minds the old carriage resembled nothing so much as Cinderella's coach just as the clock was striking twelve, and we were constantly expecting it to turn into a pumpkin under our very eyes. But it refrained from doing ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... and pieces, and the quilts made of these were of grateful warmth in bleak New England. All kinds of commonplace garments and remnants of decayed gentility were pressed into service in these quilts: portions of the moth-eaten and discarded uniforms of militia-men, worn-out flannel sheets dyed with some brilliant home-dye, old coat and cloak linings, well-worn petticoats. A magnificent scarlet cloak worn by a lord mayor of London and brought to America by a member of the Merritt family of Salisbury, Massachusetts, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... that many people are silent who ought to speak, and I touch some very closely when I say that owing to this silence the power of your experience has declined and become like a faded flower or a moth-eaten garment, and then when you would fain speak you find the assurance about the blessing has waned. My word, therefore, to you is, first of all get the blessing, then at every suitable opportunity, profess it openly and boldly for God, and by your happy testimony you will ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... limit of the ages of credulity, every absolute monarchy has been a theocracy. In our democracies, however, it is impossible to believe in the divinity of humbugs, shaky and discredited, like some of our moth-eaten Ministers; we are too close to them, we know their dirty tricks, so they have invented the idea of concealing God behind their drop-curtain; God means the Republic, the Country, Justice, Civilisation; the names are painted up on the outside. Each booth at the fair displays ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... Shades of the Pilgrim fathers, of seven, generations of Bumpuses! A Yankee who used his hands in that way, a Yankee with a nose like that, a Yankee with a bald swathe down the middle of his crown and bunches of black, moth-eaten hair on either side! But Edward, too polite to descend to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Bordeaux. It was vastly unlike either Emporia or Wichita, or anything in Kansas, or anything in America; or so far as that goes, to Henry and me, it was unlike anything else in the wide and beautiful world. "All this needs," said Henry, as he lolled back upon the moth-eaten cushions of the hack that banged its iron rims on the cobbles beneath us, and sent the thrill of it into our teeth, "all this needs is Mary Pickford and a player organ to be a good film!" The only thing we saw that made us homesick was the group of firemen ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... a turn up and down the street on his horse, then started for the dam site. As he cantered up the road, Billy Underwood, mounted on a moth-eaten pony, saluted ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Estaminet.[1] I was conducted up a dark, narrow staircase into the close, dingy room, by an ugly, ignorant frau, who seemed to wonder what earthly inducement I had to visit her dwelling-house. Lumber and moth-eaten furniture were carelessly scattered around. A solitary window, partly blocked up by an old mattress, barely admitted light sufficient to make objects visible. All was neglect and desolation. It seemed almost impossible that so obscure and dismal a lodging could ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... crape; a huge, old-fashioned thing that framed in her silver-white hair like a pent-house. The very shape and fashion of this bonnet was pathetic—it spoke of so long ago. The black dress and soft shawl with which she had come to the prison were a little moth-eaten, but not much, for they had been carefully hoarded; but the poor old woman looked with a sigh on her prison-dress as it fell to the floor, and wept bitterly before she went out, as if that gloomy mass of stones had been a pleasant home ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... may be readily supposed, was the main thing in this establishment; insomuch indeed that it shouldered comfort out of doors, and jostled the domestic arrangements at every turn. Thus in the miserable bedrooms there were files of moth-eaten letters hanging up against the walls; and linen rollers, and fragments of old patterns, and odds and ends of spoiled goods, strewed upon the ground; while the meagre bedsteads, washing-stands, and scraps of carpet, were huddled away into corners as objects of secondary consideration, not to be ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... line to air. Presently an old uniform with worn trimmings was swinging its sleeves in the air and embracing a brocade gown; from behind it peeped a court-coat, with buttons stamped with coats-of-arms, and moth-eaten collar; and white kersymere pantaloons with spots, which had once upon a time clothed Ivan Nikiforovitch's legs, and might now possibly fit his fingers. Behind them were speedily hung some more ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... ambition gets the better of discretion, but fortunately soon finds its natural level: the violent ultra-tory, and the violent ultra-demagogue sink alike, after a few years of excitement, into the moth-eaten receptacle of newspaper renown, alike unheeded, and alike forgotten, by a newer and more enlightened generation, who find that, to the cost of the real interest of the people, the mouthing orator, the agitator, the ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle |
