"Musty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in again. It was an intense blackness. The moment his head was in the opening the sense of listening, which is ever in a house, came to him. There were the strange, musty, underground odors which go with cellars and make men ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... one of the most distinguished and accomplished scholars of the abbey, Anschaire, whom Gregory IV. in the year 835 appointed his Legate Apostolic in Denmark and Sweden, and who Christianized the whole northern parts of Europe. The MS. was conned with care: it was musty, discoloured and antique-looking; furthermore, it was of the usual orthodox nature of recovered ancient MSS.—it was fragmentary: the genius of Tacitus was believed to be detected in the newly found books: 500 gold sequins were counted out from the Papal Treasury to the greedy discoverer: at ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... mother knows that and therefore repairs the dome. Inside, it is another matter: the old nest stands revealed at once. There are cells whose provisions, at least a year old, are intact, but dried up or musty, because the egg has never developed. There are others containing a dead larva, reduced by time to a blackened, curled-up cylinder. There are some whence the perfect insect was never able to issue: the Chalicodoma wore herself out in trying to pierce the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... insect-hunter and entomophile, as he sits down to his box of dried neuroptera. He seeks for a true neuropter in the white ant before him, but its very form and habits summon up a swarm of true ants; and then the little wingless book louse (Atropos, Fig. 141) scampering irreverently over the musty pages of his Systema Naturae, reminds him of that closest friend of man—Pediculus vestimenti. Again, his studies lead him to that gorgeous inhabitant of the South, the butterfly-like Ascalaphus, with its resplendent wings, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... my host; this is almost my first day of perfect freedom, and I only left London, and my uncle the king, a few days back. Dunstan has gone down to Glastonbury, for which the Saints be thanked, and I am released for a few days from poring over the musty old manuscripts to ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... called Borachio was burning dried lavender in a musty room in Leonato's house, when the sound of conversation ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... met continuously in the musty corridor, and even dined—when they did dine—at the same cremerie, they never spoke to each other. Madame la Proprietaire was the channel through which they sucked each other's history, for though they had both known her in their ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... whatever concerns musty books goes deeper with thee than thy brother," replied Stephen, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pokey old cottage!" she returned, with a shrill rendering of each adjective. "You would have us go and live in that damp, musty, fusty place?" ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... not gloat over our superior knowledge. After a similar lapse of time, may not our vaunted wisdom concerning the properties of plants look as ridiculous to the delver among our musty volumes? Indeed, it may, if we may judge by the discoveries and investigations of only the past fifty years. During this time a surprisingly large number of plants have been proved to be not merely innocuous instead of poisonous, as they were reputed, ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... stink, stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid &c 653; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... taboos—which possibly had their place and use in the past—can be tolerated no longer. We are bound to turn the searchlight of reason and science on a number of superstitions which still linger in the dark and musty places of the Churches and the Law courts. Modern inquiry has shown conclusively not only the foundational importance of sex in the evolution of each human being, but also the very great VARIETY of spontaneous manifestations in different individuals and the ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... of in the whole process, perfectly clean and free from every foreign smell. For this purpose, before you begin your work, let your mill, trough and press be made perfectly clean, by thoroughly washing, and if necessary, with scalding water. The casks are another material object, and if musty, or any other bad smell, one end should be taken out, and with shavings burn the inside; then scrub them clean, and put in the head, scald them well afterwards, and drain them perfectly; when dry, bung them tight and keep them in ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... the Inn; I have ordered my bed: Fair linen sheets therein And a tester of lead. No musty fusty scents Such as inn chambers keep, But tapestried with content And hung ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... (it's queer) Used to patronise the seer And pay cash down for magic spell Perchance a Horoscope as well. Or open wide at special rate That musty tome the Book of Fate; Or seek the Philtre's subtle aid To win the hand of some fair maid. We mus'nt miss the Troubadours Who went forth on their singing tours, Twanging harps and trilling lays To maids of medieval days. And Oh! the right good merry ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... palitics, for gad's sake;—rat the canstitution:—I wou'dn't give une Fille de joye, for all the musty canstitutions in christendom. ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... old house, that went like the last, and the night man came again to see Uncle Eb. The next morning my companion was able to walk more freely, but Fred and I had to stop and wait for him very often going down the big hill. I was mighty glad when we were leaving the musty old house for good and had the dog hitched with all our traps in the wagon. It was a bright morning and the sunlight glimmered on the dew in the broad valley. The men were just coming from breakfast when we turned in at David ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... harder, colder than the boards; it was a hearthstone, and it marked the place where, before the room was turned into a shop, there had been a small fireplace. And on the other side of this, near the wall, was a collection of rubbish, over the musty items of which Max stumbled as he went. Old boxes, bits of carpet, broken bricks; every ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... crackle of the musketry-firing was a strong contrast to the scream of the bombs. I think all the dogs and cats must be killed or starved, we don't see any more pitiful animals prowling around.... The cellar is so damp and musty the bedding has to be carried out and laid in the sun every day, with the forecast that it may be demolished at any moment. The confinement is dreadful. To sit and listen as if waiting for death in a horrible manner would drive me insane. I don't know what others do, but we read ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... them, saw the white gleam of a robe that fell down his length in smooth, still folds, saw his hands—greenish skin stretched tight over fleshless bones. Suddenly it seemed to him that the air was musty and fetid. ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... a state of the healthiest and most generous fermentation, but it may become soured and musty by the ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... are golden, friend Scapin," the pedant said, "let us by all means gather up the crumbs that are left of former plenty, though they will be but few and musty, I fear. There are still, however, two or three bottles of wine remaining—the last of a goodly store—enough for us each to have a glass. What a pity that the soil hereabouts is not of that peculiar kind ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... luxuriant, rampant, vigorous; violent, extreme, excessive, immoderate, gross; rancid, musty, frowzy, fetid, stale; offensive, impalatable, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Maggie," continued Merry. "She'll be shut up in a musty, fusty London lodging. I can't think how she ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... little bit musty," said the girl, softening a little. "I, should think that I saw the ghosts of dead and gone players sitting round the table. I remember reading a ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... pulled down all his musty tomes in Latin and in Greek; Consulted cyclopaedias and manuscripts antique, Essays in Anthropology, studies in counterpoise— "For these," he said, "are useful lore for little ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... The sharp crackle of the musketry-firing was a strong contrast to the scream of the bombs. I think all the dogs and cats must be killed or starved: we don't see any more pitiful animals prowling around.... The cellar is so damp and musty, the bedding has to be carried out and laid in the sun every day, with the forecast that it may be demolished at any moment. The confinement is dreadful. To sit and listen as if waiting for death in a horrible ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... of a reigning princess, preceded by the captain and followed by the officials, she went over the two decks, entered the galleries of the engine room and the four-sided abyss of the hatchways, sniffing the musty odor of the hold. On the bridge she touched with childish enthusiasm the large brass hood of the binnacle and other steering instruments glistening as ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... hut. A small packet contained red ochre to colour their bodies, and larger packets contained soaked Cycas seeds, which seemed to be undergoing fermentation. They were of a mealy substance, and harmless; but had a musty taste and smell, resembling that of the common German cheese. There was also a very large stone tomahawk made of greenstone; and ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... informs me, to my disgust, that he has been persuaded to take part in the forthcoming performance of the "Holloway Comedians." He says he is to play Bob Britches in the farce, GONE TO MY UNCLE'S; Frank Mutlar is going to play old Musty. I told Lupin pretty plainly I was not in the least degree interested in the matter, and totally disapproved of amateur theatricals. Gowing ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... appear to have lived more entirely in vain than some of the early heretics? They were burned or massacred, their writings extirpated, their memory anathematized, and their very names and existence left for seven or eight centuries in the obscurity of musty manuscripts—their history to be gathered, perhaps, only from the sentences by which they were condemned. Yet the memory of these men—men who resisted certain pretensions or certain dogmas of the Church in the very age in which the unanimous assent of Christendom ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... ignorance, and I love the world with its pomps, vanities, and wickedness. While you, therefore, oh Corydon—don't be afraid, I'm not going to quote Virgil—are studying Nature's book, I am deep in the musty leaves of Themis' volume, but I dare say that the great mother teaches you much better things than her artificial daughter does me. However, you remember that pithy proverb, 'When one is in Rome, one ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... 'er 'air an' she's worth looking at. Natur! Lor', Passon, if ye likes wild natur ye ain't got no call to keep a gard'ner. But if ye pays me an' keeps me, ye must 'spect me to do my duty. Wherefore I sez: why not 'ave this 'ere musty-fusty place, a reg'ler breedin' 'ole for hinsects, wopses, 'ornits, snails an' green caterpillars—ah! an' I shouldn't wonder if potato-fly got amongst 'em, too!—why not, I ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of men depends upon their temperament, not upon a bunch of musty maxims. No one had been educated with more care than Ferdinand Armine; in no heart had stricter precepts of moral conduct ever been instilled. But he was lively and impetuous, with a fiery imagination, violent passions, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... memory as well as sight, and not to know where he was. He set it open again, and having checked it so, proceeded to replace the papers. But the strangeness of the presence there of such a light took so great a hold on his imagination, and it was such a rare thing to see what the musty dingy little closet, which to Cosmo had always been the treasure—chamber of the house, was like, that he stood for a moment with his hand on the cover of the bureau, gazing into the light-invaded corners as if he had suddenly found himself in a department of Aladdin's cave. Old to him beyond ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... you may be right,' said the cob, 'and to show I'm in earnest, as no doubt you are, let me have half the good beans you have in your bag, and you shall have half the musty oats and chaff I have in mine. There's nothing like proving one's principles.' ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... loyal, and simple-hearted as they were, contented with their lot, and receiving all things so unquestioningly and thankfully, filled my life, and brought a great calm to a mind that had, hitherto, been somewhat self-centred and troubled by pessimistic doubts and fantastic dreams culled from musty pages. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... other reason than because it was the nearest, and all but startled the driver off his box by offering double-fare for a brisk pace and a simple service at the end of the ride. Succinctly he set forth his wants, jumped into the antiquated four-wheeler, and threw himself down upon musty, dusty cushions to hug himself over the joke and bless whatever English board of railway, directors it was that first ordained that tickets should be taken up at the end instead of the outset ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... will lose its charge in being taken across the room, and an electrical machine will not work without a pan of coals under the cylinder. But as no part of the island is more than twenty-five miles from the sea, this continual moisture appears to be quite innocuous, its worst effect being the musty smell which it causes in everything in the mountains, where there is the most rain. Use fortunately takes from us the perception of this, or it would be quite intolerable. Perpetual summer, and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... effect of personal sorrow. This was not where happy people came to offer thanks; it was a refuge for the afflicted, a temporary harbour for the weary. They did not seem to pray; they sat relaxed, wrapped in the antique peace, the warm, musty smell of the building, sitting with the stillness of their desire to preserve this safety which was theirs only for a little while. Their dull clothes mixed with the shadows, the old oak, the worn stone, and the voice of the organ was like the voice of multitudes of sad souls. Very soon ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... led the way up a flight of dark and twisting stairs, along a musty hall. She paused before a ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... attention which were rendered to him in silence; and if not totally without consciousness, at least without a distinct comprehension of their object. After the soothing operation of the bath, and the voluptuous exchange of the rude and musty pile of straw, on which he had stretched himself for years, for a couch of the softest down, Ursel was presented with a sedative draught, slightly tinctured with an opiate. The balmy restorer of nature came thus invoked, and the captive sunk into a delicious slumber ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... doctrine as this were advocated by an obscure individual in some secluded hamlet, or found only in the musty volumes of some forgotten author, it surely would be unworthy of notice; but coming as it does from a quite popular writer, and being coupled with a great amount of really valuable truth, it is sufficiently important to deserve refutation. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Father emigrated to Canada. Worse than that, he comes of a family which has contracted a vile habit of marrying into our family. It has come down through the ages so long that it has become chronic. Father left most of his musty traditions in England, but he brought this pet one with him. He and this friend agreed that the latter's son should marry one of Father's daughters. It ought to have been Beatrix—she is the oldest. But Beatrix had ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... is the most common sufferer from excessive secretion of urine. The most common causes are musty feeds, such as hay, grain and shipped feeds. New oats, succulent feeds and acrid plants may sometimes cause it. In the fall of the year, when the season is changing from warm to cool weather and the horse ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... parlor. The whole shebang smells shut up and musty enough, but there's somethin' about a best parlor smell that would give it away any time. Phew! I can almost smell wax wreaths and hair-cloth, even though they have been took away. No, this is an empty ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... astonished to find how often you'll be cornered by that little child—how many difficulties he will raise, that will require all your keenest wits to clear away. Oh, you must get off your clerical stilts, and drop your metaphors and musty folios, and call everything by its right name when you talk ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... of classical themes, there is a sort of pervading ennui, or the forced appreciativeness of a gouty, disappointed man. The daughter of Jove to whom he dedicates his hymns too often is 'Adversity'. And classical reminiscences have, even with him, a dull musty tinge which recalls the antiquarian in his Cambridge college-rooms rather than the visitor to Florence and Rome. For one thing, his allusions are too many, and too transitory, to appear anything but ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... in a private sitting-room, long, oak-beamed, spotlessly clean, and a trifle musty, with that faint but unmistakable mustiness which hangs about old rooms and old furniture. Tea was set out on one half of the oak dining-table. The china was of the old-fashioned white and gold order, the cups very wide at the brim and cramped at the handle, and possessing a dear little surprise ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... you," he said, in fiery tones, "let in air and life, and a view of the outside world, and as much sunshine as possible into this musty old house? You have the power, if you ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... she did write 'Mrs.' to save him! Taking them in retrospect, it's a question if the thing they called sacrifice wasn't plain damn foolishness. Why, hell, Jack, d'you mean to say that the professor and his musty European customs—oh, I can't be profane enough!—the English language is trifling and inadequate! But I'm going to take a hand in this ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Turnbull noticed the faint musty odor that told of long-unused and poorly circulated air. The conditioners had been turned down to low ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... one on the table for several days," returned Mr. Salsify, "and, as I saw the last one was sent away untouched, I feared they had detected the musty raisins." ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... outlines our so-called pedagogic new-thought methods. Birds' nests, bumblebees, hornets' nests, leaves, buds, flowers, grasses, mosses, are schoolroom properties to which he often refers. To a great degree he replaced the ferule, cat-o'-nine-tails, dunce-cap, musty, dusty books, tear-stained slates, awful examples and punishments of a hundred lines of Vergil, by wholesome good-cheer and limpid forgetfulness of self in drawing pictures of spiders and noting the difference between a wasp and a bee, a butterfly ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... a misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked the mica lights in the side-curtains. A distant train whistled desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy drowse. She felt that ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... will be a pleasant cheat. I'll plague Heartwell when I see him. Prithee, Frank, let's tease him; make him fret till he foam at the mouth, and disgorge his matrimonial oath with interest. Come, thou'rt musty— ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... pay any more rent than where you are, and it would be twenty times pleasanter for you than living up that passage where you see nothing but a brick wall. And then, as it is not far from Paddiford, I think Mr. Tryan might be persuaded to lodge with you, instead of in that musty house, among dead cabbages and smoky cottages. I know you would like to have him live with you, and you would be such ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Museum, the Congressional Library in Washington and the Public Library in Boston—and this is the only portion of the dream which has been realized. I planned an elaborate scheme of research work which was to result in a magnificent (if musty) philological treatise. I thought of trying to discover by long and patient researches what species of lullaby were crooned by Egyptian mothers to their babes, and what were the elementary dramatic poems in vogue among ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... tottering as I am on its brink, the brink of my grave, and of all born during 1900, it might prove interesting as well as profitable for me to review my musical past. I hear the young folks cry aloud: "Here comes that garrulous old chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences! Even if Old Fogy did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we should be bored by the fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us anything valuable about ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... room, dark as black velvet, weighted with the indescribable, musty odors of an Oriental abode, and possessed of an almost sensuous gloom, a mystic dreariness, a largeness which ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... suggestions which had opened this prospect to him. What right had he—an American, Republican, disconnected with this country so long, alien from its habits of thought and life, reverencing none of the things which Englishmen reverenced—what right had he to come with these musty claims from the dim past, to disturb them in the life that belonged to them? There was a higher and a deeper law than any connected with ancestral claims which he could assert; and he had an idea that the law bade him keep to the country which his ancestor had ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the St. Antoine was not a hotel but a monastery, and its cellars are all that the cellars of a monastery ought to be—thick-walled and damp and musty. Yet these subterranean suites were in as great demand among the diplomatists as are tables in the palm-room of the Savoy during the season. From my bedroom window, which overlooked the court, I could ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... a key. It is true that at Langeais there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourist's weak- ness of dawdling; for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds and ends of, antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and musty, indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all apartments should be through which the insatiate American wanders in the rear of a bored domestic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry or to read the name on the frame of some ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... might call thick, but musty, these last few days. We were lookin' to pick up the ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... forecastle, at the break of which he is received by the three warrant-officers, the boatswain, gunner, and carpenter, in their best coats, cut after the fashion of the year one, broad-tailed, musty, and full of creases from bad packing and little use, and blazing from top to bottom with a double-tiered battery of buttons of huge dimensions. Behind these worthy personages, who seldom look much at home in their finery, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... breathed again the blue, clean, rain-washed air instead of the musty smells of the hall, involuntarily Hester's eyes rose to the vault whose only keystone is the will of the Father, whose endless space alone is large enough to picture the heart of God: how was that old man to get up into ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out — Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest — they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... imitation of the Turks, "as it's the fashion to have a cross in your hawse, in this here country, I can be a bit of a lubber as well as yourselves. I wouldn't mind if I blew a cloud, as well as you, old fusty-musty." ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... accordingly looked about with interest and curiosity. The furniture, which had belonged to Pap's father-in- law, a Spanish-Californian, was of mahogany and horsehair, very good and substantial. In a bookcase were some ancient tomes bound in musty leather. A strange-looking piano, with a high back, covered with faded rose-coloured silk, stood in a corner. Some half a dozen daguerreotypes, a case of stuffed humming-birds, and a wreath of flowers embellished ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Bueno after every play. There was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... came the summons to "get in," and Kitty got into the musty old cab beside her aunt, and they were started on the last stage of their journey through rain-washed busy streets, where the people were hurrying along under umbrellas, or in omnibuses and cabs. Now and then a cab ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... picking our way down the Old Kent Road. A couple of hours later we came to Maidstone, where we had tea; it was a quarter past five precisely when we made a new start for Canterbury, and a good hour and a half later when we entered that musty old town. ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... and don't waste your time," says I. "He's a good deal of a sport and all that, but I don't think he'd fall for anything so musty as this old doubloon and ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... review my lays, Crusty Christopher; You did mingle blame and praise, Rusty Christopher. When I learnt from whom it came, I forgave you all the blame, Musty Christopher; I could not forgive ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... my misery is to be the price of its restoration. Why should I sell myself to a man I care nothing about, just because you want a musty, fusty old corpse? Now I am going." Lucy walked to the door. "I shan't listen to another word. And if you bother me again, I shall marry Archie at once and ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... not my purpose to attempt a detailed history of the Rogue River war as that task were better left to the historian with leisure to delve into the musty records of the past, but I sincerely hope that when the true story of that bloody time is written the kernel of truth will be sifted from the mass of chaff by which it has thus far been obscured. My purpose is merely ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... very well for him, because he doesn't care for society and may as well be studying medicine as philandering about the woods with his pockets full of musty philosophers and old-fashioned poets," answered Charlie with a shrug which plainly ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... a week in Denver, fraught with interest, for while it is a city destitute of the charm of historical associations and musty memories, which add so much interest to most foreign cities and many American localities, it so abounds in youthful life with its warm and bounding currents, its vim and vigor, that it teems with varying attractions. Its broad avenues, softened by shade, its stately residences ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... expect more than guessing of an Osteopath. He feels that he must put his hand on the cause and prove what he says by what he does, that he will not get off by the feeble minded trash of stale habits that go with doctors of medicine, and by his knowledge he must show his ability to go beyond the musty bread of symptomatology and water his patients made, from the cider of the ripe apples from the tree ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... received them into its musty interior and drove them through the foggy brown of a London winter dawn. Unimaginable cheerlessness enveloped them. The world wore an air of disgust at having to get up on such a morning. The atmosphere ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... that was left of a scattered Sunday-school library, that had been in use two generations before. Queer little books they were, time-yellowed and musty smelling, but to story-loving little Betty, hungry for something new, they seemed a veritable gold-mine. She had found that no key barred her way into this little red treasure-house of a bookcase, and a board propped against the wall under the window outside gave her an easy ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... fields, to fish or shoot as many modern women do. I can only say that I think I should have been far safer on the hillside or the moor than I was in the lonely recesses of that library, pouring over musty ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster a la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... with many turns and corners, steps up and steps down, which were traps for the unwary visitor. It was seldom that any one came to the old wing; its tenants were rats and spiders. Birds built their nests in the crumbling walls, and it smelt damp and musty, as if it had seen no sunlight for many ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers' shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live. We could find no dairy and so we went into a huckster's shop and bought ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Betsey. "Your aunt declared it smelled musty from being shut up. She has such a nose," and the little ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... just some old stinking salt meat, that's stayed in the butcher's shop so long, it would make a horse sick to look at it. But Moll's pretty nice; howsever, Miss, to let you know, we don't get a good meal so often as once a quarter! why this last week we ha'n't had nothing at all but some dry musty red herrings; so you may think, Miss, we're ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... way of washing a barrel is with boiling water, and when cool examining it with a light inside. If there be any sour or musty smell, however, lime must be used to remove it. Break the lime into lumps, and put it in the cask dry (it will take from 3 to 4 lbs. for each cask), then pour in as many gallons of boiling water as there are pounds of lime, and bung. ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... Nothing is so easy as to make things look fine on paper; we should never forget that: there is a great difference between high-sounding generalities and laborious details. Is it reasonable to expect that men who have passed their lives dreaming in colleges and old musty studies should be at all calculated to take the head of affairs, or know what measures those at the head of affairs ought to adopt? I think not. A certain personage, who by-the-bye is one of the most clear-headed ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... and, as he stated, never once declared war. The continental Great Powers always made war on him, but not without his thrashing them soundly until they pleaded in their humility to be allowed to lick his boots. You may search English State papers in any musty hole you like, and you will find no authoritative record that comes within miles of justifying the opinions or the charges that have been stated or written against him. Let us not commit the sacrilege, if ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... Vicare du," or "the black Vicar," as he was called by the country people, in allusion to his black hair and eyes, and also to his black apparel, sat in his musty study, as he had done every evening for the last twenty-five years, poring ever his old books, and occasionally jotting down extracts therefrom. He was a broad-shouldered man, tall and straight, about sixty-five years of age. His clean-shaven face was white ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... "What a musty old fogy he would be, by the time he had gone half through!" said Judy. "He would have used up his eyes; his spectacles would have made a ridge on his nose; he would live in an old coat that was never brushed; and his books would be all coffee stains, ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... seemed to be defending himself from a charge of unfair dealing with his brother, and protested his good faith many times. Adelle was not greatly interested in the contents of the letter, with its reference to a musty family row. She knew too little of the Clark history to appreciate the significance ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... a hand at bridge? Do you fish? Row? Swim? Motor? Golf? Booze? Not you! Might as well have stayed in New York. Two weeks now you have perched oh a porch—perched and sat, and nothing more. Dawdle and dream and foozle over your musty old books. ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled—the miser in the old castle counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be waived. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... well-meaning, God-fearing people who work joyfully at their business of living and turn up more religion when they plow a furrow or make over the wedding dress for the baby than these ministers can dig up out of all their musty books. I've prayed for all kinds of qualities in ministers but I've come to the point where I ask nothing more of a preacher than a laugh now and then, some ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly eradicated, to make way for a blazing parterre after the manner of the suburban villa—gay in the summer, in the spring a wilderness of clay, in the autumn a howling desert of musty evergreens.. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... wall opposite the door is a deep and dark hole which I presume to be a window. On the floor, in addition to the slender furniture noticed by the light of the candle, I vaguely distinguish the outlines of my travelling trunk and of a water-jug. The cold humid air gives off a musty odour. Silence reigns, but, as I move, the sound of my footsteps echoes and re-echoes beneath the vaulted ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the atmosphere was musty and fetid; a murmur pervaded the place as of voices behind many closed doors, but apart from that the tenement might have been empty and deserted for all the signs of life it evidenced. And then the spot where Jimmie Dale had stood was vacant, and he was along the narrow ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... driver recommended as the best hotel in the city, and took us thither accordingly. It received us hospitably, and looked comfortable enough; though, like the hotels of most old English towns, it had a musty fragrance of antiquity, such as I have smelt in a seldom-opened London church where the broad-aisle is paved with tombstones. The house was of an ancient fashion, the entrance into its interior court-yard being through an arch, in the side of which is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... heart out she wiped her eyes and went to the spare room. It was dark and rather musty, for the blind had not been drawn up nor the window opened for a long time. Aunt Martha was no fresh-air fiend. But as nobody ever thought of shutting a door in the manse this did not matter so much, save when some unfortunate minister came to stay all night ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in the country, then he came to Paris to live; for, the family fortunes having dwindled, he had to look for a position. For several years he was a clerk in the Ministry of Marine, where he turned over musty papers, in the uninteresting company of the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... conversation did not lead to any question about his family, and the startling apparition of youthfulness was forgotten by every one but Celia. She inwardly declined to believe that the light-brown curls and slim figure could have any relationship to Mr. Tucker, who was just as old and musty-looking as she would have expected Mr. Casaubon's curate to be; doubtless an excellent man who would go to heaven (for Celia wished not to be unprincipled), but the corners of his mouth were so unpleasant. Celia thought with some dismalness ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... away from it, hired people to pick the fruit and pack it, fed the people, entertained them, sent presents to their wives and children—we've done everything! And what have we had for it? Only a very moderate living, all the grapes we could eat, and a few bottles of musty old wine. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... for any building, whether it is the Parthenon or a farm-house. Without it, places lack their intimate personality, as photographs lack the personality of men and women. My memory of the Athenaeum Library is of the familiar, slightly musty smell of books, of the faint creaking of the librarian's boots, and the hum of bees and the whirr of a mowing machine, of the smell of an early summer afternoon, the white glare of the North Walk stretching beside the river, and the reflection of anchored boats, very perfect ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... my solicitor comes, he and your man can have an evening over a lot of musty papers and the thing will be done. Again, my boy [taking HORACE'S hand], I welcome you to our family. ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... compromise and kindly decay which belonged (and belongs still) to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was, if possible, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... of Wendell Phillips brings freshly to mind the bitter opposition with which the early champions of abolution were treated in Boston and vicinity, it is pleasant to find in the musty records of the Dochester Plantation emphatic evidence that they not only recognized slavery as an evil, and the slave-trade as a heinous crime, but that they set their faces like a flint against it. The traffic in slaves began among the colonists in the winter of 1645-6, and in the following ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... new field—a feat that becomes ever harder and less possible—then they sink down into the class of the wage earners, or of Catilinarians. All efforts to prevent the downfall of handicraft and of the middle class by means of institutions and laws, borrowed from the lumber-room of the musty past, prove utterly ineffective. They may enable one or another to deceive himself on his actual condition; but soon the illusion vanishes under the heavy weight of facts. The process of absorption of the small by the large takes its course with all the power ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... the splendor of the funeral, the torches, the illumined church, his own dignified march down the aisle, and the effect he expected to produce amongst the bewildered rustics. He thought of all these things, and cursed Luke by all the saints in the calendar. The sight of the musty old apartment, hung round with faded arras, which, as he said, "smelt of nothing but rats and ghosts, and suchlike varmint," did not serve to inspirit him; and the proper equilibrium of his temper was not completely restored until the appearance of the butler, with all the requisites ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... startled and disturbed the congregation. "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears," were his opening words. And then He began a statement of His conception of His ministry and His Message. Thrusting aside all precedent and musty authority, He boldly proclaimed that He had come to establish a new conception of the Truth—a conception that would overturn the priestly policy of formalism and lack of spirituality—a conception that would ignore forms and ceremonies, and ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... ice box. A layer of dust indicated that the key had not been touched for a long time. His thorough investigation of the pantry revealed no evidence of recent use. The ice box was dry as a bone, with the musty smell of long disuse. A touch of the finger on various dishes and pieces of glassware showed that these also were covered with a film ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... clean. Now she wore frayed, dirty caps which looked as if she had slept in them. She went without ruffles, her collar made a band of filth against the skin of her neck, and you felt that she was less clean beneath than above. An odor of poverty, rank and musty, arose from her. Sometimes it was so strong that Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could not refrain from saying to her: "Go and change your clothes, my girl—you smell ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... had begun to show disuse. There was dust on the shining surfaces of the furniture and on the polished floors. The clocks had all stopped and the musty chill of a closed house was ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... So much I've read Of musty tomes that I've a headful Of tales and rhymes Of ancient times, Which, wife ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... boys like that young Langton to meet him when his wearisome day was over, instead of being childless and a widower, and returning to the lonely, dingy house which he occupied as the incumbent of a musty ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... we had rendered the government we knew to be honorable and valuable, and we rejoiced in having so rendered it as not to be ashamed to keep its memory green. And thereunto I would cherish every memento. The knapsack and haversack, torn, musty and rusty; the battered canteen; the belt and cartridge pouch; the woolen and rubber blankets, most indispensable of equipments;—these shall not be thrown aside among the rubbish, but cherished with an ever-growing affection. Nor ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... amusements, that he sighed when his carriage stopped opposite to the old hackney-coach, which Archibald had kept in attendance at the place where they had left it. While the coachman again bridled his lean cattle, which had been indulged with a bite of musty hay, the Duke cautioned Jeanie not to be too communicative to her landlady concerning what had passed. "There is," he said, "no use of speaking of matters till they are actually settled; and you may refer the good lady to Archibald, if she presses you hard with questions. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... unhealthy life that we then led: leaping by day and reading by night. I sat at midnight half-way through Schweigaard's Process, alternately putting my head out of the window and into the washhand basin, and, between whiles, rushing like a whirlwind through the withered leaves of the musty volume. ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... no reply. Already she was fathoms deep in thought. The musty-smelling lift shot them up to the top floor; Beverley, stepping out ahead of Clo, had the air of having forgotten her existence. The girl's anxiety deepened. The best she could do was to guide her friend through dimly lighted, dark-walled corridors, to the right ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... upon the Farm—at the same time showing Jack's seal and signature at the bottom of the deed. Jack, being called upon by the justices to show cause, pulled out of his pocket an old memorandum-book—very greasy, musty, and ill-flavoured—and which, from the quantity of dust and cobwebs with which it was overlaid, had obviously been lying on the shelf for half a century at least. This he placed in the hands of his friend Snacks the attorney, pointing out to him a page ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... put his plan into execution by applying for and receiving a month's leave of absence, and taking the first train, he arrived early on the second day at Denver. Here he hastened to the court house and had the city clerk search in musty records and when he came close to the date that Joe had calculated tallied with Kansas Shorty's story, they found James McDonald's name, and the sentence the judge had imposed which read: "Imprisonment in the Colorado State Reformatory at ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town mysteries and its town eccentrics—its freaks, if one wished to put the matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion liar and its champion guesser of the weight of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hour. The two men moved a little way along the oak stick to be out of the cool draught which blew from the cellar-like place, empty save for the storage of some old fragments of vessels or warehouse gear. There was a musty odor of the innumerable drops of molasses which must have leaked into the hard earth there for half a century; there was still a fragrance of damp Liverpool salt, a reminder of even the dyestuffs and pepper and rich spices that ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... carpenters, shipwrights, smiths, and stevedores, how he envied them! envied their houses, their wives, their children, their gardens, their soft and comfortable lives, everything that made them so different from himself; he, the outcast, with no home but his musty bunk; they, the poorest, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... and Agnes should have got married and let Garvington get out of his troubles as best he could. That's what I should have done, as I'm not an aristocrat, and can't see the use of becoming the sacrifice for a musty, fusty old family. However, Agnes made her bargain and kept to it. She's all right, although other people may be not of ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... are near Spain here, and were always a famous smoker. Give me a cigar,—it will take away the musty odor of these piles ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Fausta was sitting in a yellow chair on the deck of that musty old boat, crocheting from a pattern in Godey's Lady's Book. I remember it as I remember my breakfast of this morning. Not that I fell in love with her, nor did I fall in love with my breakfast; but I knew she was there. And ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... that dirty line, Where never sun presumes to shine, With straws, and filth, and time beset, Where all is fish that comes to net, That musty film, the Muse supposes Figures the web ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... was going on in the balmy, seductive evening air at the bridge, another was transpiring in the Albergo della Torre, one of those dark, musty dens of which we have been speaking. In a damp, dirty chamber, whose brick floor seemed to have been unsuspicious of even the existence of brooms for centuries, was sitting the cavalier whom we have so often named in connection with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... matter. But ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. They would hitch her vision, not to a star, but to a—a tin dipper. You don't understand. You know it seems to me, Mrs. Blair, that most people, women, anyhow, are like great big houses with only half the rooms in use. The mentality closed up and musty from disuse because they have never found or made the keys. I want my child to live roundly—in all her mental rooms. What is the use closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I want her to know the world she lives in from attic to cellar. The good ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst |
