"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... uttered shouts of encouragement and delight to bulls and toreadors alike. The grand people were richly attired; beautiful ladies watched with excited eyes the bulls, wearing their colors in rosettes of satin and glittering tinsel; the thousands of waving, brilliantly hued fans fluttered like a swarm of butterflies; the music filled the air. Pe-" pita sat in a dream of joy, the color coming and going on her cheeks, her rapture glowing in her eyes. She ...
— The Pretty Sister Of Jose - 1889 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... at Hof, a handfulof houses on the brow of a breezy hill, the church and tavern standing opposite to each other, and nothing between them but the dusty road, and the churchyard, with its iron crosses, and the fluttering tinsel of the funeral garlands. In the churchyard and at the tavern-door, were groups of peasants, waiting for divine service to begin. They were clothed in their holiday dresses. The men wore breeches and long boots, and frock-coats with large ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... suggestive of the term woolly. Every sort of wild abandon of frowzy locks seemed to be in vogue; in some cases the hair appearing to my vision nothing but a confused snarl, in which glittered tinklers, spangles, and bits of tinsel, and from which waved long pennants ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... might almost be an enlarged reproduction of some little girl's Doll-King, dressed up in silver tinsel and left out of doors, by mistake, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... was dressed in the scarlet bridal clothes, a voluminous embroidered satin gown over all; this came with the sedan chair which was to carry her to her future home, being hired for the occasion. Scarlet shoes were on her feet, a high tinsel crown on her head, and covering her tear-stained face was a scarlet veil. In accordance with the custom which demanded that the forehead of the bride must be perfectly smooth, her front hair had been dragged out by the roots and left her with an ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... Christian families they eat, drink, dance, sing, laugh, play, caress, and kiss one another—this night, which in cold countries holds such magic for childhood with its traditional pine-tree covered with lights, dolls, candies, and tinsel, whereon gaze the round, staring eyes in which innocence alone is reflected—this night brought to Basilio only orphanhood. Who knows but that perhaps in the home whence came the taciturn Padre Salvi children ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... is as it should be. Gafsa is a rallying-point, and must be prepared for emergencies. Here, too, lie the cemeteries: the Jewish, fronting the main road, with a decent enclosure; that of the Christians, framed in a wire fence and containing a few wooden crosses, imitation broken columns and tinsel wreaths; Arab tombs, scattered over a large undefined tract of brown earth, and clustering thickly about some white-domed maraboutic monument, whose saintly relics are desirable companionship for the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... a little," said Webber, pulling up his cravat and adjusting his hair at the glass. "She's spoiled by all the tinsel vaporing of her hussar and aide-de-camp acquaintances; but something may be done for ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... mother to a premature grave. You are now entering upon the age that is capable of framing your whole life, and why not reconcile yourself to the belief, that the world, which is dazzling you with its gaudy show, is false and delusive. It is a tinsel glitter, Josephine, the wreck of the innocent and good, turn your back on it for my sake if ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... gazed at the decorations, the wreaths, the gauze, the tinsel, and paper angels, suspended by invisible wires over the counters, and all glittering and shining and twinkling with light, a strong whiff of evergreen fragrance came to her, and the aroma of fir-balsam, and it was to her the very breath ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... with silk curtains and cushions embroidered with gold thread and embossed with tinsel ornaments, the work of the bride herself. The seat for the bridegroom was somewhat higher and larger than the bride's. At last the bridegroom approached in a large barge, which held about two hundred people. A small boat preceded it with three guns, which kept up a deafening noise as he drew ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... submits, the advantages will be that, after exposing himself to all the humiliation and performing all the barbarities required of him, he may, if he escapes being killed, get a decoration of red or gold tinsel to stick on his clown's dress; he may, if he is very lucky, be put in command of hundreds of thousands of others as brutalized as himself; be called a field-marshal, and get a lot ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... to the least understanding of its followers, remain exactly where it is. Not in one jot or tittle would it suffer in the authority of its teaching. The great figure of the teacher would even gain were all the tinsel of the miraculous swept from him, so that he stood forth to the world as he lived—would gain not only to our eyes, but even to theirs who believe in him. For the Buddha was no prophet. He was no messenger from any power above this world, revealing ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... man to the contempt of superior minds if I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the gilded nimbus that surrounded the protegee of Mrs. Burrage. This shame was possible ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... themselves, 360 They smile superior; of external show Regardless, while their inbred virtues give A lustre to their power, and grace their court With real splendours, far above the pomp Of eastern kings, in all their tinsel pride. Like troops of Amazons, the female band Prance round their cars, not in refulgent arms As those of old; unskilled to wield the sword, Or bend the bow, these kill with surer aim. The royal offspring, fairest of the fair, 370 Lead on the splendid train. Anna, more bright Than summer suns, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... drags, and the players would begone, Out of this theatre of tinsel days And lights and tawdry glamour, out to face Even the blank of night, the icy stars, The vast abysses. What the gallery-gods Could give, they well have given; but deities Inscrutabler than they annul all gifts With one gift more—the restless mind that peers Past fame, friends, ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... Bertram, indeed, had come to assume a vastly different aspect from what it had displayed in times past. Heretofore it had been a plaything which like a juggler's tinsel ball might be tossed from hand to hand at will. Now it was no plaything—no glittering bauble. It was something big and serious and splendid—because Billy lived in it; something that demanded all his powers to do, and be—because Billy was watching; something ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... garden. Tonight the contrast between Yokohama, with its pitiful western vulgarity obtruding at every turn, and the quiet beauty of his surroundings struck Craven even more sharply than usual. It seemed impossible that only two miles away was Theatre Street blazing and rioting with all its tinsel tawdriness, flaring lights and whining gramophones. Here was another world—and here he had found more continuous contentment than he had known in the last ten years. The garden was an old one, planned by a master hand. By day it was lovely, but by night it took ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... that all day long an admiring group of children stood before it, gazing in at the window, and fairly goggling with wonder and longing. This was the shop of Mr. Ivory Cheeseman. Across and across the window were strings of silver tinsel, wonderful enough in themselves, but still more wonderful for the freight they bore; canes of every description, from the massive walking-stick that might have supported Lonzo's giant frame, down to dapper and delicate affairs no bigger than one's little ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... country who 'spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.' To such men, recognising only the culture of schools, a genius like Burns was a puzzle, easier dismissed than solved. Burns saw them, in all their tinsel of ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... throw "moral suasion" to the dogs. Above all, your demagogue dreads satire as vermin the avenging thumb—'Any thing but that,' squeaks he, 'an you love me. Liken me to Lucifer, or Caius Gracchus; charge me with ambition, and glorious vices; let me be the evil genius of the commonwealth, the tinsel villain of the political melodrama; but don't threaten me with the fool's cap, or write me down with Dogberry; above all, don't quote me in cold blood, that the foolish people may see, after the fever heat has subsided, what trash I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... bills are founded, and for whose support his wares are purchased? France, with her bonnet rouge and fraternity, dispatches her Rouen cottons, Marseilles brandies, flimsy taffetas, and indescribable variety of tinsel gewgaws. Philosophic Germany demands a slice for her looking-glasses and beads; while multitudes of our own worthy traders, who would hang a slaver as a pirate when caught, do not hesitate to supply him indirectly with tobacco, powder, cotton, Yankee rum, and New England notions, in order ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... passed out of the old church through a side door leading into a small green enclosure, now gloomy in the shade of the old stone walls. At one end was a tangle of briar, and here were some old graves, each with a tinsel wreath or two on the iron cross. And presiding over these was the limp figure of a one-legged man on two crutches, who saluted us. We passed along to the end of the inclosure, where lay a chance beam of sunshine ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... James the First has, among English sovereigns, rather a high character for sobriety and gravity of deportment, and purity of morals; but the glimpses we get of the real, every-day routine of his domestic life, are such as to show that the pomp and parade of royalty is mere glittering tinsel, ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... scanning similar embroidery in the literature of the Napoleonic Era, I unhesitatingly place the work of Archibald Forbes, and that of several knights of the pen still living, far above the delusive tinsel of Marbot, Thiebault, and Segur. I will go further and say that, if we could find out what were the sources used by Thucydides, we should notice qualms of misgiving shoot through the circles of scientific historians as they contemplated his majestic ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... off one's perceptions. Though not the case with all the fine churches and cathedrals of Normandy, yet with an unpleasantly large proportion—unfortunately including the magnificent Church of St Ouen at Rouen—there is beyond the gaudy tinsel that crowds the altars, an untidiness that detracts from the sense of reverence that stately Norman or Gothic does not fail to inspire. In the north transept of St Ouen, some of the walls and pillars have at various times been made to bear large printed notices which have been pasted ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... Costa-mongered; finally even the late eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... scintilla; facula; sparkling &c v.; emication^, scintillation, flash, blaze, coruscation, fulguration^; flame &c (fire) 382; lightning, levin^, ignis fatuus [Lat.], &c (luminary) 423. luster, sheen, shimmer, reflexion [Brit.], reflection; gloss, tinsel, spangle, brightness, brilliancy, splendor; effulgence, refulgence; fulgor^, fulgidity^; dazzlement^, resplendence, transplendency^; luminousness &c adj.; luminosity; lucidity; renitency^, nitency^; radiance, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Jim in sympathetic understanding. "You see, he doesn't know," she said. "Tinsel, dear brother, is supposed to represent the silver rays of the ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... were scarce out of his mouth, when three uncommonly large coaches, loaded with lackeys, as tall as Swiss, with most gaudy liveries, all covered with lace, appeared in the court, and disembarked the whole wedding company. Never was country magnificence more naturally displayed: Rusty tinsel, tarnished lace, striped silks, little eyes, and full swelling breasts, appeared on ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... particularly happy in the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek". No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his compound epithets, as 'golden-tressed', 'tinsel-slippered', 'coral-paven', 'flowry-kirtled', 'violet-embroidered', 'vermeil-tinctured', are themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are Sylvester's "opal-coloured morn", Drayton's "silver-sanded shore", and perhaps ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... on hamely fare we dine, Wear hodden pray, and a' that? Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine; A man's a man for a' that— For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that; The honest man, though e'er sae poor, Is king o' ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... with tiny lighted tapers and radiant with shiny tinsel cut in pretty devices or in thread-like strips. Bright balls, gay toys, and paper flowers help to enhance its beauty, and sometimes scenes from sacred history are arranged with toys at the base of ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... a change of prospects! What a revulsion in circumstances! I left here as a proud follower of Mars, clothed in scarlet and fine linen like the Kings of Babylon, and blowing up the tinsel'd bubble of military glory, amid the beating of drums, the blowing of trumpets, and the cheers of an excited populace. But alas! I returned in silence, as a simple man of experience, covered in sackcloth, exhausted in body, disappointed in mind, without friends, ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... young heiress, we knew a sweet orphan girl whose grief for the death of her mother, to whom she was devotedly attached, lay deeper than this hollow tinsel show; and yet the painful thought that she was too poor to pay this mark of respect to the memory of her beloved parent, in a manner suited to her birth and station, added greatly to ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... culminating at last, when the storm burst, in complete mutual understanding, and a joint determination that carried all before it—when, I say, Aunt Rennie, defeated, prepared to take her leave, she said a word to me which I often thought of afterwards. "She is choosing blindfold, tinsel for gold." I thought of it, not on account of the expression, but of Aunt Rennie herself. There was something in the pallor of her face, and in her tone, that made me ask myself whether there could be anything in this matter that concerned ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... impudent amongst us. Various were the surmises as to who, what, and from whence the gay widow was; by many she was supposed to be immensely rich; and by a few, some lady of quality incog. Many, however, asserted, that her jewels were glass; her gold, tinsel, and her glittering ornaments, beads sewed upon pasteboard. Nevertheless, in the very face of this shameful detraction, to her delightful little soirees flocked the best families in the town, (there were not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... of ever being able to pay Difference in everything between system and practice Dignity to be kept up in pleasures, as well as in business Distinction between simulation and dissimulation Do not mistake the tinsel of Tasso for the gold of Virgil Doing what may deserve to be written Done under concern and embarrassment, must be ill done Dressed as the generality of people of fashion are Economist of your time Establishing a character of integrity ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... fare we dine, Wear hodden gray, and a' that: Gie fools their silks and knaves their wine, A man's a man for a' that; For a' that and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that, The honest man, though e'er sae poor, Is king ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... jars filled with water are set near the posts, and a small earthen platform called baola is made. The bridegroom wears a yellow or white dress, and has a triangular frame of bamboo covered with tinsel over his forehead, which is known as basing and is a substitute for the maur or marriage-crown of the Hindustani castes. Over his shoulder he carries a pickaxe as the representative implement of husbandry ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... into a sombre room, stone-floored, furnished stiffly with a row of carved chairs against the wall, lighted coldly by roof-windows of placuna, and a lamp smoking before some commercial god in his ebony and tinsel shrine. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... off on the road from Florence to Rome. But M. Dumas scorns such commonplace dramatis personae, and is satisfied with nothing less than transporting a French ballet-dancer into the Appenines, with all her paraphernalia of gauze drapery, tinsel decorations, and opera airs and graces; not forgetting the orchestra, in the person of the luckless bass player. Yet so ingeniously does he dovetail it all together, so probable does he make his improbabilities appear, that we become almost ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... offer you great pay, social position, or any glitter and tinsel of man's glory; in fact, we can promise little more than rations, plenty of hard work, and probably no little of worldly scorn; but if on the whole you believe you can in no other way help your Lord ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... his duty as it seemed to lie plain and straight before him, and he meant it still, increasingly difficult as it appeared. But all the talk of the lonely soul, of the eternal isolation of the spirit, in which man was doomed to live, all the tinsel sentimentalisms of which the talk of the bilingual poetess had mainly consisted, afforded perhaps as poor a pabulum as he could anywhere have found. There was he, with that sore-stricken heart of his, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... were in great peril, if not actually consumed. Now was not this characteristic?—the ruling passions of Pope are nothing to it. Whilst the poor distracted manager was bewailing the loss of a building only worth 300,000 l., together with some twenty thousand pounds of rags and tinsel in the tiring rooms, Bluebeard's elephants, and all that—in comes a note from a scorching author, requiring at his hands two acts and odd ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... he had a few worshippers, unenvious, except with the noble emulation of imitating him. This is the rarest, but most glorious success that life holds forth to the young and the brave. Fame is but a breath; Honor but the paint and tinsel of the stage; Wealth an intolerable burden; but the fire of noble rivalry struck from the souls of the young in the glow of enthusiasm—here is the only guerdon that the world can give to noble endeavor, and the kingly promises ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... vulgarity is inseparable from even the most respectable forms of magic,—an atmosphere of tinsel, of ostentation, of big cry and little wool. A child might have told us that matter is not almighty, that minds are sometimes transparent to one another, that love and faith can work wonders. And we also know that, in this mortal life, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... she will yield up all that she has, making, it may be, but one protest for Justice' sake and then no more. And she will urge her children to do the same. If the world will let her have no jewels, then she will put glass beads in her monstrance, and for marble she will use plaster, and tinsel ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... not the last to be attracted by glitter and tinsel, and to live for earthly things which perish in the using. The candidate who cares much for honour and nothing for learning, the professional man who will sacrifice reputation to win a fortune, and all who wrong ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... they are simple who prize The tongue that is smooth to deceive; Yet sure she had sense to despise, The tinsel that folly ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... come upon me—nor ever will. There is a romance in life, that is no illusion. It lives not in the effete forms and childish ceremonies of the fashionable drawing-room—it has no illustration in the tinsel trappings and gaudy puerilities of a Court. Stars, garters, and titles are its antidotes; red cloth and plush the upas-trees of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... scanty portion of happiness, are supposed to envy mankind their more complete and substantial enjoyments. They are supposed to enjoy, in their subterraneous recesses, a sort of shadowy happiness,—a tinsel grandeur; which, however, they would willingly exchange for the ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... fitted tightly on the ends of the stationary shaft, D, and drilled through their diameter to admit heavy copper rods, KK, which are bent as shown. Tinsel or fine wire such as contained in flexible electric wire are soldered to the ends of these rods, and the brushes thus made must be adjusted so they will just touch the plates. The caps are fitted with screws for adjusting the brushes. These rods and brushes are called the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... and painted like peacocks; being more moved with her most virtuous example than with all that ever Paul or Peter wrote touching that matter. Yea, this I know, that a great man's daughter (lady Jane Grey) receiving from lady Mary before she was queen good apparel of tinsel, cloth of gold and velvet, laid on with parchment lace of gold, when she saw it, said, 'What shall I do with it?' 'Mary,' said a gentlewoman, 'wear it.' 'Nay,' quoth she, 'that were a shame, to follow my lady Mary against God's word, and leave my lady Elizabeth which followeth ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... serious fault arises from his desire to be thought a fine writer. Without making long extracts, it is impossible to give any conception of the absurdities into which this childish ambition has led him. The tropes and metaphors, the tawdry tinsel, the common tricks of feeble rhetoricians are reproduced here as if they were the highest results of rhetorical art. The display is often amusing. Thus, in describing Mrs. John Adams, Mr. Randall says: "Her lofty lineaments carried a trace of the Puritan severity. They were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... happened that the Union public were hungering for heroes at this particular time and that Union journalists were itching to write one up to the top of their bent. So all McClellan's tinsel was counted out for gold before an avaricious mob of undiscriminating readers; and when, at the height of the publicity campaign, the Government wanted to retrieve Bull Run they turned to the "Man of Destiny" ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... most likely he would have frowned on his adviser. He would have urged the "haste" which "the King's business" requires, and might have reminded us that viands are as wholesome on a wooden trencher as on a plate of gold. He would have told us that truth needs no tinsel, and that the road over a bare heath may be more direct than the pretty windings of the valley. Or, rather, he would have said, as he has written—"Know that you have to do with a person who, provided his words but clearly ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... "funny." Her work, and that of Frances Hodgson Burnett, as well as that of Miss Phelps and Mrs. Spofford, shine with a silver thread of humor, worked too intimately into the whole warp and woof to be extracted without injuring both the solid material and the tinsel. To appreciate the point and delicacy of their finest wit, you must read the whole story and grasp the entire ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... me at once break through the formalities of a first acquaintance, and say, dear Smith;—Dear Smith, I am delighted to have been at last introduced to a real member of the theatrical profession—a bona fide flesh and blood, silk-stocking'd and tinsel-rapier'd "pride of Astley's stage." If you unite in your own person the artist and the player; if you occasionally handle the painter's brush as well as the field-marshal's truncheon—for have I not seen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... too florid a kind; affected turns; conceits and frivolous thoughts; which, far from being adapted to his Jerusalem, could hardly be supportable in his 'Aminta.' So that all this, opposed to the gravity, the sobriety, the majesty of Virgil, what is it but tinsel ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... are still coming to light from many quarters in the shape of tombs, houses, palaces, utensils, ornaments, representations of the gods, and household and funerary furniture,—not only in the Cyclades, but on the mainland of Asia Minor and of Greece. No inferior goods or tinsel wares would have satisfied the luxurious princes who reigned in such ancient cities as Troy and Mycenae, and who wanted the best industrial products of Egypt and Syria—costly stuffs, rare furniture, ornate ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... as high as $11. But the ribbon tying was not steady work. It is applied to only some of the material, and the task and bonus here are intermittent. The girls who knot, or run silk threads through the selvages, paste on tinsel ribbon, and wrap are younger than the other workers. Their wages before had been from $5.80 to $6 a week. Now they are in some cases over $8; in others about $7; in others about $6. The work reaches them in better condition than before. They said it was more interesting, and the chief difficulty ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... vanity was as quick as ever, and it pleased him to see that her own soul was taking the vengeance on itself that he had bartered off for a price. Miserable, selfish, old man! All the gold of his life had turned to paltry tinsel years ago. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... satin and silver, lifted on high his two barb-tipped sticks, gaily ornamented with tinsel paper, and called Vivillo from a distance. His mocking voice infuriated the bull, who rushed upon him; then, as he swayed lightly aside, it was all he could do to save himself from the great animal's sudden, swift turn, without ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... brown-wrapped Suckling in a hollow log in the center, and departed flapping. After that the ceremonial developed itself into the education that was to flow down upon her defenseless head at the waving of the wand of Minerva, who was Charlotte with a tinsel star of wisdom resting rampantly upon her brow. And it came down upon the Suckling with a vengeance. A whole troop of young letters of the alphabet, led by small Susan with the large red A upon her fat back, danced around the Suckling's helplessness ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... celebrated by the populace with every sign of joy and attachment. The bonfires blazed, and the gunpowder roared, all night. In every parish from Mile End to Saint James's was to be seen enthroned on the shoulders of stout Protestant porters a pope, gorgeous in robes of tinsel and triple crown of pasteboard; and close to the ear of His Holiness stood a devil with horns, cloven hoof, and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... supper, a dozen Indian girls were gathered about a table in one of the large rooms behind the house, busily engaged in blowing out the contents of several hundred eggs and filling the hollowed shells with cologne, flour, tinsel, bright scraps of paper. Each egg-was then sealed with white wax, and ready for the cascaron ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... famous Gorilla, who was crowned poetess-laureate at the capitol by night, six years later. She was crowned where our great Italian poets were crowned; and though her merit was no doubt great, it was, nevertheless, more tinsel than gold, and not of that order to place her on a par with Petrarch ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... demanded at first to be treated as befitted his rank; but none of his self-importance went with his black captors. "We'll brigidiale-gene'al yer, yer black scound'al," they remarked cheerfully, as they stripped off his tinsel stars. "Yer ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... there's ever so many more gents called for their money. There's Mr. Flanker, the whipmaker, and Mr. Smokem, from the cigar-shop, and Trotter, the bootmaker, and—yes, sir, there's a young man from Mr. Tinsel, the jeweller: and, oh! a load more of 'em, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... carried, for whom we bound nosegays on the heath and stole apples from the orchard and climbed upon the table after desert, if we were left alone in the dining-room, to lay hands on some beautiful sweetmeat wrapped in tinsel and fringes of pink paper—have we not met her again in after-life, a grown woman, very, very far from our ideal of feminine grace and beauty? And still in spite of changes in herself and ourselves there has clung to her memory through all those years enough of romance to make our heart beat ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... arrayed in their best. They were received by Mrs. Roosevelt, who had a hand-shake and a kind word for each, and then some of the Cabinet ladies, who were assisting, gave to each visitor a button, set in ribbon and tinsel and inscribed "Merry Christmas ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... public generally will feel under great obligations to the publishers of this work for the beautiful taste, arrangement, and delicate neatness with which they have got it out. The intrinsic merit of the Bible recommends itself; it needs no tinsel ornament to adorn its sacred pages. In this edition every superfluous ornament has been avoided, and we have presented us a perfectly chaste specimen of the Bible, without note or comment. It appears to be just what is needed in every ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... the virgins with a flute; these appeared from a green-room, to the number of thirty or forty, of all ages and sizes. Each had her hair dressed in a topknot, and her head covered with a veil; a scarlet petticoat loaded with tinsel concealed her naked feet, and over this was a short red kirtle, and an enormous white shawl was swathed round the body from the armpits to the waist. A broad belt passed over the right shoulder and under the left arm, to which hung gold ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... to the dazzling, silvery glitter of the mirror-work and stuccoed halls of the Teheran palaces, the home of the wealthy Timuree Chieftain is distinguished by a striking and lavish display of colored glass, gilt, and tinsel. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... troth 's but a night-gown in respect of yours: cloth o' gold, and cuts, and laced with silver, set with pearls, down sleeves, side sleeves, and skirts round, underborne with a blush tinsel; but for a fine, quaint, graceful, and excellent fashion, yours ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... carpet. Seated on it, against no more romantic object than a blackened chimney-stack, over which some humble creeper had been trained, they both pored over one book, while a basket of common fruit, and another basket of strings of beads and tinsel scraps were lying near. ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... dressed as devils, was raised a downright pyramid of men and women, sitting, standing, leaning, in every possible variety of odd, extravagant, and grotesque costume; altogether an indescribable mass of bright colors, flowers, ribbons, tinsel and spangles. Amid this heap of strange forms and dresses appeared wild or graceful countenances, ugly or handsome features—but all animated by the feverish excitement of a jovial frenzy—all turned with an expression of fanatical admiration ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... conclusions. Only nobody could discover who was the young girl concerned, or where she came from or what might be her name. And, after a few days, Broadway, also, forgot the matter amid the tarnished tinsel and raucous noises of its own mean ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... It could not be otherwise. It made him at once sad and angry. "Romance! I hate the word. Once I was as full of romance as a water-chestnut is of starch. I again affirm that young women should not travel alone. They think every bit of tinsel is gold, every bit of colored glass, ruby. Go home; don't bother about romance outside of books. There it is safe. The English are right. They may be snobs when they travel abroad, but they travel securely. Romance, adventure! Bah! So much twaddle has been written about the East that cads and ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... him now, no mockery. He was naked man, stripped of his tinsel, and laid bare to the soul by the inexorable Master, Pain. Across his chin, as though to mock ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... wardrobe contained, and she was bright and cheery and exceedingly incompetent. It was her costume that shocked him. Not only was she attired in a low-necked, rose-coloured evening gown, liberally bespangled with tinsel, but she wore a vast top-heavy picture-hat whose crown of black was almost wholly obscured by a gorgeous white feather that once must have adorned the king of all ostriches. She was not at all his idea of a chambermaid. He started ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... wax—Clown dissolving partnership by walking off, in a new wrap-rascal, with the cash-box, that no one may rob them. The best things must come to an end!—and so does the Pantomime—with a gorgeous display of red fire, tinsel and gold, real water and the electric light—all chopped off in the middle by the descending curtain. The box-fronts have been enveloped in their night-gowns; the Columbine is clattering, in pattens, to her lodgings; the Harlequin has been bolted ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... 'a star'. Steingass (Persian Dictionary) defines Kaukaba as 'a polished steel ball suspended to a long pole, and carried as an ensign before the king; a star of gold, silver, or tinsel, worn as ornament or sign of rank; a concourse of people; a royal ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... them with astonishment and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious, more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks. An audacious conjurer has generally been his hero,—some youth who, by wonderful cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that comes to his hand. Through it all there is a feeling of stage ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... and Lord Oxford on his left, bearing the swords of state. Sir Edward Hastings, on foot, led the Queen's horse. She sat in a chariot of tissue, trapped with red velvet, and drawn by six horses. Mary was dressed in blue velvet, bordered with ermine, and on her head she carried not only a caul of tinsel set with gold and stones, but also a garland of goldsmith's work, so massive that she was observed to "bear up her head with her hands." She was subject to violent headaches, and in all probability was suffering from one now. A canopy ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... elevated thought or vigorous argument to noble diction. By the side of his serried yet persuasive periods the efforts of Fox seemed ragged, those of Burke philosophic essays, those of Sheridan rhetorical tinsel. And this harmony was not the effect of long and painful training. His maiden speech of 26th February 1781 displayed the grace and forcefulness which marked his classic utterance at the Lord Mayor's banquet ten weeks ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Frontignac longed for one strong, unguarded, real, earnest word from the man who had stolen from her her whole being. She was beginning to feel in some dim wise what an untold treasure she was daily giving for tinsel and dross. She leaned back in the carriage, with a restless, burning cheek, and wondered why she was born to be so miserable. The thought of Mary's saintly face and tender eyes rose before her as the moon rises on the eyes of some hot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... somberness of the reign of Louis, all France went to the extreme of levity. Costumes changed. Manners, but late devout, grew debonair. Morals, once lax, now grew yet more lax. The blaze and tinsel, the music and the rouge, the wine, the flowing, uncounted gold—all Paris might have been called a golden brothel of delirious delight, tenanted by a people ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... disgusting indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions, and was kittle cattle to rebuke. If sometimes you see tinsel and tawdriness about poor Seneca, look a little deeper, and you seem to see him writing it in agony and bloody sweat. . . . He was among the richest men in Rome, when riches were a deadly peril: he ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... velvet is equal to the richest silk; glazed calico takes the place of satin; and even the royal ermine may be admirably simulated by tails of black worsted stitched on a ground of flannel. Lace may be manufactured from cut paper, and a dollar's worth of tinsel will afford jewels for a congress of sovereigns. Of course, there is not the least objection to his wearing a crown of the purest gold, or diamonds of the finest possible water (if he can get them), but they will not look ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... war will end; not just yet, I think. But whenever it does, just as far as we are concerned the days of roses will be over. For the time being art and literature are dead. Look at the rotten stuff that's being written to-day. At the beginning we were deceived by the tinsel of war; Romance dies hard. But we know now. We've done with fairy tales. There is nothing glorious in war, no good can come of it. It's bloody, utterly bloody. I know it's inevitable, but that's no excuse. So are rape, theft, murder. It's a bloody ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Orige up in tinsel. But for Clare and Blanche, leave me see to them. Clare hath one gown ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... was said to have stood and reached by a flight of stone steps, worn smooth by the tread and kisses of multitudes of worshippers. The manger is represented by a marble slab a couple of feet in height, decorated with tinsel and blue satin and marked at the head with a chiseled star, bearing above it the inscription in Latin, "Here was Jesus Christ born of the Virgin Mary." At the foot are several altars, on which incense is ever kept burning and from which mass is conducted, while a score of hanging lamps ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... likely to attain any very large share of popular favour or to be esteemed a companionable sort of person. The fabric of social life is interwoven with a multitude of delicate evasions, of small hypocrisies, of matters of tinsel sentiment; social intercourse would be impossible, if it were not so. There is no sort of social existence possible for a person who is ingenuous enough to say always what he thinks, and, on the whole, one may be thankful that there is not. One naturally enough objects to form the subject of ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... were up and cross-barred. As the first tazia, a gorgeous erection ten feet high, was borne aloft on the shoulders of a score of stout men into the semi-darkness of the Gully of the Horsemen, a brickbat crashed through its talc and tinsel sides. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... chivalry—the heritage only of fools and very clever men—which takes no note of such things. It was Miss Brown who, from her place in a corner of the room, ran over the cheap attractions of this unwelcome visitor with an expression of scornful wonder—who understood the tinsel of her jewellery, the cheap shoddiness of her ready-made gown; who appreciated, with merciless judgment, her mincing speech, her cheap, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... those who need a figure-head to remind them of a vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. Lay ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... saw a man happily wearing a tinsel crown, would you go to him and say, 'My good friend, you're making a fool of yourself. Your crown isn't of real gold, and you must throw it away. I haven't a golden crown to give you instead, but you're wicked to take pleasure in that sham thing.' They're just as comfortable, ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... side, Delia had now come to the swift decision natural to her age and character. Anna was unworthy. She had been tried and found wanting. Gold had been offered to her, and she had chosen tinsel. It was not surprising that the Palmers should be preferred to herself, but that any one related to the Professor, able to see and know him, should be capable of turning aside and neglecting him for others, was a thing she could neither understand nor bear with patience. She ceased to ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... shoot In golden boughs, and golden fruit; And he, the dragon never sleeping, Guarded each fair Hesperian Pippin. No hobby-horse, with gorgeous top, The dearest in Charles Mather's[7] shop, Or glittering tinsel of May Fair, Could with this rod of Sid compare.[8] Dear Sid, then why wert thou so mad To break thy rod like naughty lad?[9] You should have kiss'd it in your distress, And then return'd it to your mistress; Or made it a Newmarket switch,[10] And not a rod for thine own breech. But since old ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... say nothing of Marzipan, to which the girl was introduced for the first time, and which she found altogether fascinating. Innumerable candles burned gayly among the spreading boughs, and at the very top hovered an angel with outspread, shimmering wings, her hands bearing a garland of glistening tinsel, and her garments ablaze with gold and silver decoration. Grown girl as she was, Nan was delighted. It was all so new and strange; so different from anything she had ever ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... the spot where the pulpit and the minister's chair usually held sway. The tree was likewise adorned with silver paper and tinsel, and pink and white tarlatan in the shape of plump stockings filled with candy and nuts. Each of the little girls was to have one of these, and each boy a candy cane. These also hung in red and white ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... man that day was Roger Acton; not of his deserts—they were worse than none, he knew it; not of the procession—no silly child was he, to be caught with toy and tinsel; God wot, he was meek enough in self—and as for other pride, he knew from old electioneerings, what a humbling thing ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... little attention to matters outside of the law, though a little to a volunteer militia company of which I was a member; for a time a lieutenant, then in 1860 brigade-major on a militia brigadier's staff. We staff officers wore good clothes, much tinsel, gaudy crimson scarfs, golden epaulets, bright swords with glistening scabbards, rose horses in a gallop on parade occasions and muster days, yet knew nothing really military—certainly but little useful in war. We knew a little of ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... which Pope is so entirely destitute as a taste for Homer.... I remembered how we had been disgusted; how often we had sought the simplicity and majesty of Homer in his English representative, and had found instead of them puerile conceits, extravagant metaphors, and the tinsel of modern ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... one hears always the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridae a moment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously deeply by the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... flourished in tawdry, gay-colored rags, and tatters, he brandishing a sweep's broom and she a ladle. Jim Crow and a fancifully bedizened ballet-dancer in white muslin, often swelled the ranks, and the rest of the party rigged out in a profusion of gilt paper, flowers, tinsel and gewgaws, their faces and legs colored with brick-dust, made up a comical crowd. But even these mild remains of the great festival are almost entirely banished to the rural districts, and are ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... kings of the earth—they, and they only. All other kingships, so far as they are true, are only the practical issue and expression of theirs; if less than this, they are either dramatic royalties,—costly shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels instead of tinsel,—but still only the toys of nations; or else, they are no royalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and practical issue of national folly; for which reason I have said of them elsewhere, "Visible governments are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, the harness ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... was in an unsystematic way a collector of Napoleonic relics; the bigger the book about his hero the more readily he bought it; he purchased letters and tinsel and weapons that bore however remotely upon the Man of Destiny, and he even secured in Geneva, though he never brought home, an old coach in which Buonaparte might have ridden; he crowded the quiet walls of Lady Grove with engravings and figures of him, preferring, my aunt remarked, the more convex ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... She had again and again heard very clever people pronounce this or that passage, in this or that versifier, altogether admirable, which, when she read, her soul refused to acknowledge as anything but cant, flourish, and tinsel, or at the best elaborate wordiness, curious, clever, learned, perhaps, haply even tinged with the fascinating hues of fancy, but, God knows, as different from real poetry as the gorgeous and massy vase of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... absolutely swear you to be the living image of their 'long lost Amy'? And how, if the farthest journey you ever will take again is the monotonous hand-journey from your pillow to your medicine bottle, then how, for instance, with map or tinsel or attar of roses, can you go to work to solve even just for your own satisfaction the romantic, ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... to pick up a pebble that he might kiss the hem of her garment, "suffer me to watch over you as a dragon guards a treasure. The poet was covering you just now with the lace-work of his precious phrases, the tinsel of his promises; he chanted his love on the best strings of his lyre, I know he did. If, as soon as this noble lover finds out how small your fortune is, he makes a sudden change in his behavior, and is cold and embarrassed, will you still ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... electroliers a curious, mixed company of the pious and the vicious of the capital. There was the Metropolitan in his robes and with his great crucifix, Ministers of State in uniforms with decorations, Actual Privy Councillors and their wives, and dozens of underlings in their gaudy tinsel, prelates with crosses at their necks, and women of all classes, from the highest aristocracy to the painted sister ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux |
