"Sempstress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... even a watchguard, and might therefore turn out to be a safe challenge. But it so happened that, by a curious accident, he was then wearing under his coat-sleeves some gold wrist-studs which he had quite recently taken into wear, in the absence (by mistake of a sempstress) of his ordinary wrist-buttons. He had never before worn them in Florence or elsewhere, and had found them in some old drawer where they had lain forgotten for years. One of these studs he took out and handed to the Count, who ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... gossip about the lodgers on the other side of the landing. The latter were a young and happy pair: the husband, a chorus singer at the Apollo, who worked at glove cleaning during the day time; his wife, a sempstress, who did repairs upon the costumes of the theatre. Their apartments consisted of two rooms and a kitchen, while Marzio and his family occupied the rest of the floor, and entered their lodging by the ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... upon Hoppesteris in a passage of Chaucer (Knight's Tale, l. 2019.); but to ignorant persons it seems not very probable. "Maltster," surely, is not feminine, still less "whipster;" "dempster," Scotch, is a judge. Sempstress has another termination on purpose to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... she eyed him. He was a clerk at eighteen shillings a week, and he looked it. His mother was a sempstress, and he looked it. The idea of neat but shabby Denry and the mighty Duncalf not hitting it off together seemed excessively comic. If only Denry could have worn his dress-suit at church! It vexed him exceedingly that he had only worn that expensive dress-suit once, and saw no faintest hope ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... 1750 we find something about these in "Gil-Blas," and in "Marianne," (Mme. Dufour the sempstress and her shop).—Unfortunately the Spanish travesty prevents the novels of Lesage from being as instructive as they ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... naked, have cherished me dying, have died herself to save me? Alas, no! It was because I had been drawn on to Siena by that lovely, haunting, beckoning, beguiling vision of Aurelia, my torture and stem of shame. Why, finally, were my eyes not lifted up to her wistful eyes, as she sat—poor sempstress—in that upper room? It was because of my accursed prosperity. It was because my eyes were cased and swollen in pride; because my fine horse held them; because I thought I had but to nod and be obeyed by—my wife! Thy wife, sayest thou, Francis? Nay, wretched fool, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... century or more ago, a talented German writer (Hacklaender) wrote a book entitled European Slave-life, in which he attempted to show that, without knowing it, we were all slaves one of another, and, in fact, that the artisan working in a cotton factory or the sempstress employed in a milliner's shop was as truly in a state of slavery as the negro who at that time was working in the fields of Georgia or Carolina. In a sense, of course, it may be said that every one who works for his living, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... chimney-boards, or cut paper, or work samplers?" "Dear aunt," said Isabel, "I am a brown bird of the mountains, as my mother called me. She taught me to sing, because she said it made work go on more merrily, but the longest day was short enough for what I had to do; I was laundress, and sempstress, and cook, and gardener; and if Cicely went to look for the sheep, I had to milk and bake, and at night I mended my father's fishing-nets, while I was learning Latin with Eustace. Yet I got through all very well, till my mother fell sick, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... to a male relative of the deceased sempstress, "that people will accuse me of all those deaths. Death follows me wherever I go.'' She quitted ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... of mignonette upon her breast, just at the point where the slashing of her bodice ended, and the gray gave way to a wedge of virginal white, as if her sempstress had started to lay bare her heart. The flowers quivered as from some internal agitation, nestling their pale gold spikes against their ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... an excellent sempstress, and what between making waistcoats and trousers for the tailors, and binding shoes for the shoemakers,—a business that she thoroughly understood,—she soon had her little hired room neatly furnished, and her grandfather as clean and spruce ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... landing Mr. Calthrop's man at the Temple and we went homewards, but over against Somerset House, hearing the noise of guns, we landed and found the Strand full of soldiers. So I took my money and went to Mrs. Johnson, my Lord's sempstress, and giving her my money to lay up, Doling and I went up stairs to a window, and looked out and see the foot face the horse and beat them back, and stood bawling and calling in the street for a free Parliament and money. By and by a drum was heard to beat a march coming ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... fat, weary-faced woman about fifty, who only did not look like a cook because she looked more like a sempstress. Her black dress was all covered with white threads. Mrs. Wilton looked at her with some embarrassment. It seemed more reasonable to be asking a woman like this about altering a gown than about intercourse ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... is said, you cannot legislate for all trades; and therefore you had better not legislate for any. Look at the poor sempstress. She works far longer and harder than the factory child. She sometimes plies her needle fifteen, sixteen hours in the twenty-four. See how the housemaid works, up at six every morning, and toiling up stairs and down stairs till near midnight. You own that you cannot do anything for the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rumours came from the North. Mrs. Shaftoe had, after five years' silence, received letters from her daughter Fanny, the sempstress, by a secret hand, and was filling Newcastle with lamentations over trepanning, imprisonment, and compulsory conversion, with the object of making Fanny a nun. A young English priest, agent for supplying the Catholic squires ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... bought, and nothing remaineth but to perform the ceremony, which is put off for some days, because they design it to be a public wedding. And to reward my love, constancy, and generosity, he hath bestowed on me the office of being sempstress to his grooms and footmen, which I am forced to accept or starve.[73] Yet, in the midst of this my situation, I cannot but have some pity for this deluded man, to cast himself away on an infamous creature, who, whatever she pretendeth, I can prove, would at this very minute rather ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... married when she was twenty,—the usual age for marriage, as he told me. His daughter, rather a pretty and slight-made girl, was very busy making shoes for her brothers out of cured skin. I rewarded the youthful sempstress by giving her one of a number of dolls kindly sent me for the purpose by Mrs. W. of Woolwich; and could that kind friend have seen the joyful countenance of the Esquimaux child, she would indeed have been richly remunerated for her thoughtful little addition ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... ridiculous circumstances over which the Northern Circuit men of the last generation delighted to laugh occurred at Newcastle, when Baron Graham—the poor lawyer, but a singularly amiable and placid man, of whom Jeckyll observed, "no one but his sempstress could ruffle him"—rode the circuit, and was immortalized as 'My Lord 'Size,' in Mr. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... reversion to the inferior class of servants, laundress, sempstress, chambermaids, and the like, who had much more liberty than their betters, and not such a lack of occupation as Anne soon perceived that she ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... product of her skilful labor. Thus for many years (refusing meanwhile several good offers of marriage) she continued to ply her needle and shears, working steadily and cheerfully in her vocation, earning good wages and spending but little, until the thrifty sempstress was counted well to do, and held in esteem according. Sometimes, when she got weary, and thought a change of labor would do her good, she would engage with some lucky dame to help do housework for a month or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Gadsden's sale of negroes" at the head. There were plantation negroes, coachmen, house-servants, mechanics, children of all ages, with descriptions as various as the kinds. Below the rest, and set out with a glowing delineation, was a description of a remarkably fine young sempstress, very bright and very intelligent, sold for no fault. The notice should have added an exception, that the owner was going ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... have reason to think that a favourable construction was put on my silence. A volume, of the size of a family bible, would not be sufficient to display half the contrasts engendered by the revolution. Many a Marquise has been obliged to turn sempstress, in order to gain a livelihood; but my friend the Comtesse had much ready wit, though no talents of that description. Having soothed her mind by venting a few imprecations against the murderers of her departed ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... satin ribbons edged with straw plait, such as the old-clothes buyers wear at market. On looking down at her kid shoes, made, it was evident, by the veriest cobbler, a stranger would have hesitated to recognize Cousin Betty as a member of the family, for she looked exactly like a journeywoman sempstress. But she did not leave the room without bestowing a little friendly nod on Monsieur Crevel, to which that gentleman responded by a look ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... cure, and his friend, and being served to their reverences smoking hot on the summit of a pyramid of yellow cabbage, figured admirably as a small Vesuvius and a centre dish. The surgical operation over, Brigitte, whose qualifications as a sempstress were superior, darned up the hole in the neck of the unfortunate animal, and he was then turned loose until a fresh supply of black-puddings should be required for a similar occasion. This wretched pig was never happy: how could he be so? Like Damocles of Syracuse, he lived in a state of perpetual ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... it. They began to wonder how they had managed to live before. The money flew, and was swallowed up by a thousand new expenses, which seemed at once to be habitual and indispensable. Jacqueline had begun to patronize the great dressmakers: she had dismissed the family sempstress who came by the day, a woman she had known since she was a child. The days of the little fourpenny hats made out of nothing, though they were quite pretty all the same, were gone,—gone the days of ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town. To shops in crowds the dangled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach, Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. The tuck'd-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... my thousand thanks, Dwellers by the banks Of mournful Somme (God keep me therefrom Until War ends)— These, then, are my friends: Madame Averlant Lune, From the town of Bethune; Good Professeur la Brune From that town also. He played the piccolo, And left his locks to grow. Dear Madame Hojdes, Sempstress of Saint Fe. With Jules and Susette And Antoinette. Her children, my sweethearts, For whom I made darts Of paper to throw In their mimic show, "La guerre aux tranchees." ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... be admitted that Punch has long since forgotten his declared crusade against capital punishment. But he has been otherwise busy. His sympathy for the poor, the starving, the ill-housed, and the oppressed; for the ill-paid curate and the worse-paid clerk; for the sempstress, the governess, the shop-girl, has been with him not only a religion, but a passion. Professor Ruskin, judging only by Punch's pictures, and that a little narrowly, has thought otherwise. Punch "has ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... how fondly Thought around that lost name lingers, Oft when lone your mother sitteth, she shall weep and droop her head, She shall mourn her baby-sempstress, with those imitative fingers, Drawing out ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... Isidore Hourdequin, a citizen of Chateaudun, for a fifth of its value. When he became old he divided his twenty-one acres between three of his family, Marianne, Louis, and Michel, and gave a corresponding sum of money to his younger daughter Laure, who had been brought up as a sempstress and was in service at ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... In Swift's Remarks on the Clerical Residence Bill, he describes the family of an English vicar thus: "His wife is little better than a Goody, in her birth, education, or dress..... His daughters shall go to service, or be sent apprentice to the sempstress ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Endo[u] observed her closely. To Abe—"Truly she is a beauty.... Your name is Kiku.... And age?... Twenty years only!... So Kiku is sempstress in the house of Aoyama Uji. So! So!" He and Abe regarded her attentively. They praised her beauty. The crimson blush spread over face and neck, adding to her charm. Thoroughly warmed the men left the room. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... reprehensible," said Astrardente, putting up his eyeglass to look at a pretty little sempstress who hurried past on ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Agricola, that he might not wound her delicacy, had come to a secret arrangement with the housekeeper, and hired a garret for her, just large enough to hold a small bed, a chair, and a table; for which the sempstress had to pay five shillings a year. But Agricola, in fulfilment of his agreement with the porter, paid the balance, to make up the actual rent of the garret, which was twelve and sixpence. The poor girl had thus about eighteenpence a month left for her other expenses. But many workwomen, whose ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... young sempstress, taking the pins out of her mouth furtively, seeing that Conny was looking at her. "He ran out of the house before we had finished dinner, and took Puck ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... pimp of a gauger." "The gauger! there must be some mistake," said Harley. "He writes me, that it was engaged for one whose long services—" "Services!" interrupted the other; "you shall hear. Services! Yes, his sister arrived in town a few days ago, and is now sempstress to the baronet. A plague on all rogues, says honest Sam Wrightson. I shall but just drink damnation to them to-night, in a crown's worth of Ashley's, and leave London to-morrow by sun-rise." "I shall leave it too," said Harley; and so ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... hostess of every detail of her young guest's life. And wonderful as was the difference between the peasant maiden of Domremy and the most famous woman in France, the life of Jeanne, the Deliverer of her country, is as the life of Jeanne, the cottage sempstress,—as simple, as devout, and as pure. She loved to go to church for the early matins, but as it was not fit that she should go out alone at that hour, she besought Madame Marguerite to go with her. In the evening she went ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... brogue, antigropelos^; stocking, hose, gaskins^, trunk hose, sock; hosiery. glove, gauntlet, mitten, cuff, wristband, sleeve. swaddling cloth, baby linen, layette; ice wool; taffeta. pocket handkerchief, hanky^, hankie. clothier, tailor, milliner, costumier, sempstress^, snip; dressmaker, habitmaker^, breechesmaker^, shoemaker; Crispin; friseur [Fr.]; cordwainer^, cobbler, hosier^, hatter; draper, linen draper, haberdasher, mercer. [underpants for babies] diaper, nappy [Brit.]; disposable diaper, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... And I make you a bet the oaf of a husband does not appreciate her! Is it not always so? Now I—but of course I married foolishly, I married an artiste. If I had my time again I would choose in preference any sempstress. The artistes are for applause, for bouquets, for little dinners, but not ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... after which I need not tell you what great and what rapid advancement Rhetoric will put in your way. You have but to look at me. My father was an obscure person barely above a slave; he had in fact been one south of Xois and Thmuis; my mother a common sempstress. I was myself not without pretensions to beauty in my youth, which earned me a bare living from a miserly ill-conditioned admirer; but I discovered this easy short-cut, made my way to the top—for I had, if I may be bold to say it, all the qualifications ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... was neat and clean, and decently furnishedornamented, too, by such relics of her youthful arts of sempstress-ship as Mrs. Hadoway had retained; but it was close, overheated, and, as it appeared to Oldbuck, an unwholesome situation for a young person in delicate health,an observation which ripened his resolution touching a project ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... looked from the kitchen,— Neat was the kitchen and tidy was she; There at her window a sempstress sat stitching; "Were I a sempstress, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... cut in long before she finished, and when they talked together it was not easy to keep the two narratives distinct. One was the mother of four daughters, all still unmarried, earning their own livings, one in a shop, another a sempstress, two in service in good houses, earning good wages. Never had woman been so blessed in her children! They would never see their mother go to the House! The other had but one, a son, and not many like him; no son ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... to give me something like a polished education, but my mother was particularly determined that it should be a rough, but at the same time a useful one; and nothing farther she thought was necessary but to send me two or three months to a sempstress to be taught to make household linen. . . . My mother would not consent to my being taught French, and my brother Dietrich was even denied a dancing-master, because she would not permit my learning ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... readers a little more than is above told, I have had recourse to my botanical friend, good Mr. Oliver of Kew, who has taught me, first, of palms, that they actually stitch themselves into the ground, with a long dipping loop, up and down, of the root fibres, concerning which sempstress-work I shall have a month's puzzlement before I can report on it; secondly, that all the increment of tree stem is, by division and multiplication of the cells of the wood, a process not in the least to be described as 'sending down roots from the leaf to ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... a reasonable gentleman. Thou wouldst have a conscience. Now hark to a tale about my lady's last gown. How many times, think you, took I it back to the sempstress? ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... marvellous lyrics. In spirit and in form they are singular and remarkable. We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—nothing of the romantic. A stern picture it is, which even the softer touches render sterner; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... inexorable prescriptions for him that he should drink a glass of warm milk-punch before breakfast, and smell the cow's breath during the operation. She was milking the white cow herself, while the pseudo sempstress, Nichols, waited with the goblet, and the bandy-legged shoemaker, Twiss, stood on guard, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... shut up in a box? Good gracious me, why sure it locks! And why is it beside that flint? I could give her now a good hint: If she were handed to a sempstress, She would hem more and she ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... this DEVOTED town. To shops in crowds the daggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach. Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. The tuck'd up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides. Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, Commence acquaintance underneath a shed. Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... sure he could never love anybody as he had loved Madge, nor could he cut indifferently that other cord which bound him to her. Nobody in society expects the same paternal love for the offspring of a housemaid or a sempstress as for the child of the stockbroker's or brewer's daughter, and nobody expects the same obligations, but Frank was not a society youth, and Madge was his equal. A score of times, when his fancy roved, the rope checked him as suddenly as if it were the lasso of a ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... been assured of obtaining an apartment, into which, when tired of the sublime and beautiful, it might be competent for us to retire; but being quite uncertain on that head, our first measure was to question the sempstress touching both her ability and inclination to accommodate us. Never surely was the spirit of patient industry more strikingly illustrated than in the personage whom we now addressed. Her needle did not cease to hold its course one moment; ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... There is the span, the palm, the hand-breadth, the thumb-breadth (or inch), the hair-breadth, and the foot. The simple fisherman on our coasts still measures off his fathoms by stretching out both his arms to the full; the village sempstress still tells off her cloth-breadths by finger-lengths and nails; the untaught tiller of the soil still estimates the area of his little field by pacing along its sides. Man's first and most obvious expedient, when he sets himself to measure, is to employ his own person as his standard; ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... a motion to her to stay a little about the door, and in the meantime I wrote a note, and dropped it out of the window, in which I told her how I had lived in her absence, and desired her to write me a letter, and carry it the next day to my sempstress's house, who would take care to ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... little city urchins who would greet you with a curse? Is not such a life much better than the squalid street and square Where the fallen women flaunt it in the fierce electric glare, Where the sempstress plies her sewing till her eyes are sore and red In a filthy, dirty attic toiling on for daily bread? Did you hear no sweeter voices in the music of the bush Than the roar of trams and 'buses, and the war-whoop of 'the push'? ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... de Haldimar had prevailed on his unfortunate relatives to retire to the small cabin arranged for their reception; and here they were attended by an aged female, who had long followed the fortunes of the crew, and acted in the twofold character of laundress and sempstress. He himself, with Sir Everard, continued on deck watching the progress of the vessel with an anxiety that became more intense at each succeeding hour. Hitherto their course had been unimpeded, save by the obstacles already ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... Parliament, when every member, be he peer, knight of the shire, or burgh member, had to ride on horseback in the procession, it is impossible not to feel the force of Miss Grisel Dalmahoy's appeal in the Heart of Midlothian, she being an ancient sempstress, to Mr. ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... aprons slept upon greasy benches; the Boots sat staring at you while you fumbled, helpless, in a row of pigeon-holes, for your candlestick or your key; and, amid the coming and going of the commis-voyageurs, a little sempstress bent over the under-garments of the hostess—the latter being a heavy, stern, silent woman, who looked ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of much respect. Whether the dismissed cronies would talk or keep silence, who could say? Sir Spencer affected to believe that Arabella, when his son came to know her, was leading the life of a harmless, necessary sempstress, and that only by long entreaty, and under every condition of decorum, had she been induced to sit for her bust to the enthusiastic sculptor. Very touching was the story of how, when the artist became ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... characters of dynasties of yore; while she attached special importance to spinning and female handiwork. To this reason is to be assigned the name selected for her, of Li Wan (Li, the weaver), and the style of Kung Ts'ai (Palace Sempstress). ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Each of them threaded her needle with a short end of thread attached to the work, which was instantly pulled by an invisible force through the stuff, dragging the needle after it: the nimble fingers of the little sempstress caught it at the other side, but only to lose it again the next moment. And so the work went on, steadily undoing itself, and the neatly-stitched little dresses, or whatever they were, steadily falling to pieces. ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... to Europeans for a loan of money, and they are admitted under the pseudonym of sempstress or housekeeper. Natives among themselves do not kiss—they smell each other, or rather, they place the nose and lip on the cheek and draw a ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Thursday, Nine. My sempstress. She has lost the measure of my wrist. Forced to be measured again. The baggage has got ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... to blue eyes, clear as crystal. The broad daylight streaming in through the short curtains against the window pane fell with softened light on her girlish face. A pile of shaped pieces of linen told me that she was a sempstress. She looked like a spirit of solitude. When I held out the bill, I remarked that she had not been at home when I called in ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac |
