"Secondhand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... third floor facing Broadway and the location and the habitat of the company was disclosed by a canvas sign which, banner-like, hung upon the outer wall proclaiming this to be the office of the California Insurance Company. For furniture, there was a flat top desk and a typewriter (both secondhand) and the balance of the equipment was handmade, of ordinary lumber, by a local carpenter. There was not very much cash among those thus assembled, but, fortunately, the company had maintained a deposit in an Oakland bank and this was ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... on that tragic night can obviously be known to you only at secondhand. You have no proofs. Neither have Madame d'Imbleval ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... to speak, of the developing sink is a common wooden washstand of the kind which has a circular hole in the top to hold the basin. A secondhand article of this sort can be purchased for a shilling or two. A thoroughly sound specimen should be selected, even if it is not the cheapest offered, especial attention being paid to its general rigidity and the good condition of the boards surrounding ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... said Paul, "and tell the boys what you suggested to me late this afternoon. I'm sure they'd appreciate it more coming directly from you than getting it secondhand." ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... things, not because they are deliberately denied by anybody, but because they are apt to be overlooked by those who take their facts at secondhand. All this does not show that the Puritans had, even at the outset, worse men or a cause no better; it simply shows that war demoralizes, and that right-thinking men may easily, under its influence, slide into rather reprehensible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... persons, because he has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all secondhand: and we are practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a door-knocker, without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are gone—where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... preference was shown for the works of the interpreters, compendists and commentators, like Alfarabi and Avicenna. And this helps us to understand why it is that Ibn Daud and Maimonides who not only read Arabic but wrote their philosophical works in Arabic showed the same preference for the secondhand Aristotle. One reason may have been the lack of historical and literary criticism spoken of above, and the other the difficulty of the Arabic translations of Aristotle. Aristotle is hard to translate into any language by reason of his peculiar technical terminology; ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... marketable value. One perfect specimen of a 96lb. shell from Bulwan fell into a soft flower bed and did not burst or receive a scratch. I suppose it cost the Boers about L35, and it would still fetch L10 as a secondhand article. A brother to it pitched into a boarding house close by us, and blew the whole gable end sky high. Unhappily two of the inmates were ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... within a fortnight. Curse them! curse them all, I say! Oh! I wish I had the pluck to run away, or to kill myself or do something—but I am such an abominable coward—and I shall loathe to live in Arad in a tiny secondhand clothes shop, with that hideous monster for a husband—pointed at by everyone as the girl with a disgraceful story to her credit and sold to a creature whom no one else would have—in order to cover up ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... orders to take it regularly and get well again. And there were the windows and the painted doors that he could fairly boast of; he set to work at once fitting them in. Oh, such little doors, and secondhand at that, but painted up all neat and fine again in red and white; 'twas almost as good as having pictures ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... What I want to ask you is this. Our contact with you has been through vidscreen only. We must rely on indirect evidence, since none of us goes above. We can only infer what is going on. We never see anything ourselves. We have to take it all secondhand. Some top leaders are beginning to think there's too much room ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... more of late than usual, and once in a while we have caught a glimpse of what is occurring behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they have been mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guesswork based on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yet conclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and Charles Reade have personally visited prisons, talked with prisoners, written stories that have stirred the world, and ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... to get away, and Lem was certain everything would open right out. But he's awful hard to do with; he wouldn't take a dollar from parties who had every right to stake him good, and borrowed five from no more than a stranger to buy that secondhand barber chair. What he needed was chloroform to separate these farmers from their dimes and whiskers." Bowman laughed loudly, and a corresponding color invaded Bella. "Of course no one knew Lem had done time, then. They wouldn't have either, but for the Law and Order. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... back to the office he passed a secondhand book-stall. He had lingered in front of it many times before now, turning over the leaves of this and that odd volume, and picking up the scraps of amusement and information which are always to be found in such an occupation. To-day, however, he overhauled ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... glad to thank you again, when I asked him to come and judge of what you were really like in your own lodging. Tell him some of those splendid stories of yours. I've been terrifying him already with one or two of them at secondhand. Oh Lord! how hospitably we'll treat him—won't we? You shall make his hair stand on end, Mat; and I'll drown him in ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... schoolmaster looking over a boy's theme, it is difficult not to take him more seriously than he deserves or perhaps desires. One would think that Mr. Butler was the travelled and laborious observer of Nature, and Mr. Darwin the pert speculator, who takes all his facts at secondhand." ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... head again. "No. You wouldn't like what you find here. Freedom is heady stuff, but you have to have a taste for it. You can't acquire a fondness for it secondhand. And for a while, there's going to be freedom here. Besides, once you get back to Earth, ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... wealthy and influential, and because the head of the family saw that that influence was brought to bear upon his neighbors and acquaintances, their custom followed. Hamilton and Company put a delivery wagon—a secondhand one—out on the road, and hired a distinctly secondhand boy to drive it. And Mary and Shadrach and Zoeth and, in the evenings, the boy as well, were kept busy waiting on customers. The books showed, since the silent partner took hold, a real and tangible profit, and the collection ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... And I can't find him. Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, or School Board officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability, he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with secondhand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching. If you want to keep the foundry in the family, you had better find an eligible foundling and marry ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... wares for your own welfare; but even a Jew will not urge Simson's Euclid on you with an affectionate assurance that you will have pleasure in reading it, and that he wishes he had twenty more of the article, so much is it in request. One is led to fear that a secondhand bookseller may belong to that unhappy class of men who have no belief in the good of what they get their living by, yet keep conscience enough to be morose rather than unctuous in ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... locality. Stow (Survey of London, edit. 1720, lib. iii. p. 122) says:—"Long Lane, so called from its length, coming out of Aldersgate Street against Barbican, and falleth into West Smithfield. A Place also of Note for the Sale of Apparel, Linnen, and Upholsters Goods, both Secondhand and New, but chiefly for old, for which it is of note." See also p. 284 of the same book, and Cunningham's Hand Book of London, edit. 1848, in voce, with the authorities and illustrations there given. Rowlands, in his Letting of Humors ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.' The 'wheel of fortune has come full circle;' and the descendants of the old peddlers now own and inhabit the palaces where their ancestors once begged at the back doors for secondhand clothes; while the posterity of the former lords have been, in many cases, forced down into the swarming misery of the lower classes. This is a sad world, and to contemplate it is enough to make a man a philosopher; but he will scarcely know whether to belong to the laughing or the weeping school—whether ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... allegiance to life was lost. Artistically, therefore, the scheme was false, and artistically, therefore, it must perish. It did not perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school of unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned long after the original conjurer had wearied of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the book which he implies that he purchased, and which I am almost certain he never read. I have a strong suspicion that he very much antedated the incident which he narrates, for I myself knew an old secondhand bookseller in a back street at Bristol, who was a Muggletonian, with whom I made acquaintance when a lad. He was a slow-speaking, wary, suspicious, and dirty old man, and as I had not sufficient funds to be a good customer, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... as ignorant people go into the secondhand book business ... It's a tedious business, but if you look over enough stalls, you're ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... turned—for Stuppeny did not return for nearly a quarter of an hour. He looked slightly more presentable as he climbed into the back of the trap. It struck Joanna that she might be able to get him a suit of livery secondhand. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... hardware-store for two dollars and forty cents. He wanted four dollars, and we argued for some time. The stove was a secondhand one and good only for scrap-iron anyway. Scrap was worth fifty cents a hundred, and this stove weighed only two hundred fifty, so we convinced the man our offer was big. At that we made him throw in ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... of a first-rate telescope, mounted in a little observatory, on a rocky peak of ground which rose up a hundred feet or more in the immediate neighbourhood of the house, that itself stood high. This instrument, which its owner had acquired secondhand at some sale, of course was not of the largest size. Still, it was powerful enough for all ordinary observations, and to show many hundreds of the heavenly bodies that are invisible to the naked eye, even in the clear air ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... constant quantity. But to be at home with one's contemporaries and to record one's intimacy means to see with the eye as well as the mind. The slow inductive method of personal contact is indispensable; and no reasoning from first principles, no assimilating of secondhand experience, with whatever touches of genius, can ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Giardini, the erewhile cook, in the poor fellow she saw, without wondering by what series of disasters he had sunk to keep a miserable shop for secondhand food. She went in and sat down, for she had come from Fontainebleau. She had walked fourteen leagues that day, after begging her ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... the plea that value had not been received. His fifty acres of land were gone, and all that remained of his six thousand dollars, were a half-weatherboarded, frame building, called a saw-mill, in which were a secondhand steam-engine, some rough gearing, and a few saws. This stood in the centre of a small piece of ground—perhaps the fourth of an acre—upon which there was the moderate annual rent of one hundred dollars! More than the whole building, leaving out ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... I was heavy. Now, if she wished me to be light-headed, why did she order a landaulet? She declared, too, that I was unfit for town service; gave new orders to Houlditch; took possession of a chariot fashioned eight months later than myself; sent me to Long Acre to be disposed of, and I became a secondhand article! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... activities. The activities in plain sight were somewhat limited in variety, but the signs sported the names of nearly every nation upon the earth. The Shubeners, Levis, Ezekiels and Appels were generally in tailoring or secondhand furniture and clothing, while the Raffertys, O'Flanagans and McDougalls dispensed liquor. All the most desirable sites were occupied by saloons, for it was practically impossible to quench the thirst of the neighborhood, though many were ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... what is good and moral to the Bible alone, sir," I answered. "They get it secondhand, it is true, just as they get their knowledge of God from the Bible, although they may never look into it. Without the Bible we should still be worshipping blocks of stone, or creeping things, or the sun and stars. Without it ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... prepared a succession of thrilling scenes from Byron's sensational poem, "The Corsair," for presentation by his fellow players. This melodramatic production was staged with all the pasteboard pomp and secondhand circumstance the little workshop theater could afford and was given with all the fire the high-toned author could impart to his ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... Hoffman—gave it to him. I saw him buy it this afternoon in a secondhand store in ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... away. During that period David had built up a shed in his back yard and had established a printing-press there, with a respectable, though not extensive, fount of type—bought, all of it, secondhand, and a bargain. John and he spent every available moment there, and during their first experiments would often sit up half the night working off the sheets of their earliest productions, in an excitement which took no count of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... went on, and then Droom dismissed the workers with their pay. The storage van men were there to carry the boxes away. Graydon sat still and saw the offices divested. Secondhand dealers hurried off with the furniture, the pictures and the rugs; an expressman came in for the things ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... question the facts to the extent of doubting one's veracity, or else nearly all testimony must go for nothing; but there is in these matters always room for doubting whether the narrator has not been deceived; and, moreover, even if accepted at secondhand, I doubt whether facts so accepted ever become, as it were, assimilated, so as to ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... father and mother had perished, an idea can be formed of the terrible chief of the assassins of Avignon, who had for his lieutenants, Farges the silk-weaver, Roquefort the porter, Naudaud the baker, and Magnan the secondhand clothes dealer. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... afford to buy a bit of tea and sugar and a quart loaf when a friend drops in," said Pauline, "but the meanness isn't any less disgusting. He'll want her to sell her cast-off dresses to the secondhand dealers, I ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... merchants had crossed northward over the Alps, Roman expansion and colonization made a detour around the mountains westward into Gaul, with the result that the Germans received Roman civilization not straight from the south, but secondhand through their Gallic neighbors west of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... brief and straightforward; he talked no secondhand formalities from the textbooks; he met his hearers as men, and they took every word in with complete understanding. When I hear a man talking to the fishers about the symbolism of an ephod, I always want to run away. What is needed is the human voice, coming right from the human heart: cut and dried ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... writer of these lines is unintentionally doing injustice, through having to trust to secondhand information, to one who is regarded in Germany as belonging to the highest order of scientific theologians; though perhaps the interesting account of C. Schwarz leaves little to ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... as to more effectually conceal her face. We came near being run into, and we had a spasm of alarm, for an accident would have exposed us to public gaze, and of course the masquerade would have been at an end. On Tuesday I hunted up a number of dealers in secondhand clothing, and had them call at the hotel by appointment. Mrs. Lincoln soon discovered that they were hard people to drive a bargain with, so on Thursday we got into a close carriage, taking a bundle of dresses and shawls with us, ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... far as it is a name; of fact, so far as it is a thing. Dr. Stirling has not taken the trouble to refer to the original authorities for his history, which is consequently a travesty; and still less has he concerned himself with looking at the facts, but contents himself with taking them also at secondhand. A most amusing example of this fashion of dealing with scientific statements is furnished by Dr. Stirling's remarks upon my account of the protoplasm of the nettle hair. That account was drawn up from careful and ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... one night, and the master of Bramble Farm could not bring himself to pay out the cash for even a secondhand wagon. As a result, the always limited social activities of the farm were curtailed to the ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... sane and smug you with your secondhand suit and hand-me-down knowledge!" He jumped up in a fury and turned his back on Timmy, addressing himself directly to Homer whose patient, pain-filled eyes held undeniable understanding. "Look at you! The telepathic genius ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... always easy to chum with quickly, and always ready to make the first advances. He is a salted traveller. He knows what is the best of everything, how to get it, and, moreover, how to get it cheaply. He never plagues you with "shop," or secondhand guide-book extracts, or sentiment about scenery and sunsets. Cheeriness and bons mots are part of his stock-in-trade; brazen good-fellowship ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... I happen to be second-hand." And her voice awakened Shelton's pity; it was like a frightened child's. "I don't know what I shall do if I have to form opinions for myself. I was n't brought up to it. I 've always had them nice and secondhand. How am I to go to work? One must believe what other people do; not that I think much of other people, but, you do know what it is—one feels so much more comfortable," and her skirts rustled. "But, Dick, whatever happens"—her voice entreated—"do let Antonia ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... mean by such conduct as this? Playing us for Chinamen, because we are strangers and trying to learn! Trying to impose your vile secondhand carcasses on us! Thunder and lightning! I've a notion to—to—if you've got a nice, fresh corpse fetch him ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching-away of the shoes. An original man;—not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;—on the reality and substance which Nature gives us, not on the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... not—for they' ve got none. They're sticks, not legs. Who can think much of fellows with such legs? Now, the next time you go to the Italian Opera, notice 'em. Ha! ha!—well, that would sound queer, told at secondhand; but, just look at their legs, ma'am, and ask yourself whether there's much chance for a country that stands on legs like those! Let them paint, and carve blocks, and sing. They're not fit for much else, as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... University of Chicago students. To-morrow will be an open day for me and the little secretary will take me shopping. The big department store is the fashionable place where all the noble and rich buy their kimonos, and I may supplement my secondhand attempts with a new one. When I get to Kyoto I hope to find a real old one, as the new style of weave are infected with foreign influence. The other evening with Y—— we found a little shop for antiques which is a gem to look at. An old man and his wife, Y—— says ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... books. He was well known by the bookseller, for he was a frequent visitor, and, once in a while, he made a purchase; however, to day he must not spend too much time "browsing" among books. He would, however, just slip around to Twenty-fifth street and take a look at the secondhand store there. Not to buy shoes, of course, but sometimes there were other interesting things ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... Instead of putting our thinking out, as we put our washing, let us do it at home. No man can do another's thinking for him. What is thought in the originator is only acquiescence in the man who takes it at secondhand. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... historical work, we should consider both the writer's sources of information and the use he has made of them. Has he gone to original and trustworthy sources of information or has he taken his materials at secondhand? Has he given them thorough or only partial examination? Has he well digested his materials, so that he writes from the fullness of assimilated knowledge, or does he present only the raw materials of history? While delightful and useful histories may be written largely of secondhand ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... paid his whole expenses, and that his salary came to him each week intact. He began to save money and to develop at the same time an inexpensive dandyism. He took to brown velveteen and to patent leather boots. He bought a secondhand watch at a pawnbroker's, but disdained a chain. His father had inspired him with a horror of jewellery; for once, when he had spent the savings of a month upon a cheap scarf-pin, the elder Armstrong had wrathfully asked him what he meant by sticking that brass-headed nail in his chest, and ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... not dissociate the matter and manner of any of the greatest poets; the two are so fused by integrity of fire, whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering is the vainest task of criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and not be compelled to divide his secondhand and enfeebled and excited matter from the successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has said again, "It imposes a law on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived that fatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of the maxim confounded? Or is Swinburne's a "single and excepted case"? ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... where smaller shops were to be found. She walked on for quite a long way without meeting with any place that looked in the least degree likely; then at last, at the corner of an even humbler street still, she found a secondhand furniture dealer, who, to judge by the contents of his windows, seemed also to trade in a variety of miscellaneous articles. On the pavement in front of the shop were spread forth specimens of chairs, tables, ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... served to cover effectually any noises he made as he felt about and made up his small pack. His old canvas coat, his most treasured article of apparel, he took down from the hook where it accumulated dust from month to month. His ancient, secondhand cartridge belt with the antiquated revolver he removed from another hook—he had never been given enough ammunition to become a shot of any quality—and he pushed quickly ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... and narghileh, and watch the Arabic letter-writers worming the thoughts from their inarticulate clients, and Aliens grew. And later, near the Greek Patriarchate, I found that which to me is home—a secondhand book-store. For I mark my passage about this very wonderful world by old book-stores. London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Genoa, Venice, New York, Ancona, Rouen, Tunis, Savannah, Kobe and New Orleans have in my memory their old book-stores, where I could browse ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... up in some secondhand book-store for a quarter or a dime. He had erased the pencilled name of the original owner on the fly-leaf and had written mine and the date over it in ink. Then turning to the inside of the back cover he had rubbed out the price mark ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... advantages of a new mill against a definite saving. It was not the sum about which he hesitated, but a touch of uncertainty as to just how much capital Wimperley and the rest could actually provide. Then suddenly he decided to be economical, even though a secondhand ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... Nan, "you couldn't find Miss Pompret's things here—in a store like this. They only sell new china, and hers would be secondhand!" ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... there. I'll give you the address. However, the base is some distance away, so you'll need transportation. I suggest a jeep. You can pick one up secondhand after you arrive. I'll give you sufficient funds. Also, prepare to hang around Las Vegas for a while. It will take at least a ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... thought of them as actual persons living in different parts of the shop. There was, for instance, the triumph of "Lady Audley's Secret." An old lady with a trembling voice and a very sharp pair of eyes wished for a secondhand copy. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... said one youth to an acquaintance; "he's escaped from Madame Tussaud's, he has. Painted hisself over with Day & Martin's best, and bought a secondhand Guy ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... However, at secondhand, the details very shortly reached him. They were brought by no less a person than Deputy Sheriff Quarles, who, some twenty minutes or possibly half an hour later, obtruded ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... visiting, moreover, most of the harbors of the Levant. Careful to be always well supplied with the products in most general demand—coffee, sugar, rice, tobacco, cotton stuffs, and gunpowder—and being at all times ready to barter, and prepared to deal in secondhand wares, he had ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... eagerly seizes it, and is forthwith furnished with topics of conversation with his family. When he is thoroughly posted up in the news of the day, he sallies forth, and is ready to interchange ideas at secondhand with any acquaintance he may meet. What would become of Paterfamilias, his family, and his friends, if they were deprived of this resource? The whole framework of society would be unhinged, business and pleasure would ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... use or for extended private reading, a larger collection of the standard works on the period 1750-1829 is necessary. The following books ought to cost about a hundred and fifty dollars. Many may be had at secondhand through dealers, or by advertising ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... any collectors of playbills? In the catalogues of secondhand booksellers are occasionally to be found such entries as: "Playbills of the Theatre Royal, Bath, 1807 to 1812;" or "Hull Theatre Royal—various bills of performances between 1815 and 1850;" or "Covent Garden Theatre—variety of old bills of the last century pasted ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... cried the squire. "Stirn, I say, Stirn!" But Stirn had forced his way through the hedge and vanished. Thus left to his own powers of narrative at secondhand, Mr. Hazeldean now told all he had to communicate,—the assault upon Randal Leslie, and the prompt punishment inflicted by Stirn; his own indignation at the affront to his young kinsman, and his good-natured merciful desire to save the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a Scotch boy, nineteen years old, with what seems to us a "secondhand head," which doubtless came down to him from some knight who wore it during the Border Wars. It looks a very old head indeed, with deep-set blue eyes and beaked nose. Young as he is, Hall has had experience in hunting, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... saddened alike by the weight of years and blindness; this was what people did not hesitate to utter over his grave yet barely closed, and what indeed they are still saying—commonly too without any knowledge of what Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at secondhand ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... of thought: New Thought and Secondhand Thought. New Thought is made up of thoughts you, yourself, think. The other kind is supplied to you by jobbers. The distinguishing feature of New Thought is its antiquity. Of necessity it is older than Secondhand Thought. All genuine New Thought is ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... on an early train to San Jose. Alas! my girl weakened, and nothing would induce her to part with her drug; but the men went with Callie to an adjacent barber-shop for baths, hair-cutting, and shaving. During these operations Callie and I quickly went to the Salvation Army's secondhand shop, where Callie procured the men complete outfits of respectable clothing. What a transformation when we beheld them again! Then we took them to breakfast; but they ate sparingly, and were not satisfied until they had taken some ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... came to comprise almost everything that could be bought or sold, from French wines to secondhand shoes. The effect was to raise prices so as to make even the common necessaries of life excessively dear. A great outcry finally arose; Parliament requested the Queen to abolish the "monopolies"; she hesitated, but when she saw their determined attitude she gracefully granted ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... no use to talk in that way. I've quite set my heart on Ester's going. I never expect to have an invitation there myself, so I must take my honors secondhand. ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... ingenious. He got his wife, Peggy—or "my Paggy," as he called her—to read aloud to him a text from the Bible, until he knew it by heart; and he had, as he said truly, "a good remembrancer," and never heard a striking sermon but he retained the most important passages, and retailed them secondhand to his ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the pawnbroker, going to the shop and returning with two or three secondhand revolvers and ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... excellent. To persons conscious of mental debility and incapable of grappling even with a short shilling novel, a brief and easy form of reading may be recommended. They may study catalogues; they may peruse the lists of their wares which secondhand booksellers and dealers in all kinds of curiosities circulate gratis. This is the only kind of circular which should not go straight to its long home in the waste-paper basket. A catalogue is full of information. It is so exceedingly inconsecutive ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... irritating because the program director or someone had muffed the perfume that the Lady Jane wore. Instead of the wholesome freshness of the free, open air, Jane was wearing a heady, spicy scent engineered to cut its way through the blocking barrier of stale cigar smoke, whisky-laden secondhand air, and a waft of cooking aroma from the kitchen of ...
— The Big Fix • George Oliver Smith
... prepared for the day of opening, and requested the state railroad commissioners to make their final inspection of the road. The three officials gravely travelled from end to end of the line in the secondhand P. K. & R. coach, the only passenger-car of the road, and after some jocular remarks, issued a certificate empowering the Poquette Carry Road to convey passengers and collect fares. Then, after a telegraphic conference ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... imagination a soulless erudition walked abroad. In the vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park, he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative. Even on a holiday ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... is nothing that may not be found there. One never knows what extraordinary or wonderful thing one may light upon there. Among old rusty fire-irons one finds an ancient sword offered as a poker; among the litter of holy and secular secondhand books, hand-painted missals of the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... These expenses were defrayed by a continuation of the duties on malt, &c; a land-tax at three shillings in the pound; a duty on licences, to be yearly paid by pawnbrokers and dealers in secondhand goods, within the bills of mortality; the sum of one million four hundred thousand pounds advanced by the bank, according to a proposal made for that purpose; five hundred thousand pounds to be issued ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... jars of water and yet they find their way to the top of the tables. Then there is dampness everywhere. Books soon become mildewed or unglued and the finest library will soon have the appearance of a secondhand bookshop. ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... bent his way towards the west-end; and having some knowledge of a secondhand tailor's shop in Rupert Street, proceeded thither, and looked out a handsome suit of mourning, with a sword, cloak, and hat, and demanded the price. The man asked twelve guineas, but after a little bargaining, he came down ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... stood about, staring vacantly. Leh Shin's shop attracted him, and he would squat on the ground either just outside the narrow entrance, or just within, and, with flaccid, dropping mouth, stare at the hanging array of secondhand clothes, making himself a source of endless entertainment for the boy, who found him easy to annoy and distress, and consequently practised upon him ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... into a doorway. From amidst the crowd behind, the yellow flare of a gasoline lamp, outhanging from a secondhand shop, glinted on brass buttons. An officer, leisurely accommodating his pace to his own monarchial pleasure, causing his hurrying fellow occupants of the pavement to break and circle around him, sauntered casually by. The Flopper's black eyes contracted with ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... wife with a smile—such a smile! "You might have afforded your lover something better than a secondhand souvenir," he said. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... his shop so well, that he seemed little more than an animated bundle of secondhand goods. His cowhide boots were the fellows of those that dangled from the fourth beam. His gayly checked flannel shirt harmonized delightfully with the carriage robes in the corner, and the soft brown-felt hat toned aesthetically ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... got a place at the table, but did not find it heaven; for a number of secondhand carpets were in the sale, and these, brimful of dust, were all shown on the table, and the dirt choked, and poisoned our fair friends. Brokers pestered them, until at last Rosa, smarting under her late exposure, addressed the auctioneer quietly, in ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... her credit. She was refused at every shop and store in Jamestown. In her distress she sold such articles as she could dispense with; but Jamestown was only a frontier hamlet, it had no such conveniences as pawnbrokers and secondhand clothiers, and what few articles she could dispose of were sold mainly to freed or indented ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... of the depression is obvious. But that is not all that you and I mean by the new order of things. Our pledge was not merely to do a patchwork job with secondhand materials. By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... my dear little Abbe, that my faith is not very fervent, but, as my friend, you are magnanimous enough to put up with my lukewarmness, and to leave me alone, and to wait for the future, so you say. But I absolutely disbelieve in the relics of secondhand dealers in piety, and you share my doubts in that respect. Therefore, the loss of that bit of sheep's carcass did not grieve me, and I easily procured a similar fragment, which I carefully fastened inside my jewel-box, and then I went to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... came swinging in on his secondhand crutches looking as if he had been made a general, and Marco came with him; and the drill the Squad was put through was stricter and finer than any drill they ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... new author, or a new language, in quite the same way. The present writer began Dante with very little knowledge of Italian; but knowing French and Latin pretty well. Being in Florence one day, he went to a bookstall and bought for one lira a secondhand copy of a little text published in 1811; and began to puzzle out bits here and there with the help of a small dictionary. In the following winter he went through the whole poem in Bianchi's edition with a friend, aided by various of the older commentaries. Then he took to reading ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... their ignominy. The young men will scorn me as one who has sold out: to the young women I, who have always been an enigma and a possibility, shall be merely somebody else's property—and damaged goods at that: a secondhand man at best. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... and shells and all kinds of rifles, as well as some really cheap, useful clothing. They don't mind how long you mosey around. In the end I buy a belt pack and canteen, and Tom picks up some skivvy shirts and socks that are only ten cents each. They're secondhand, I guess, but they ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... incidentally mention that Sir Richard was a well-known, ardent devotee of the fair sex. When he retired he wrote a pamphlet called "A Few Plain Truths about India." It caused a great sensation at the time, but is now quite unobtainable. A secondhand copy would be interesting not only for its material but for ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... be had—they might not do so well by looking further, for Mrs. Jukniene had at least kept one room for herself and her three little children, and now offered to share this with the women and the girls of the party. They could get bedding at a secondhand store, she explained; and they would not need any, while the weather was so hot—doubtless they would all sleep on the sidewalk such nights as this, as did nearly all of her guests. "Tomorrow," Jurgis said, when they were left alone, "tomorrow I will get ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... to give way under him. Let no one dare to say in future that a tailor is but the ninth part of a man. That reproach has been gloriously taken away from the character of the cross-legged corporation by Neal Malone. He has wiped it off like a stain from the collar of a secondhand coat; he has pressed this wrinkle out of the lying front of antiquity; he has drawn together this rent in the respectability of his profession. No. By him who was breeches-maker to the gods,—that is, except, like Highlanders, they eschewed inexpressibles,—by him who cut Jupiter's frieze ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... The paper is lying on the bar-room table; and all of them, who can read, have already made themselves acquainted with the particulars of the crime. Those, whose scholarship does not extend so far, have learnt them at secondhand ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... delineates character with great clearness and power; his speeches are noble rhetorical compositions; his sentences are rhythmical cadences. He was not a critical historian, like Herodotus, for he took his materials secondhand, and he was ignorant of geography; nor did he write with the exalted ideal of Thucydides, but as a painter of beautiful forms, which only a rich imagination could conjure, he is unrivaled in the history of literature. Moreover, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... "He had an odd mock solemnity of tone and manner," said Miss Burney (afterward Madame D'Arblay), "which he had acquired from constantly thinking, and imitating Dr. Johnson." It would seem, that he undertook to deal out some secondhand homilies, a la Johnson, for the edification of Goldsmith during Holy Week. The poet, whatever might be his religious feeling, had no disposition to be schooled by so shallow an apostle. "Sir," said he in reply, "as I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... is entirely gone, and resources can neither be found in the present, or hoped for in the future. Hard is the fate of those who are bound to such victims by the ties of blood and duty. They must suffer, secondhand, all the annoyances which ennui inflicts on its wretched victims. No natural sweetness of temper can long resist the depressing influence of dragging on from day to day an uninterested, unemployed existence; and besides, those who can find no occupation for ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... men's lodging house, kept by a Chinese, he engaged a room, left what gold he had there—he had to take his chance against theft—and in the afternoon took a down train to the marsh. He was back with the rest of the money that night, buying a secondhand suitcase on his way from the depot. In this he packed it, still in the canvas sacks, the newspaper folded over it. He saw to it that the suitcase had a lock, and lead-heavy he laid it flat under ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... to carry in two-by-four timbers and lay them where they wanted them on the ground inside the tent. Next they nailed boards across. They had bought all of this timber in Gridley secondhand ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... his calfskin binding, quite old and worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence? (I had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, London, from a cart, cheap, because ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... with our author on the general merits of Roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of its inferior originality to the Grecian. It is true the Romans had no Aeschylus nor Sophocles, and but a secondhand Homer, though this last was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators. But where was the Greek model of the noble poem of Lucretius? What, except the mere idea, did the Georgics borrow from Hesiod? and whoever thinks of comparing the two poems? Where, in Homer or the Euripides, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... occur by animals coming near or in contact with one another. It is an indirect infection. The cattle from the infected district first infect the pastures, roads, pens, cars, etc., whence the susceptible cattle obtain the virus secondhand. Usually animals do not contract the disease when separated from infected pastures by a fence. If, however, there is any drainage or washing by rains across the line of fence this ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Genoa Damask or Velvet, almost covered with gold lace or embroidery. The whole made Gay by Pictures, or Great Jars of Porcelain; in almost every room large lustres of pure Crystal; and every thing as dirty as a Secondhand Clothes dealer's ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... with the oleander this morning, though the oleander got there a little more previously than I did. Parties desiring a good, secondhand oleander tub, with castors on it, will do well to give us a call before going elsewhere. Purchasers desiring a good set of second-hand ear muffs for tulips will find something to their advantage by addressing ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... willing to take your tuition secondhand," said Ralph. "I am a much better teacher ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... fence. And the next week Ajax, who was known in private life as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called at the house in Little Queen Street where the Lambs lived, and they all had gin and water, and the elder Lamb played the harpsichord, a secondhand one that had been presented by Mr. Salt, and recited poetry, and Coleridge talked the elder Lamb under the table and argued the entire party into silence. Coleridge was only seventeen then, but a man grown, and already took snuff like a courtier, tapping the lid ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... and rugs for camping out, as the early mornings are sometimes very chilly. And there is one other thing that is worth while taking, even though it may cost from L30 to L50 or so in Sydney—a good secondhand boat, with two suits of sails. Thus provided the sportsman can sail all along the coasts of Savaii and Upolu, and be practically independent of the local storekeepers. To hire a boat is very expensive, and to travel in native craft is horribly uncomfortable, and ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... making. Two out of three times when I thought I had run across a characteristically American expression of efficiency, I was told that it had been copied from the British. I learnt more about my own army's business efficiency in studying it secondhand with the Americans, than I had ever guessed existed in all the time that I had been an inhabitant of the British Front. It is characteristic of us as a people that we like to pretend that we muddle our way into success. We advertise our mistakes and camouflage ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... said Bobby, struggling with matches that had felt the damp. "But it is very smoky. I should like to have a stove. You don't know where I can get a secondhand stove, do you? with a ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... on, whirled about, that she finally made friends with an old man who kept one of the secondhand shops, and, comparatively safe, used the doorway as her ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton |
