"To-do" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with Bryce, I met Broderick, warden of Merton, and there was an interesting political discussion. Bryce thought Chamberlain had alarmed the well-to-do classes, but trusted to Gladstone to bring matters around right, and, apropos of some recent occurrences, remarked upon the amazing depth of spite revealed in the blackballing at clubs. Took lunch at Balliol, where the discussion upon general and American ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... for her, but her eldest daughter manages to bring life together for the family. The bad father, on his release from jail, deserts his wife, which is no bad thing; the wife takes the Blue Ribbon and gives up drinking; a couple of well-to-do gentlemen take an interest in the family; and finally they all emigrate to Canada and live happily ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... formula which recorded the church restorations of the period.[883] There are plenty of allusions in the writings of contemporary poets and essayists to the cosy, sleep-provoking structures in which people of fashion and well-to-do citizens could enjoy ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... time ago the wife of a well-to-do peasant came to a justice of one of the district courts in Russia and demanded protection from the cruelty of her husband. She proved conclusively by the aid of competent witnesses, that he had bound her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... is believed to have been a well-to-do tradesman, and the lad is said to have had an uncle a painter, who probably influenced his nephew. But Correggio had a greater master, though but for a very short time, in Andrea Mantegna, who died when Correggio was still a young boy. Mantegna's ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... will enlarge no further upon things that are themselves so obvious. You may say that it is not your fault. The answer is ready enough at hand, and it amounts to this—that if you had been born of healthy and well-to-do parents, and been well taken care of when you were a child, you would never have offended against the laws of your country, nor found yourself in your present disgraceful position. If you tell me that you had no hand in your parentage and education, and ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Cicely, to talk so disrespectful of your pa's best friend. He's well-to-do an' has got the finest place in the county. Think how nice we'd be fixed, child. We'd never have to work no more," and the widow sighed as the girl looked into her face for the congratulations she ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... And the sad fact is, that the majority of unchristian young people and many older ones do not decline. To prove this we have but to look at the human wrecks along the shore. Two young men lived near our home. Their parents were well-to-do. The family grew tired of the farm and moved to town. The boys fell in with bad company. They did not decline the social glass. Soon they furnished other young men with drink from their own pocket. This was fifteen years ago. To-day one of them is ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... what I am going to say I shall be given credit for endeavoring to speak conscientiously and to the best of my knowledge and judgment from the point of view of the welfare of the entire country and not of the welfare merely of the well-to-do. ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... money. I wasn't going to tell him how I got it, and he thought I'd been crying off with no reason. See? Now he thinks he can force me to the higher rent. 'Tis a bigger cottage, but 'tis so far off, even well-to-do folk fight shy of the extra walk, and so it's stood empty a year and more. Now he's thinking he'll ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... and growing, and therewith the jeering grew; And now that the time was come for an ugly brawl I knew, When I saw how midst of the workmen some well-dressed men there came, Of the scum of the well-to-do, brutes void of pity or shame; The thief is a saint beside them. These raised a jeering noise, And our speaker quailed before it, and the hubbub drowned his voice. Then Richard put him aside and rose at once in his place, And over the rags and the squalor beamed out his beautiful ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... rusticity, or even coarseness, of what are called the lower classes, is infinitely preferable to the assumption of gentility of those a little above them in the social scale. The artisan, or day-laborer, or common workman, is apt to be a gentleman, compared with a certain well-to-do small shopkeeper.... ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... mutilations on the unfortunate merchants whom they regarded as their natural prey. Even the greatest of them, like Francis von Sickingen, were not ashamed to "let their horses bite off travellers' purses" now and then. But it was not only the nobles who became gentlemen of the road. A well-to-do merchant of Berlin, named John Kohlhase, was robbed of a couple of horses by a Saxon squire, and, failing to get redress in the corrupt courts, threw down the gauntlet to the whole of Electoral Saxony in a proclamation that he would ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... letters, suggesting various means of employing her time. His admiration of her was such that he even asked her to select for him a wife of her own type. He explained to her that his affection was not diminished an atom by distance or by silence, for there are torrents which make a terrible to-do and yet their beds are dry in a few days, and there are waters which flow quietly, but ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... scores of his masterpieces were returned unopened from theatres—in some cases they were not returned, and he had infinite difficulty to secure them; moreover, he was ill all his life: yet he never lost faith in mankind, and when he became, comparatively, a well-to-do man he went on doing generous deeds as though nothing had happened. With humbugs and pretenders he would have no dealings; but no genuine young artist ever asked his help in vain. He spared even that rancorous decadent Nietzsche; he owned his obligations to that ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... forgetting that Providence disposes as it thinks fit. There was a gentleman by birth, of the name of Seton, who lived at Greenock; he was very poor, and although he had high friends and relations well to-do, he was too proud to ask for assistance. His wife was equally proud; and at last one day he died, leaving her with hardly a penny, and two fine boys of the names of Archibald and Andrew. Well, the widow struggled on, how she lived no one knew, but she fed the boys and herself, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... man. Women occupy a more fortunate biologic, and in many countries, a more fortunate economic position, in the increasingly intensified struggle for existence. And the preferred class, the biologically and economically favored class, or sex, has rarely been efficient-to-do, has never been revolutionary to attack a social system that ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... to give in. He is the poor relation, and a poor relation in royal circles doesn't amount to more than one among well-to-do merchants and farmers. He has no rights that others need respect and if he shows backbone he is given to understand that the head of the family has other uses for the palace or ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... always be ready for him, day or night. The location was advantageous. Nearly all the Americans visiting Sonora and many resident Americans stopped at the Plaza. Waring frequently picked up valuable bits of news as he lounged in the lobby. Quietly garbed when in town, he passed for a well-to-do rancher or mining man. His manner invited no confidences. He was left much to himself. Men who knew him deemed him unaccountable in that he never drank with them and seldom spoke unless spoken to. The employees of the hotel had grown accustomed to his comings and goings, though they seldom knew ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... who are likely to beget only a sickly offspring, may follow this course, and so may thieves, rascals, vagabonds, insane and drunken persons, and all those who are likely to bring into the world beings that ought not to be here. But why so many well-to-do folks should pursue a policy adapted only to paupers and criminals, is not easy to explain. Why marry at all if not to found a family that shall live to bless and make glad the earth after father and mother are gone? It is not wise ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... born near Strensham, Worcestershire, in 1612, the fifth child and second son of a farmer of that parish, whose homestead was known to within the present century as "Butler's tenement." The elder Butler was not well-to-do, but had enough to educate his son at the Worcester Grammar School, and to send him to a university. Whether or what time he was at Oxford or Cambridge remains doubtful. A Samuel Butler went up from Westminster to Christ Church, Oxford, 1623, too soon for the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... "What a to-do! Lord have mercy on us!" muttered the driver in a conscience-stricken voice, setting right something in the harness at the horses' heads. "It's all that devil of a tracehorse. Cursed filly; it is only a week since she has run in harness. She goes all right, but as soon as we go down hill there ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... craft it is the fashionable thing amongst well-to-do Chinamen to hold their jamborees. They hire a particular junk for a certain date, and at the appointed hour the party assembles there, being received by two or three unprepossessing servants. Dinner, or whatever form ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... a tone as haughty and dictatorial as any well-to-do peasant woman. "Sit down by the fire and warm yourself, Abbot Hans," said she; "and if you have food with you, eat, for the food which we in the forest prepare you wouldn't care to taste. And if you are tired after the long journey, you can lie down on one of these beds to ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... punishment; those who are very bad will be unable to do any more mischief, while those who have any good in them have chances given them to lead a new life.' Why some of them are getting to be well-to-do bodies, Nic, and married and have children, who will grow up better people in a new land. Don't you fret about the convicts, boy; but take them as you find them. When you have to do with the bad ones, keep them at a distance; and when you have to do with the good and repentant, just shut ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... and 2 sets of privates, and was exhibited throughout Italy for gain's sake." The "Biddenden Maids" were born in Biddenden, Kent, in 1100. Their names were Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst, and their parents were fairly well-to-do people. They were supposed to have been united at the hips and the shoulders, and lived until 1134. At the death of one it was proposed to separate them, but the remaining sister refused, saying, "As we came together, we will also go together," and, after about six ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... supposed to be a keepsake, but as Ruth never opened the book and never willingly allowed her thoughts to dwell upon the scenes of which it reminded her, she had forgotten the existence of Mrs Starvem almost as completely as that well-to-do and ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... Mrs. Sykes, or bought his tea at a different shop. On the other hand, the revolutionary literature of the time, and more particularly Byron, increasingly interested him. The very wildness and remoteness of Byron's romance was just what suited him. It is all very well for the happy and well-to-do to talk scornfully of poetic sentimentality. Those to whom a natural outlet for their affection is denied know better. They instinctively turn to books which are the farthest removed from commonplace and are in a sense unreal. Not to the prosperous man, a dweller in beautiful scenery, well ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... usual people," said Barnard. "A few well-to-do Methodists have provided some of it, but the really big money has to come from the churches—collections and subscriptions and all that. This sort of work is being done in forty-odd other schools, where the Wesley ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... Atherly, Esq., of Rough and Ready, California. Mr. Atherly will be remembered by some of our readers as the hero of the romantic elopement of Miss Sallie Magregor, daughter of Colonel 'Bob' Magregor, which created such a stir in well-to-do circles some thirty years ago. It was known vaguely that the young couple had 'gone West,'—a then unknown region,—but it seems that after severe trials and tribulations on the frontier with savages, they emigrated early to Oregon, and then, on the outbreak of the gold ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... "You well-to-do people, for instance, who are here to-night will go to 'Divine Service' next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely little Sunday feathers in their hats; and you'll think, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... breadth of the land. It numbered, I suppose, some adherents even in the aristocratic and governing classes,—thousands, no doubt, among the working and laboring millions; but its central strength was in that backbone of English philanthropic effort, the more plebeian section of the well-to-do middle class,—that section which gravitates towards Dissent, in religion, towards Radicalism in politics, towards Bible Societies, Temperance Movements, "Bands of Hope," and Exeter Hall. If this section of the British community had not remained true to anti-slavery ideas, the country would indeed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... he became the owner of two copyhold estates, one of them consisting of a house with a garden and a croft attached to it, the other of a house and garden. As these were estates of inheritance, the tenure was nearly equal to freehold; so that he must have been pretty well-to-do in the world at the time. For several years after, his circumstances continued to improve. Before 1558, he became the owner, by marriage, of a farm at Wilmecote, consisting of fifty-six acres, besides two houses and two gardens; moreover, he held, in right of his wife, a considerable share in ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Her life with Mr. Purnell had not brought her many luxuries, and perhaps she over-valued their importance. She thought Miss Rexhill a most imposing young woman and she believed in the impeccability of the well-to-do. Her heart was still warmed by the memory of the courtesy with which she had been treated by the Senator's daughter, and was not without the gratification of feeling that it had been a tribute to her own worth. She had scolded Dorothy afterward for her frank speech to ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... protest. To measure the stranger's probable influence with the Turks, he looked first at the Prince, and was not, it must be said, rewarded with a return on which to found hope or encouragement. The small, stoop-shouldered old man, with a great white beard, appeared respectable and well-to-do in his black velvet cap and pelisse; his eyes were very bright, and his cheeks hectic with resentment at the annoyance he was undergoing; but that he could help out of the difficulty ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Wife. A well-to-do and chivalrous rancher of abundant means and large holdings in a Western State wishes to correspond with a respectable young woman who will be willing to appreciate a good home ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... prosperous and well-to-do than those at which the previous nights had been passed. The head of the village appeared to be a personage of some importance; and although clinging in secret to his Christian faith, he and his belongings had so far adopted the usages of the Mussulmen ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... brim its cup with bliss and overbrim; Oh, to be worn and fade beside his cheek!'— 'In love and happy, Delphis; and the boy?'— 'Loves and is happy'— You hale from?'— 'AEtna; We have been out two days and crossed this ridge, West of Mount Mycon's head. I serve his father, A farmer well-to-do and full of sense, Who owns a grass-farm cleared among the pines North-west the cone, where even at noon in summer, The slope it falls on lengthens a tree's shade. To play the lyre, read and write and dance I teach this lad; in all their country ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... were still to be counted a certain number of well-to-do citizens, professors, government employes, priests and magistrates, all simple honest souls who had stayed because they were unable to resign themselves to an indefinite residence away from Soissons, and there was no sacrifice to which they were ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... crowned in the Olympic games; and upon this account a Lacedaemonian is said to have refused a considerable present, which was offered to him upon condition that he would not come into the lists; and when he had with much to-do thrown his antagonist, some of the spectators saying to him, "And now, Sir Lacedaemonian, what are you the better for your victory?" he answered smiling, "I shall fight next the king." After they had routed an enemy, they pursued him till they were well assured ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... drowning myself yet: and what I wrote to you was a sort of safety escape for my poor flame . . . It is only idle and well-to-do people who kill themselves; it is ennui that is hopeless: great pain of mind and body 'still, still, on hope relies': the very old, the very wretched, the most incurably diseased never put themselves to rest. It really gives me pain to hear you or ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... taxation upon the property, real and personal, of the citizens and residents, and the other half is borne by the General Government. The city is expanding at a remarkable rate, and this can only be accounted for by the coming here from other parts of the country of well-to-do people who, having finished their business careers elsewhere, build and make this their permanent place ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... no use for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education. This may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know, because we have no history of him of an informing sort. There were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to the dead languages. "All the valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a single shelf"—imagine it! The few existing books were in the ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... strength of character which could not be other than sustaining to the man fortunate enough to possess you for a helpmeet. In short, my dear Miss Marvin, you would gratify me in the highest degree by consenting to be Mrs. R. I am, as you are probably aware, well-to-do. The circumstances of my being a widower will not, I hope, weigh seriously against this proposal in the mind of one who, while retaining the personal attractions above mentioned, may be reasonably ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... A well-to-do man always gets a higher price than a poor one Avoid all useless anxiety Dried merry-thought bone of a fowl Enjoy the present day Facts are differently reflected in different minds Feeling themselves oppressed by the benevolence ...
— Quotations From Georg Ebers • David Widger
... have devoted the moments to complaining of the heat, in order to increase their tip. We, being Europeans, spent the time worrying whether the automobile would be waiting for us at the right place. Well-to-do Chinese would have started a discussion as to whether the universe moves in cycles or progresses by a rectilinear motion; or they might have set to work to consider whether the truly virtuous man shows complete self-abnegation, or may, on occasion, consider ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... really keen to learn and to work. But I can't. I'm in honour bound to appear to-night. You see, it's our second century—the first one we could not observe, because it came at the end of January just in the general mourning—so there's an awful to-do and tomasha to-night, souvenir programmes and I don't know what all, also a rather extra special audience. It would be little too bad if I played them false. But," she added, rising, "when it's over I shall come back—yes, I will, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She's the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd; the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father—a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... is to say, about the year 1860—the steam service to South Africa was very different from what it is to-day. The steamers were small, slow, and infrequent; Natal was just then attracting a big influx of well-to-do people from England; passenger rates were high—as also, for that matter, was the freight on such special merchandise as was at that time being carried out to the colony—and those who took credit to themselves for their foresight believed that there ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... yard, the sheep dogs following. The doctor would have helped her, but she took the lamp from his hand, replaced it in its socket and set about unharnessing without further to-do, coaxing Dapple the while to ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... splendour of the metropolis of the empire. He who goes to the Palatine may to-day refigure for himself, from the so-called House of Livia, the house of a rich Roman family of the time of Augustus, and convince himself that a well-to-do middle-class family would hardly ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... sudden leap of inspiration. It sounded too apropos to be life, but there was a little deaf-anddumb girl, a far-away relative of the Hempsteads, who lived with her aunt Felicia in Anderson. She was a great trial to her aunt Felicia, who was a widow and well-to-do, and liked the elegancies and normalities of life. This unfortunate little Effie Hempstead could not be placed in a charitable institution on account of the name she bore. Aunt Felicia considered it her worldly duty to care for her, ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... I regard it closely, a curious reflection arises. I suppose that, fifteen hundred years ago, the child of any well-to-do Roman citizen was taught just these same things; reading and writing in his own, and, perhaps, the Greek tongue; the elements of mathematics; and the religion, morality, history, and geography current in his time. Furthermore, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... idea somehow," said Mrs. Carling, "that his father was very well-to-do. The young man gives one the impression of a person who has always ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... on the verandah of a well-to-do Hindu house one day, and talked to the bright-looking women in their jewels and silks. And all the time, though little I knew it, a widow was tied up in a sack in one of the inner rooms. This ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... Normans despised the tongue of the conquered Saxons, but, as time progressed, the two races intermarried, and the children could hardly escape learning some Saxon words from their mothers or nurses. On the other hand, many well-to-do Saxons, like parents in later times, probably had their children taught French because it was ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... rains here, all the year round, more or less," says a friendly Englishman in the hotel. "If you like I'll take you to see a well-to-do Chinaman who is a friend of mine. The Chinamen are all rich here, lots of them keep motors." We gladly accept and go off under borrowed umbrellas to the outskirts of the town. The house stands by itself in a clump of trees and is very imposing with its great white marble pillars; as we get near ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... baptised on the 6th of June 1599, in the church of S. Peter at Seville. He was the son of well-to-do parents; his father, a native of Seville, was named Juan Rodriguez de Silva, his mother Geronima Velasquez. At thirteen years old he had displayed so strong an inclination towards painting that he was put to study under Francisco de Herrera, then the most considerable painter in Spain (his ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... Mate, Master, in the ancient and honourable craft of the sea. As to my friend Hermann, he might have been a consummate master of the honourable craft, but he was called officially Schiff-fuhrer, and had the simple, heavy appearance of a well-to-do farmer, combined with the good-natured shrewdness of a small shopkeeper. With his shaven chin, round limbs, and heavy eyelids he did not look like a toiler, and even less like an adventurer of the sea. Still, he toiled upon the seas, in his own way, much as a shopkeeper works behind his counter. ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... which her boy was about to enter. Dr. Johnston's was the largest and most renowned school in the city. It was also in a certain sense the most aristocratic. Its master charged high rates, which only well-to-do people could afford, and as a consequence the sons of the wealthiest citizens attended his school. Because of this, it was what would be called select; and just in that very fact lay one of the dangers Mrs. Lloyd most dreaded. Rich men's sons may be select from a social ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... replied Louisa, giggling—a little licence was surely permissible to the girl on Christmas night—'Oh, ma'am, there's such a to-do! Tinsley has just brought some boxing-gloves, and master and Mr Bittenger have got their coats off in the dining-room. And they've had the table pushed up by the door, and you never saw such a set-out in all ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Gin, in whose family the office had been handed down from father to son for seven generations. What they had taken in by way of beggars' pence they had lent out on interest, and so the family had gradually become well-to-do, and ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... lights in the trees, the brightness of the dresses, the laces and gold crosses, and the crowd of people all hopping at the same time. She was standing modestly at a distance, when presently a young man of well-to-do appearance, who had been leaning on the pole of a wagon and smoking his pipe, approached her, and asked her for a dance. He treated her to cider and cake, bought her a silk shawl, and then, thinking she had guessed his purpose, offered ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... had not been rewarded by a single coin. My fiddle was old and warped, and injured by the rain; its whining was even more repugnant to my own sensitive ear, than to that of the casual passer-by. I was in despair. How I hated all the few well-dressed, well-to-do people who were but on the Boulevards, on that inclement night. I wandered up and down hoping against hope, until I was too tired to stand, and then I crawled under the shelter of a covered passage, and flung myself down on the ground, to die, as I ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... nee Feng, possessed a worthy and virtuous disposition, and had a clear perception of moral propriety and good conduct. This family, though not in actual possession of excessive affluence and honours, was, nevertheless, in their district, conceded to be a clan of well-to-do standing. As this Chen Shih-yin was of a contented and unambitious frame of mind, and entertained no hankering after any official distinction, but day after day of his life took delight in gazing at flowers, planting bamboos, sipping his ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... are nearly all level, so that the rickishas, usually pulled by Chinese, make good time. Many residents own their own rickisha and hire the man by the month; more well-to-do people, and there are many wealthy people both native and foreign in Singapore, have their own teams ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... with a little purple plush at the neck and sleeves. Her gloves were grayish, and were worn through at the right forefinger. Her boots I didn't observe. She had small round, hanging gold earrings, and a general air of being fairly well-to-do, in ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... have never heard that there was anybody present to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-do about—" ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... are large with obtuse angles, square orillons, and double flanks originally casemated, and most of them crowned with cavaliers." On the way to Durham, "much amused by the discussions of two passengers, one a smooth-spoken, semi-clerical looking person; the other a brusque well-to-do attorney with a Northumbrian burr. Subject, among others, Protection. The Attorney all for 'cheap bread'— 'You wouldn't rob the poor man of his loaf,' and so forth. 'You must go with the stgheam, sir, you must go with the stgheam.' 'I never did, Mr Thompson, and ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... we are expected, however, to see in this the high-class kind of Girton College for young gentlewomen that was attached to the Temple at Jerusalem, under the direction of the Chief Priest's wife, or some one of his near female relatives. Here all well-to-do Jewish young women completed their education, and here accordingly we find the Virgin, whose parents desired she should shine in every accomplishment, and enjoy all the ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... inhabitants and well-to-do fellow-natives of the town were against Phillotson to a man. But, somewhat to his surprise, some dozen or more champions rose up in his defence ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Abraham Lincoln, a member of a respectable and well- to-do family in Rockingham County, Virginia, started westward to establish himself in the newly-explored country of Kentucky. He entered several large tracts of fertile land, and returning to Virginia disposed of his property there, and with his wife and five ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the Memoir of J.H. Shorthouse, and it has been a great mystery to me. It is an essentially commonplace kind of life that is there revealed. He was a well-to-do manufacturer—of vitriol, too, of all the incongruous things. He belonged to a cultivated suburban circle, that soil where the dullest literary flowers grow and flourish. He lived in a villa with small grounds; he went off to his business in the morning, and ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... all this to-do?" said she, in considerable dismay. Had she been wasting daylight and precious material for gossip, by lying in ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... excess of boys is greatest in the country districts, less in the villages, still less in the cities, and least in Berlin.[6] In times of war, famine, and migration more boys are born, and more are born also in poor than in well-to-do families. European statistics show that when food-stuffs are high or scarce the number of marriages diminishes, and in consequence a diminished number of births follows, and a heightened percentage of boys; with the recurrence of prosperity and an increased number of marriages ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... imagination is as much matter-of-fact as the understanding. If we were to trust the impression made on us by some of the cleverest and most characteristic of their periodical literature, we should think England hopelessly stranded on the good-humored cynicism of well-to-do middle-age, and should fancy it an enchanted nation, doomed to sit forever with its feet under the mahogany in that after-dinner mood which follows conscientious repletion, and which it is ill-manners to disturb with any topics more exciting than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... The greater part of that population was excluded {91} from voting. For to say nothing of the fact that about 120,000 inhabitants were classed as paupers, it so happened that the capitation tax had been remitted for a term of years, leaving only the well-to-do shopkeeper, some part of the professional, and the capitalist class on the voters' list. Workmen of the faubourg St. Antoine signed a petition to be allowed to pay taxes so as to obtain a vote. Robespierre, a narrow, prudish, jealous, puritanical but able lawyer from Arras, with ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... I was living in the township of Vaughan, and like other boys of the same class and age, devoting my winters to school, and my summers to the healthful exercise of the farm. My father was a good farmer, pretty well-to-do, and I, being the eldest son, was second in command. He had purchased two or three uncleared lots in the same township, one of which was designed for me. I was fond of books, and possessed some good ones, besides I had made ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... crossly, almost angrily. Cosmo seemed to himself to understand her entirely. Had she looked well-to-do, he would have taken the loaf, promising to send the money; but he could not bring himself to trouble the thoughts of a poor woman, possibly with a large family, to whom the price of such a loaf must be of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... these aggressive efforts, the ranks of incoming Americans, negligible in the earlier years, rose to astounding proportions—from seven hundred in 1897 to fifteen thousand in 1900 and one hundred thousand in 1911. This influx had a decisive effect on the West. It was not only what these well-to-do, progressive settlers achieved themselves that counted, but the effect of their example upon others. Every American who preferred Canada to his own land persuaded an Englishman or a Scotsman that the star of empire ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... and who have seen whole waggon-loads of "black ivory," as they were called, sold for about 15 pounds a-piece. I have at this moment a tenant, Carolus by name, on some land I own in Natal, now a well-to-do man, who was for many years—about twenty, if I remember right—a Boer slave. During those years, he told me, he worked from morning till night, and the only reward he received was two calves. He finally ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... ball, of course," said Lord Lackington, still smiling. "Such a to-do! All the elderly sticks practising minuets ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... order of things, is the bitterest drop in the cup of the Alsatians. Only the poorest, and those who are too much hampered by circumstances to evade it, resign themselves to the enrolment of their sons in the German army. For this reason well-to-do parents, and even many in the humbler ranks of life, are quitting the country in much larger numbers than is taken account of, whilst all who can possibly afford it send their young sons across ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... years after his death; and, at some period which is not defined in our authorities, he was beatified by due ecclesiastical process. His baptismal name was Guido, Giovanni being only his name in religion. He was born at Vicchio, in the Tuscan province of Mugello, of unknown but seemingly well-to-do parentage, in 1387 (not 1390 as sometimes stated); in 1407 he became a novice in the convent of S. Domenico at Fiesole, and in 1408 he took the vows and entered the Dominican order. Whether he had previously ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... and Tennessee and represented the second generation of white people in those States, now impelled to move on to a new frontier by the desire for larger and cheaper farms. Included in this Southern element were many representatives of the well-to-do classes, who were drawn to the new territories by the opportunity for speculation in land and for political preferment, and by the opening which the fast-growing communities afforded for lawyers, doctors, and members of other professions. ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... is sufficient to give him a considerable part of his active time for carrying out his intellectual aspirations. We have great numbers of people whom we have reason to believe are as able on the average, have as large a proportion of talent as the well-to-do, whose poverty is so crushing and whose days of toil are so long and so consuming of energy that the element of leisure is lacking. It is only an occasional individual of this class of people who is able to secure the wealth which means a measure of leisure by which he is able ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... of the Furrers came old Gleichen and his two sons, Tim and Harry. Gleichen was a well-to-do "mixed" farmer—a widower who was looking out for a partner as staid and robust as himself. His two sons were less of the prairie than their father, by reason of an education at St. John's University in Winnipeg. Harry was an aspirant to ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... Ireland for its background, but it is by all odds the most readable, possibly because it is not in any sense a political novel. It is in characters rather than events that the author interests himself. A highly refined, well-to-do and extremely picturesque Irish revolutionary, whom the author not very happily christens Count Kettle, has a daughter who secretly abhors romance and the high-falutin sentimentality that he and his circle mistake for patriotism. To her father's disgust she marries ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... distant about two or three hundred yards from the clump of trees where we lay. We shouted as loud as we could, and they, hearing the shouting, came presently towards us. They were truly surprised and concerned to find Ahmed and myself, whom they had known formerly as respectable and well-to-do merchants, lying bound, dirty, and ragged upon the ground. They freed us, and we told them of the villainy of the African merchant, and related to them all that had befallen us, from the time he sold us the seeds, until the assault he had made upon us and the robbery he had committed that afternoon. ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... slow; but it improved from year to year, and now, in the year 1899, it has become one of the most important, successful and profitable industries in the state, and the farmers of southern Minnesota constitute the most independent and well-to-do class of all our citizens. It was not very long ago when a mortgage was an essential feature of a Minnesota farm, but they have nearly all been paid off, and the farmer of southern Minnesota is found in the ranks of the stockholders ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... in. We taunted them to come on. But at hand-to-hand courtesies we had shown we could hold our own, and so they were calling for fire-tubes with which they could strike us down in safety from a distance. Then up came Phorenice. 'What is this to-do?' says she. 'We seek to kill Lord Tatho, who led against you,' say they. 'So that is Tatho?' says she. 'A fine figure of a man indeed, and a pretty fighter seemingly, after the old manner. Doubtless he is one who ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... morning at sunrise they carefully collected the ashes, and threw them into the running water of the Roeten brook. The man who had been the first to reach the pyre and to kindle it was rewarded on Easter Sunday by the women, who gave him coloured eggs at the church door. Well-to-do women gave him two; poorer women gave him only one. The object of the whole ceremony was to keep off the hail. About a century ago the Judas fire, as it was called, was put down by the police.[362] At Giggenhausen and Aufkirchen, two other ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... early one October. She was bound for Genoa; and as this was a long trip, a little group of men, among whom were several who owned shares in her, waved their farewells from the end of the pier. A number of small tradesmen and a few well-to-do fishermen had formed a company to buy her, so she was regarded as quite an institution of the port. A smart captain had managed her cleverly, and she paid, during five years, an average dividend of nearly fifty per cent., after the modest claims of the "managing" owner had been ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... Adkins, who had long been quite a character about Chester. He was said to be quite well-to-do, though those who called him a millionaire were doubtless "drawing the long bow," as people always do whenever the wealth of ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... continued, after a pause, "that I come from the Western Reserve. My father was a middlin' well-to-do farmer,—not rich, nor yit exactly poor. He's dead now. He was always a savin' man,—looked after money a leetle too sharp, I've often thought sence: howsever, 't isn't my place to judge him. Well, I was brought up on the farm, to hard work, like the other boys. Rachel Emmons,—she's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... but said calmly, "You are a well-to-do farmer, Mr. Cheshire. You have friends of property; my ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... is for the well-to-do. We hope that they will distribute our Broadsheets, which are obtainable at the station book-stalls of Messrs. W. H. Smith & Sons. The little work No. 52 is also a suitable ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 1 • Various
... tempt their parents to their large share of the sacrifice which young Scotch lads and even American lads make to get through advanced studies. The higher education is still a sort of preserve of the well-to-do, and when one thinks of how greatly this is valued it seems a pity that it is not open to the talents, to the industry, to the enthusiasm of all the young of both sexes. But one exception I must make to the aloofness of people with degrees and professions ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... gentleman has early and important information on all theatrical topics. 'Well,' says he, abruptly, when you meet him in the street, 'here's a pretty to-do. Flimkins has thrown up his part in the melodrama at the Surrey.'—'And what's to be done?' you inquire with as much gravity as you can counterfeit. 'Ah, that's the point,' replies the theatrical young gentleman, looking very serious; ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... pretty faces too; and though afterwards they enjoy many a good run, there are but few falls and fewer broken heads. But it is over the races that Pau gets really excited. Hunting only attracts the well-to-do, but all who can hire or borrow even a shandry make a point of not missing the "races." And these meetings are not few and far between, but about once a fortnight, for there is no "Jockey Club" at Pau, and consequently it pleases ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... the carpenter that he was to stand on the Sabbath behind the poor-box, in order to see whether the well-washed hands of believing Jews took the bread away from their brothers, or, rather, did not bestow it liberally upon them. And as Jesus stood in the Temple, he observed the well-to-do Nazarenes dip their hands into the basin, with pious air throw large pieces of money into the poor-box, and then look round to see if their good example was observed. When it grew dark, a poor woman came and with her lean fingers put ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... through the crowd, leading Amelius between them. "Something wrong, sir, in the back kitchen," said one of the policemen answering the sergeant while he opened the street door. A few yards down the passage there was a second door, with a man on the watch by it. "There's a nice to-do downstairs," the man announced, recognizing the sergeant, and unlocking the door with a key which he took from his pocket. "The landlord at the Dairy knows his lodgers, sir," Morcross whispered to Amelius; "the place is kept like a prison." As they passed through the second ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... lady," said the other simply. "I did not accept her renunciation, though I acknowledge I forbade it with a very poignant envy. I could not be the cause of her giving up for my sake her state of ease and luxury—for my relatives are more than well-to-do, and they made it plain she must choose between them and me, with the design, I think, of making it more difficult to choose me. And, also, it seemed to me, as it did to her, that she owed them nearly everything, but she declared I had lived alone so long that she owed me everything, also. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... could almost distinguish. He was going to the woman he loved, but he was leaving his youth behind, and those whom he had known as children, as girls, as women; he remembered all the gossip, all the quarrels, all the to-do about nothing; and now, looking on the beautiful garden where he had played and passioned in all varying moments of grief and glee, he re-lived the past; and leaning out of the carriage window he gazed fondly, and cried out: ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... "He's just a well-to-do tradesman, though he had mighty fine airs when he used to come to Dunster; but I never liked the looks of him. He broke his poor wife's heart, and never believed it till she lay dead, and then he was sorry, and ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... at a restaurant with a College friend of mine, Jack Vincent, whose tastes were much the same as my own, only more strenuous; his father and mother lived in London, and when I went there I generally stayed with them. They were well-to-do, good-natured people; but, beyond occasionally reminding Jack that he ought to be thinking about a profession, they left him very much to his own devices, and he had begun to write a novel, and a play, and two or ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... boy baby. Troubles had begun to gather around him; he was very poor, tormented with neuralgia, unable to find regular occupation, and estranged by a quarrel from his friend and brother-in-law, Robert Southey. Thomas Poole, a well-to-do tanner at Nether Stowey, a man of good education and noble character, a great lover of poetry and liberty, had befriended Coleridge and won his deep regard and affection. Nothing would do but that Poole should find a cottage near ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... double chin, and a certain prim sumptuousness of dress imparted an air of old-world distinction. Indeed, as he dipped an amethystine nose into his wine-glass, and gazed thoughtfully at the glowing end of his cigar, he looked the very type of the well-to-do ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... young men"—as Richard Henry Lee called them—who had swayed the Federal Convention. But there were strong forces at work in the opposite direction. In Boston and all the large coast towns, even those of the Maine district, the dominant feeling was Federalist. All well-to-do people had been alarmed by the Shays insurrection, and merchants, shipwrights, and artisans of every sort were convinced that there was no prosperity in store for them until the federal government should have control over commerce, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... family still took a house in the Close for the winter months, and there a very sober-minded and conventional courtship of Lucy took place by Sir Edmund Nutley, a worthy and well-to-do gentleman settled on the borders of Parkhurst Forest, in the ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by their fireside of an evening have the satisfaction of relating their artistic misery with the magniloquence of a traveller narrating a tiger hunt. Others persist and put their self-esteem in it, but when once they have exhausted those resources of credit which a young fellow with well-to-do relatives can always find, they are more wretched than the real Bohemians, who, never having had any other resources, have at least those of intelligence. We knew one of these amateur Bohemians who, after having remained ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... well blest in being well born. His parents were middle-class people, fairly well-to-do. They proved themselves certainly more than middle-class in intellect, when they adopted the plan of being the companions and comrades of their children. Johannes grew up with no slavish fear of "old folks." He had worked with his father, studied with him; learned ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... picturesque, old German virtuoso is the reverent possessor of a genuine "Cremona." He consents to take for his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for technique, but not the soul of an artist. The youth has led the happy, careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, the passion and the tragedies of life and all its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his life—a beautiful bit of human driftwood that his aunt had taken ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... of slow starvation, when a fellow looks for work, The chances are a cop will grab his collar with a jerk; He will run him in for vagrancy, he is branded as a tramp, And all the well-to-do will shout: "It serves him right, the scamp!" So we let the ruling class maintain the dignity of law, When the court decides against us we are filled with wholesome awe, But we cannot stand the outrage without ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... rest of the party coming through the little path that led to Grandma's door. He saw them all plainly through the curtains and plants that screened him. Jocelyn and David came last. David made a great to-do about stamping the snow off his feet, taking pains to stand between Jocelyn and the door. Then, just as Jocelyn was about to slip past him, the minister saw David reach out and sweep the girl into his arms. And Cynthia's son could not help but see the glory in the boy's eyes ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... sale, and among those who saw it was the Tsar himself. "What dost thou ask for it?" said the Tsar.—"I ask five thousand roubles." Then the Tsar counted down the money and took the horse away. When he got to his court, he made a great to-do about his beautiful horse, and cried to his daughter, "Come and see, dear little heart, what a fine horse I have bought." Then she came forth to look at it; but the moment she saw it, she cried, "That horse will be my ruin. Thou must kill it on the spot."—"Nay, ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... retorted Mrs. Grime. "By their works ye shall know them. You needn't tell me about people being so dreadful sorry at the loss of friends when they can make such a to-do about getting black to wear. These bombazine dresses and long black veils are truly enough called mourning—they are an excellent counterfeit, and deceive one half of the world. Ah, me! If all the money that was spent buying in mourning was given ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... books made a fair show beside the bright tins and the scanty crockery, were of pine; and the horned heads of deer and wapiti made pegs for coats and caps, and rests for guns and rifles. It was a place of comfort; it had an air of well-to-do thrift, even as the girl's dress, though plain, was made of good, sound stuff, gray, with a touch of dark red to match the auburn of ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... accepting office under the Crown) was vituperated, and sundry provincial persons wrote confidentially to the Queen. Arthur Constant's backsliding cheered many by convincing them that others were as bad as themselves; and well-to-do tradesmen saw in Mortlake's wickedness the pernicious effects of Socialism. A dozen new theories were afloat. Constant had committed suicide by Esoteric Buddhism, as witness his devotion to Mme. Blavatsky, or he had been murdered ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... whom he had written, giving an account not only of his experiences in prison and of his home-coming, but also of the venture that he was making. "If I succeed, mother," he said, "you must come to Brunford to live. And I mean to succeed. In twelve months from now I am going to be a well-to-do man. I've learnt pretty much all there is to know about manufacturing, and I've a good partner. And I mean to get on. But don't think I've forgotten the real purpose for which I came to the North. I have not found out much about my father ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Sunday there was nothing to complain of. His black velveteen shooting coat, and cotton plush waistcoat, his brown corduroy knee-breeches and gaiters, sat on him well, and gave the world assurance of a well-to-do man, for few of the Englebourn labourers rose above smock-frocks and fustian trousers. He wore a blue bird's-eye handkerchief round his neck, and his shirt, though coarse in texture, was as white as the sun and the best ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... They were well-to-do people, and Rachel's dress betokened the limit of the luxury allowed by the Pragmatic—a second-hand silk dress with a pin at the throat set with only a single pearl, a bracelet on one arm, a ring without a bezel on one finger, a single-stringed necklace ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... time were built of brick and stood with gable ends to the street; each house had a garden and a stoep, where the family were accustomed to sit summer evenings, the burgher with his pipe and his "vrouw" with her knitting. Well-to-do families owned slaves, but according to Mrs. Anne Grant, an English writer of the day who spent part of her childhood in Albany, "it was slavery softened into ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... think, than anyone else in the West. But the play seemed to have touched some hidden spring. Almost before I knew it he was telling me of his college days, and of his assured future at that time as the only son of a well-to-do New England manufacturer. ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the well-to-do ones that live in all ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... close my ears that night: I lay listening, I knew not what for. A scare was on me that made me dislike the dark, and I switched on the light and slept at last. I was roused by a great to-do in the early morning, servants knocking excitedly, and my door opened, and the dear Porthos I had mourned so long tore in. They had heard his bark, but whence he ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... an old suit of clothes which he kept for such occasions—an old green coat with basket buttons, and a pair of plaid trousers of an exploded shape and pattern—and looking more like a pinched and pallid scarecrow than a well-to-do farmer. Mrs. Tadman had only carried out his commands in a modified degree, and he immediately ordered the servant to put a couple of logs on the fire, and then drew the table close up to the hearth, and sat down to his tea with some appearance of satisfaction. He had had rather ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... made a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a good one—the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... ways, and the storms of politics seem to have intruded as faintly into this suburban seclusion as the roar of London. Books, business, and religion provided a framework of decorous routine within which these kindly and beautiful souls moved with entire content. Well-to-do Camberwell perhaps contained few homes so pure and refined; but it must have held many in which the life-blood of political and social interests throbbed more vigorously, and where thought and conversation were in closer touch with the intellectual ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... pour les Kanaques; vous etes doux, vous et votre famille; vous seriez obeis dans toutes les iles.' We had been civil; not always that, my conscience told me, and never anything beyond; and all this to-do is a measure, not of our considerateness, but of the want of it in others. The rest of the evening, on to Vaekehu's and back as far as to the pier, Stanislao walked with my arm and sheltered me with his umbrella; and after the boat had put off, we could still distinguish, in the murky darkness, his ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the congregation, the well-to-do and the poor alike, poured out of the church and spread in merry groups over the grass: keel boatmen in tow shirts and party-colored worsted belts, the blacksmith, the shoemaker, the farmer of a small plot in the common fields in large cotton ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of more or less organized factory laborers with recognized political rights, and who make claims for a responsible role in the control of industry—claims which receive sympathetic attention from many among the well-to-do, since they have been brought into closer connections with the less fortunate classes through the breaking down of ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... size. It is more New-England-like in the general make-up of its social, religious, and educational characteristics than any town west of the Mississippi. The poorer people are a respectable class who have received some social and educational advantages; none but enterprising or well-to-do people would ever cross the plains to establish a new home ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... avert the misfortune. He was a gentleman by the grace of God and the flunkeyism of man. Montgomery was also a gentleman, but only by virtue of his position. So that, for instance, Priestley's personal fac-simile, appearing as a well-to-do squatter, would have been received on equal terms by Montgomery; whereas, Folkestone's disdain would have been scarcely lessened. The relative manliness of the two types of 'gentleman' is a question which each student will judge according to ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... folk struggling to build a church, or rather help build it, and holding its first bazar. There were no rich people of their faith—unless one except the Conners, who owned the saw-mill and were well-to-do—not even many poor to club their mites; more disheartening yet, the parish roll held about an equal proportion of Irish and German names. The Vicar-General and the Bishop shook their heads at the yoking of the two races; but there was no church nearer than Father Kelly's, five miles away, and Father ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... roughly made. The old machine for prizing was a primitive affair, the upright beam through which ran another at right angles, turning slightly on a pivot, heavily weighted at one end, and used as a lever for compressing the brown mass into the hogsheads. Now, most well-to-do planters own a tobacco straightener and screw-press, inventions which materially lessen the manual labor of preparing the crop for market. Each hogshead is branded with the name of the owner, and thus shipped to his commission-merchant, when ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... made the mistake of thinking that they had changed permanently and might be expected now to settle down with wives and raise families and hay and cattle and potatoes, and grow beards, perhaps, and become well-to-do ranchers. ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... that best was not very good, but who at least knew more than themselves. Carrying the thing home to England, we should scarcely say that our country places would be the better for the exodus of all the educated and refined and well-to-do families, with the peasantry and an unmarried clergyman left sole masters of ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... could not wholly approve; but her nature was pity, not justice, and she shut her eyes to much that she could not change. Her miracles, therefore, were for the most part mere evidence of her pity for those who needed it most, and these were rarely the well-to-do people of the siecle, but more commonly the helpless. Every saint performed miracles, and these are standard, not peculiar to any one intermediator; and every saint protected his own friends; but beyond these ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not every-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a good-sized family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now the broken staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses too much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In times past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... platters, an iron candlestick, and a knife or two; while the furniture was composed of two or three chairs and stools, with a frame in the wall, with shelves, for clothes and utensils. The manciple and the cook of the company seem to indicate that living among the well-to-do classes was a very generous and a very serious part of life, on which a high estimate was placed, since food in any variety, though plentiful at times, was not always to be had, and therefore precarious. "Guests at table were paired, and ate, every pair, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... old-fashioned frame building, square as a packing-box, and surrounded, as all country dwellings at the South are, by a broad, open piazza. Our summons was answered by its owner, a well-to-do, substantial, middle-aged planter, wearing the ordinary homespun of the district, but evidently of a station in life much above the common 'corn-crackers' I had seen at the country meeting-house. The Colonel was an acquaintance, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... estate. Thorbjorn's daughter was Gudrid, the fairest of women, and of peerless nobility in all her conduct. There was a man named Orm, who dwelt at Arnarstapi (eagle-rock), and he had a wife who was named Halldis. He was a well-to-do franklin, a great friend of Thorbjorn, and Gudrid lived at his house as his foster-child for a long time. There was a man named Thorgeir, who dwelt at Thorgeirsfjall (fell). He was mighty rich in cattle, ...
— Eirik the Red's Saga • Anonymous
... in the York Lunatic Asylum. This was a proceeding which called much attention to the treatment of the insane, and produced much good effect. He was very resolute and energetic. The magistracy of his {276} time had such scruples about using the severity of law to people of such station as well-to-do farmers, &c.: they would allow a great deal of resistance, and endeavor to mollify the rebels into obedience. A young farmer flatly refused to pay under an order of affiliation made upon him by Godfrey Higgins. He was duly ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... to look at it, my brother, how shall we compare the conditions of the well-to-do-man, who has been merely robbed of his watch and purse, even at the cost of a broken head, which will heal in a few days, with the awful doom of the poor multitude, who from the cradle to the grave work without joy and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... over the profits of their business; moreover in rainy and muddy countries dress has to be cared for, and by the women more than the men. The mind feels itself contracted on entering the circle of this well-to-do domestic life; such is the impression of Corinne when from liberal Italy she passes to rigid and dreary Scotland. And yet there is a certain picture, a large landscape by Rembrandt, which equals and surpasses all; a dark sky bursting with showers among flocks of screaming crows; beneath, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... dreams I could give up the house! My baby with a well-to-do husband maybe on Riverside Drive. A servant for herself, so I could pass, maybe, Mrs. Suss and Mrs. Katz by on the street. Ruby, you—you wouldn't, Ruby. After ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... collapsed thus ignominiously was not a popular agitation in the English sense of the term: like other movements of its generation it sprang, not from the people but from the well-to-do, and its strength lay among the professional and educated classes. The Frankfurt Parliament was a predominantly middle-class assembly: lawyers and professors, always an important element in German national life, were ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... cried joyously, leaping from his horse, and emptying the gold out of his pockets into her apron. "Thou madest a great to-do over thy coverlets, but I trow that forty pounds of good red money will pay for them fully, and the three cows which we lost were but thin, starved creatures, compared with these two that I have brought back, and here is a ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... and by the time I was about fifteen years old was head over heels in love. She was far above me in the social scale of the neighborhood. Her folks lived in a frame house on "the other side of the creek," and were well-to-do, for that time and locality. My people lived in a log cabin, on a little farm in the broken country that extended from the south bank of Otter creek to the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. But notwithstanding the difference in our respective ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... They are exceedingly poor, as you can see by their house. The only property Lin possesses is this plot of ground, which has come down to him from his forefathers, and which he hopes one day to dispose of to some well-to-do person as a burying-ground that may ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... it a good deal, my lady. And I liked the idea of it very much." Lizzie pricked up her ears. In spite of all his harshness, could it be that he should be the Corsair still? "I am a rambling, uneasy, ill-to-do sort of man; but still I thought about it. You are pretty, you ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... all aginst me for agraying to take the twinty-foive,' whispered the well-to-do tenant who was talking to ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... be better for the child to have playmates of her own age, he advertised in several local papers for a good home in a comfortable farmhouse for a girl of twelve, and this advertisement was answered by Mr. R., a well-to-do farmer in the above-mentioned village. His references proving satisfactory, the gentleman sent his adopted daughter to Mr. R., with a letter, in which he stipulated that the girl should have a room to herself, and stated that her guardians ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... at a bare table, by an ill-to-do dip candle, sat Mr. Glanbally and his book. The book on the table, and Mr. Glanbally's face on the book, as near as possible; and both as near as possible under the candle. Reason enough for that, ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... a man of determination, stuck to his text like a horse-leech; so, after a great to-do, and considerable argle-bargling, he got me, by dint of powerful persuasion, to give him my hand on the subject. Accordingly, at the hour appointed, I popped up the back-loan with my stick in my hand—Peter having agreed ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... bad enough luck with Gibbs, a sallow devil of a whaler who never did a fine act in his life till he went down with his vessel and all hands in the Arctic one year and left Sympathy Gibbs sitting alone in the Pillar House on Lovett's Court, pretty, plump, and rather well-to-do ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... this strange, impalpable post-mortem comment and influence referr'd to, that gives them their contrast, attraction, making the zest of their author's after fame. If he had lived steady, fat, moral, comfortable, well-to-do years, on his own grade, (let alone, what of course was out of the question, the ease and velvet and rosewood and copious royalties of Tennyson or Victor Hugo or Longfellow,) and died well-ripen'd and respectable, where could have come in that burst of passionate sobbing and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... against the grain. Do not the wheels of life often go slowly? Are you not often weary of the inexpressible monotony and fatigue? And do you not go to your work sometimes, though with a fierce feeling of 'need-to-do-it,' yet also with inward repugnance? And are there not great parts of your nature that have never woke into activity at all, and are ill at ease, because there is no field of action provided for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... unpleasantness all round. For my part, I doubt if Miss Farringdon will leave her fortune to Miss Elisabeth, and her only a cousin's child; for when all is said and done, cousins are but elastic relations, as you may say. The well-to-do ones are like sisters and brothers, and the poor ones don't seem to be ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... again overnight, and found it finished in the morning as before. So it went on for some time. What was got ready at night was always done by daybreak, and the good man soon was well-to-do. ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... the cellar and flung the door wide open. With timid curiosity Yefrem craned his neck from behind Naum and with difficulty made out the figure of Akim in the corner of the cellar. The once well-to-do innkeeper, respected all over the neighbourhood, was sitting on straw with his hands tied behind him like a criminal. Hearing a noise he raised his head.... It seemed as though he had grown fearfully thin in those last few days, ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... 34) it is said: "It would be an irreparable error ... not to admit the gratuitous grant of part of the expropriated lands to poor and even well-to-do peasants." ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... was no first edition, but that it was published with "second edition" on the title-page. My copy has the same date, 1819, but is styled the third edition, and has a postscript commenting on the to-do the book made. However all this may be, it is a very handsome book, excellently printed and containing capital portraits and vignettes, while the matter is worthy of the get-up. The descriptions of the Outer-House, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... homely weddin' 'fore the war. We didn't have much to-do at our weddin'. I asks missis if I could have Imogene and she says yes and that's all they was to our weddin'. We had three boys and three gals, and Imogene died 'bout twenty years ago and I been livin' with one child and 'nother. I gits a little pension from the gov'ment and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration |
