"Toothless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he said softly; and then, when the horse's nose was thrust in his face: "No, not me—kiss the kid." He lifted the child up in his arms, and when Redcloud touched his soft nose to Dorman's cheek and lifted his lip for a dainty, toothless nibble, Dorman was speechless with fright ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... I am not sure I have a real friend in the world, for, gild a fool or a monkey, and mark what a troop of flatterers fawn around and follow admiringly at his heels! And as for choosing a wife, why, were I toothless, one-eyed, or deaf as a post, the magic of gold would ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... discovering his error, he'd wag his tail and go back to his den—all this being evidently done to show that he was as vigilant as ever—a sort of protest, that said, "Don't believe one word about my being blind and toothless, still less flatter yourself that the place is secure. It requires all my activity and watchfulness to protect; but go back in peace, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... man poured a glass of neat gin down his shrivelled throat, and the effect upon him was extraordinary. A light glimmered in each of his dull eyes, a tinge of colour came into his wax-like cheeks, and, opening his toothless mouth, he suddenly emitted a peculiar, bell-like, and most musical cry. A hoarse roar of laughter from all the company answered it, and flushed faces craned over each other to catch a ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... suffer in all your system. But the babies were fed. Morning, noon and evening Scott would solemnly lift them out one by one from their nest of gunny-bags under the cart-tilts. There were always many who could do no more than breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths drop by drop, with due pauses when they choked. Each morning, too, the goats were fed; and since they would struggle without a leader, and since the natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... she was a cross baby. It did not take her long to forget all about heaven. She liked to pull hair, and she liked to scratch faces; and no matter how much you trotted her up and down, she just opened her toothless ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... this monstrous Nought had come to his kingdom and was opening a yawning mouth and toothless jaws to swallow its all down into the throat that it has not got—you, and me, and your young officer, with this splendid, recreant city and the sky and the earth. Wait, only wait! The glorious image of Serapis still stands radiant, but the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sheepskin garments, worn out and filthy, and their coiffures were so unwashed that they emitted a sickening odour. I ordered them not to come too near us, for although these females had no claims whatever to beauty—and, as far as I could see they possessed no other charm—one being old and toothless, the other with a skin like a lizard, they actually tried to decoy us to their tents, possibly with the object of getting us robbed by their men. My men seemed little attracted by the comical speeches and gestures with which they sought to beguile us, and I pushed ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... artists had any one species in mind. In the Tro-Cortesianus frogs are not uncommon. In 31a there are four (Pl. 7, fig. 1) with water coming from their mouths. They are characterized by their stout tailless bodies, flattened heads and toothless mouths. In 101d (Pl. 7, figs. 2, 3) there are two, the first painted blue with spots of darker blue and the second white and represented as broken in two in the middle. The signs of death above the latter clearly show that a dead ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... thing. I guess they just scraped acquaintance in the Alley after dinner, like they sometimes do. A man with eyelashes like his always speaks to any woman alone who isn't pockmarked and toothless. Two minutes after he's met a girl his voice takes on the 'cello note. I know his kind. Why, say, he even tried waving those eyelashes of his at me first time he turned in his key; and goodness knows I'm so homely that pretty soon I'll be ripe for bachelor floor thirteen. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... sir; for I am main and happy. Just before you came in now, I had really forgotten that I was a toothless old man, and thought I was lying here waiting for my mother to come in and say good-night to me before I went to sleep. Wasn't that curious, when I never saw my mother, as I ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... faith, a woman smells best [6] when she smells of nothing at all. For those old women who are in the habit of anointing themselves with unguents, vampt up creatures, old hags, and toothless, who hide the blemishes of the person with paint, when the sweat has blended itself with the unguents, forthwith they stink just like when a cook has poured together a variety of broths; what they smell of, you don't know, except ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... and fear to strike. O son, this breast Pillowed thine head full oft, while, drowsed with sleep, Thy toothless mouth ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... enlivening to meet a fellow-creature whose expression and accents say, "You are the hair that breaks the camel's back of my endurance, you are the last drop that makes my cup of woe run over"; persons whose heads drop on one side like those of toothless infants, whose voices recall the tones in which our old snuffling choir used to wail out ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... rigid and more emaciated than a thirteenth-century statue, opened wide her toothless mouth. Terror paralyzed her. The man, better prepared for the visit of the phantom, cocked his revolver under the table and took aim at the Colonel, crying "Vade retro, Satanas!" The exorcism and the pistol missed ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... Mary-Constance Ballard Richardson, in spite of the dignity of her hyphenated name, was a wee morsel. Swathed in fine linen, she showed to the unprejudiced eye no signs of great beauty. With a wrinkly-red skin, a funny round nose, a toothless mouth—she was like every other normal baby of her age, but to her family and friends she was a rare ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... I call sentient beings out of the blessed gulf of nothingness, that they may pay a duty to my weakness by and by, and curse me in their hearts? That would be somewhat too high a price to pay for broth when I am toothless, and the coddling comforts of one who has lived ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... therefore, sir, I left it to prodigals and coxcombs, that could afford to pay for it; and in its stead, sir, mark! I looked out for an ancient, weel-jointured, superannuated dowager:—a consumptive, toothless, ptisicky, wealthy widow,—or a shrivelled, cadaverous piece of deformity in the shape of an izzard, or a appersi-and,—or, in short, ainy thing, ainy thing that had the siller, the siller,—for that, sir, was the north star of my affections. Do ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... now recalls another which Mrs. Keeley, the actress, tells of a tradesman's little boy who was often taken to stay with his grandmother and grandfather—the latter a very feeble old man, bald and toothless. This little fellow was told that his father and mother had "bought" a nice new baby brother for him. The little man was much interested by the news, and was taken to see the new arrival. He looked at it with astonishment for a few seconds, then ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... Meriem came in contact was, almost without exception, either indifferent to her or cruel. There was, for example, the old black hag who looked after her, Mabunu—toothless, filthy and ill tempered. She lost no opportunity to cuff the little girl, or even inflict minor tortures upon her, such as pinching, or, as she had twice done, searing the tender flesh with hot coals. And there was The Sheik, ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... screamed, a hand was clapped over her mouth, breaking her false teeth, and all her stifled shrieks, queries and expostulations were literally cuffed into a whimper. Five minutes later, toothless, half-dressed and trembling, she thrust a few things into a dressing-case, struggled into a fur coat, and passed with sagging knees downstairs, clinging to the arm of a bully whom she had ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the calendar of the world in rags; it was hideously old, but its years inspired not respect. Old king, old ministers, old generals—if indeed there were generals,—old courtiers, old mistresses, old poets, old musicians, old opera dancers, broken down with ennui, pleasure, and idleness—toothless, faded, rouged, and wrinkled—were descending slowly to the tomb. Louis XV. formed one of the funeral procession; he was taken to St. Denis between two lines of cabarets filled with drunken revellers, madly rejoicing at being rid of this plague, which another plague had carried ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... frame, Yet just as busily swung she on: The garland beneath her had fallen to dust; The wheels above her were eaten with rust; The hands, that over the dial swept, Grew crook'd and tarnished, but on they kept; And still there came that silver tone From the shrivelled lips of the toothless crone, (Let me never forget, to my dying day, The tone or the burden of that lay)— "PASSING AWAY! ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... before his igloo. Two signs of spring pleased him. Some tiny icicles had formed on the cliff above him, telling of the first thaw. An aged Chukche, toothless, and blind, had unwrapped his long-stemmed pipe to smoke in ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... and apothecaries, sun-shunning night-birds and corner-creepers, dull-pated and base mechanics, stage-players, jugglers, peddlers, prittle-prattling barbers, filthy graziers, curious bath-keepers, common shifters and cogging cavaliers, bragging soldiers, lazy clowns, one-eyed or lamed fencers, toothless and tattling old wives, chattering char-women and nurse-keepers, long-tongued midwives, 'scape-Tyburns, dog-leeches, and such-like baggage. In the next rank, to second this goodly troupe, follow poisoners, enchanters, wizards, fortune-tellers, magicians, witches and hags. Now, if you take ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... you, Madame?" she cried, smiling a broad toothless smile. "I thought it was you, an' Minnie she says, I believe ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... white-sweating brow; bowed old men stood in front of their doorways, leaning with one hand on short, trembling staffs, while the slaver slid unheeded along the cutties which the left hand held to their toothless mouths; white-mutched grannies were keeking past the jambs; an early urchin, standing wide-legged to stare, waved his cap and shouted, "Hooray!"—and all because John Gourlay's carts were setting ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... that were full of the undazzling brightness of the true King of Israel, and the ordered ranks of His attendants! How little the greatness! How tawdry the pomp! How impotent the power, and how toothless the threats! The poor show of the earthly king paled before that awful vision, as a dim candle will show black against the sun. 'I stand before the living God, and thou, O Ahab! art but a shadow and a noise.' Just as we may have looked upon some mountain scene, where all the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... civics can never be solved by appealing to Nature Back, when only the few could be healthy, when one baby in three died in infancy, when old age was toothless and childish, when infection ravished nations, when the average life was twenty years shorter than now, and when unspeakable filth was tolerated in air, street, and house. They can all be solved by appeals to Nature Fore, which holds up an ideal of mankind physically ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... of his Heart, and support him, I warrant, by the Memory of past Interviews with Persons of their Condition. No, there is not in the World an Occasion wherein Vice makes so phantastical a Figure, as at the Meeting of two old People who have been Partners in unwarrantable Pleasure. To tell a toothless old Lady that she once had a good Set, or a defunct Wencher that he once was the admired Thing of the Town, are Satires instead of Applauses; but on the other Side, consider the old Age of those who have passed their Days in Labour, Industry, and Virtue, their Decays make ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... shrieking senseless gibberish in its rage. Then it began to hurl its whole body madly against the glass walls and to beat its head. It appeared to have a sudden incomprehensible hatred for the three strangers. It was trying to fly at them. The toothless gums moved spasmodically, and it threw its face into horrible grimaces. That nameless, loathsome abortion was the nearest that Oliver Haddo had ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... blackish-green (perhaps the color gas-light imparts to faded black) clerk of Emanuel Griffin, Esq. Whether David Dubbs, such was he called, derived the power of writing from his mouth; or whether the gentle excitation of moving his lips over toothless gums assisted thought; or whether, as some said, he chewed tobacco, a position which nobody ever held long, as nobody ever proved him to have expectorated during his whole life; his mouth—always closed—moved up and down, up and down, with the motion of ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... how could he take the life of him who gave life to his adored one? Your hero can always hit a man just where he pleases—vide every novel in Mr C's collection. The hero becomes misanthropical, the heroine maniacal. The former marries an antiquated and toothless dowager, as an escape from the imaginary disgust he took at a sight of a matchless woman; and the latter marries an old brute, who threatens her life every night, and puts her in bodily fear every morning, as an indemnity in full ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... of land in fee, years after dirt clogs those bright generous eyes, and years after this fine big-hearted boy is wasted! And I shall forget all about him, too. Marion l'Edol, that very pretty girl behind him, is to become a blotched and toothless haunter of alleys, a leering plucker at men's sleeves! And blue-eyed Colin here, with his baby mouth, is to be hanged for that matter of coin-clipping—let me recall, now,—yes, within six years of to-night! Well, but in a way, these people are blessed in lacking ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... old man, who could speak only a patois from over the frontier, cackled without understanding what his daughter said. He guessed well that he was the subject of the conversation, and jokingly he reproved the middle-aged Madonna with a few toothless mutterings more like Latin than ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions' mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... would have pierced the whole line of the enemy with his shafts. Ah! but if you will not leave the aged in peace, decree that the advocates be matched; thus the old man will only be confronted with a toothless greybeard, the young will fight with the braggart, the ignoble with the son of Clinias;(8) make a law that in the future, the old man can only be summoned and convicted at the courts by the aged and the young man by ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... behold in dreams; ewes in plenty and she-goats abundant, their fleeces are strown beneath my head and feet. In the fire of oak- faggots puddings are hissing-hot, and dry beech-nuts roast therein, in the wintry weather, and, truly, for the winter season I care not even so much as a toothless man does for walnuts, when rich pottage ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... deprive it of its pristine gloss. Make ashen-white your eyebrows, there, and lashes, Precocious hags! The world's but dust and ashes. Wrinkles and crowsfeet next must have their turn (To limn them in let toilette artists learn), Then make each belle bald, scraggy-necked and toothless, Grey hair alone won't make Society youthless. Let belles turn beldams if they find it jolly. But they might be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... incoherent yelling their protestations gradually died down to an occasional gulp like that of a naughty child. Making soothing sounds and patting their breasts and our own in turn, in sign of friendship, we had plenty of time to inspect them. An old lady, with grizzled hair, toothless and distorted in countenance, with legs and arms mere bones, and skin shrunken and parched; a girl-child, perhaps six years old, by no means an ugly little thing, and a youngish man made up the trio; all stark-naked, and unadorned by artificial means, unless one excepts a powerfully scented ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... exclaimed Lydia. Begging Indians were no novelty to Lake City children, but this one was so old and thin that Lydia was horrified. Toothless, her black hair streaked with gray, her calico dress unspeakably dirty, her hands like birds' claws clasping her stick, the squaw stopped ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... them their honest admiration, if it be honest—their delight, if they feel delight. I harbor no animosity toward any of them. But at the same time the thought will intrude itself upon me, How can they see what is not visible? What would you think of a man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra, and said: "What matchless beauty! What soul! What expression!" What would you think of a man who gazed upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said: "What sublimity! What feeling! What richness of coloring!" What would you think ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... vain imaginings! Let then her lore fulfil thee evermore, And like high inspiration send thee forth To prophecy aloud unto mankind Of love, and peace, and verity sublime. Let not disaster daunt thee, nor reproach, No feeble yelpings of the toothless curs That follow on the heels of all who walk The highways of this world in faithfulness, And strength, but like a wild swan on the wave Let every billow swelling round thy breast Raise thee ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... longer be accepted by any woman. Although almost entirely crippled, he did not appear to be so when he was seated, when he talked, or when he was at table. He had only one meal a day, and always took it alone because, being toothless and unable to eat otherwise than very slowly, he did not wish to hurry himself out of compliment to his guests, and would have been sorry to see them waiting for him. This feeling deprived him of the pleasure he would have enjoyed in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and consequently the killers give the cachalot a wide berth as a dangerous customer. The finback, however, swift and lengthy as he is, seldom manages to escape once he is "bailed up," and having no weapon of defence except his flukes (for he is one of the baleen or toothless whales), he has but one chance of his life, and that is to dive to such a depth that his assailants have to let go their hold of him in order to ascend ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... fields we approach the honest old mansion, across the emerald-carpeted lawn. The birds are singing, around the sleepy-looking gables, and the toothless old hound comes wagging his ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... toothless, and of great size. The young frog feeds on living prey, which is generally caught by the tongue. For this purpose, the tongue in the frog and toad is fixed to the front of the floor of the mouth, so that the tip of the tongue points backwards towards the throat! In capturing, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... departure; plenty of things may have happened to eliminate it. Men lose their hair and their teeth; why might not a man lose a tail? Scientists say that coming generations far in the future will be toothless and bald. Why may it not be that through causes unknown to us we are similarly deprived of something our ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... heaved in his toothless laugh. "Seven o'clock," he said scornfully. "Yew look through a knot-hole in your floor any mornin' when it's handy to four o'clock and yew'll ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... likewise to have only one arm. So forbidding of aspect was he that greetings consisted of no more than grunts. Huge-boned, tall, gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a dirty death's head, he was as repellent a nightmare of old age as ever Dore imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard's beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... therefore for the effecting of this they will sprinkle some jests and puns that must pass for ingenuity, though they are only the froth and folly of affectedness. Sometimes they will nibble at the wit of being satyrical, though their utmost spleen is so toothless, that they suck rather than bite, tickle rather than scratch or wound: nor do they ever flatter more than at such times as they pretend to speak with ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... modestly, pointed to his narrow chest and toothless mouth and then to the head of the Council as the man who had undertaken to transmit his opinion to the populace; so Alexander ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under a hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her eyes, withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a mongoose's, and at Bella's feet she first sank down, in pure Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless mele of Bella and Bella's ancestry and adding to it an extemporized welcome back to Hawaii after her absence across the great sea to California. And while she chanted her mele, the old crone's shrewd fingers lomied or massaged Bella's ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... king's leech,' he said to himself, 'and bid him give me some medicament that shall strengthen my wound. For I cannot abide that I stay here like some toothless old hound, while his fellows are gone to ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... none, not even Odin and his Asa-folk. They all grow old and gray; and, if there were no cure for age, they would become feeble, and toothless and blind, deaf, tottering, and weak-minded. The apples which Idun guarded so carefully were the priceless boon of youth. Whenever the Asas felt old age coming on, they went to her, and she gave them of her fruit; and, when they had tasted, ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... by the hand, and half pulled them along in their haste. They overtook and passed by the bent old grandmothers who were trudging along with crooked canes toward the centre of excitement. Most of the young braves galloped hither on their ponies. Toothless warriors, like the old women, came more slowly, though mounted on lively ponies. They sat proudly erect on their horses. They wore their eagle plumes, and waved their various trophies ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... struggling through the curtains that cover its fantastic windows allows a mellow light to fill the expanse of the building. A toothless old woman and a young girl, both of them thinly and poorly clad, are the sole occupants of the church, and they are evidently too much absorbed in prayer to notice our presence. They have placed beside ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... katviro. Tome volumo. To-morrow morgaux. To-morrow, the day after postmorgaux. Tone (music) tono. Tongs prenilo. Tongs, fire fajrprenilo. Tongue lango. Tonic fortigilo. Tonic accent tonakcento. Tonnage enhavebleco. Tonsure tonsuro. Too (much) tro. Tool ilo. Tooth dento. Toothless sendenta. Top (summit) supro. Top (peak) pinto. Top (of head) verto. Topaz topazo. Topic subjekto. Topmost plejsupra. Topography topografio. Topple fali. Topsy-turvy, to turn renversi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the candles flaring, and nobody to guard but the toothless old hound who slept and snored on the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... pareimenos tas knmas, weak in his knees, is pravedhayamna{h} sarvngapratyangai{h}, trembling in all his limbs; sunkekuphs, bent, is kubja; pepolimenos, gray, is palitake{s}a; estermenos tous odontas, toothless, is kha{n}{d}adanta; enkekomena laln, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... increase of bald heads and purblind people, has deduced a wonderful future for the children of men. Man, he said, was nowadays a hairless creature by forty or fifty, and for hair we gave him a wig; shrivelled, and we padded him; toothless, and lo! false teeth set in gold. Did he lose a limb, and a fine, new, artificial one was at his disposal; get indigestion, and to hand was artificial digestive fluid or bile or pancreatine, as the case might be. Complexions, too, were replaceable, spectacles superseded ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Maisanguaq," his toothless jaws chattered. "Thou bearest no one good will. Seldom dost thou smile. For this ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... dreams men picture! Treasured there Are multitudes of she-goats and of sheep, Swathed in whose wool from top to toe I sleep. The fire that boils my pot, with oak or beech Is piled—dry beech-logs when the snow lies deep; And storm and sunshine, I disdain them each As toothless sires a nut, when ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... beheld a tiny, bent old woman, all enveloped in grey rags. The old woman's face was visible from beneath them: a yellow, wrinkled, sharp-nosed, toothless face. ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... did not know her neighbours as well as she later learned to know them. Becky came nearer, and her thin lips curled back from her toothless jaws. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... An old, old man, whose shrivelled skin, suntanned, Clung like a beast's hide to his fleshless bones. Bent was his back with load of many days, His eyepits red with rust of ancient tears, His dim orbs blear with rheum, his toothless jaws Wagging with palsy and the fright to see So many and such joy. One skinny hand Clutched a worn staff to prop his quavering limbs, And one was pressed upon the ridge of ribs Whence came in gasps the heavy painful breath. "Alms!" ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... and was admitted under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, and he knew how it was done. The manner counted for more than the words. The scene was interesting, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... bluntness &c adj.. V. be blunt, render blunt &c adj.; obtund^, dull; take off the point, take off the edge; turn. Adj. blunt, obtuse, dull, bluff; edentate, toothless. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ordered the policeman, winking, as he pushed her aside with his body. She retired to her cellar, and stood there using her tongue to such purpose that the saliva flew from her toothless mouth. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... white hair which a painter would gladly have paid four francs an hour to copy,—a dazzling mass of snow, worn like that in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to the bottle than the trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles. The eyes, too small for his enormous face, and sloping like those of a pig, betrayed cunning ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... will not suck when its lips are properly stimulated, and further, the action may be originated centrally, as in a sleeping suckling. At a later stage biting is as instinctive as sucking, and was first observed to occur in the seventeenth week with the toothless gums. Later than biting, but still before the teeth are cut, chewing becomes instinctive, and also licking. Between the tenth and the sixteenth week the head becomes completely balanced, the efforts in this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... woman, infirm and toothless, yet with all the remains of great beauty, sits cowering over this hidden turf fire, mumbling to herself, it may be, of golden days now past and gone, when she had been the fairest colleen at mass or pattern, and had counted her lovers by the score. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... that hung in our garret, so I got their heads off without delay, and gradually extracted every tooth in their jaws. As there were about sixty teeth, I think, in each pair, I felt myself much improved before the jaws were toothless. At last, I resolved to take advantage of the first opportunity that should offer, during my father's absence, to practise on the living subject. It was not long ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... a little deaf," she said, mumbling a laugh with her toothless gums. "Will your reverence tell me the ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... bright, was cold, and a bonfire on the rocks was greatly patronized by the very old and very young, while distant preparations for tea were viewed, at first with stealthy, half-reluctant admiration, and then with open restlessness. The patriarchs—toothless and wrinkled, yet not a man of them over fifty-eight—stood around in expectant silent clusters, and also in their best clothes, of which a great deal of faded red neck-tie and pepper and salt trousers seemed chiefly to strike ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... along the tracks, his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... was soiled and copiously patched and her worn out brogans were several sizes too large. Ill health probably accounts for this untidiness for, as she expressed it, "when I gits up I hate to set down and when I sets down, I hates to git up, my knees hurts me so," however, her face broke into a toothless grin on the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... A.M. and proceeded to the entrance of the Yellow-Knife River of the traders, which is called by the natives Beg-ho-lo-dessy; or, River of the Toothless Fish. We found Akaitcho, and the hunters with their families, encamped here. There were also several other Indians of his tribe, who intended to accompany us some distance into the interior. This party was quickly in ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... knew what might have passed between the soul and God? It was safe to leave that little sinful soul with Him who had died to save. It was good to go out from there knowing that the pretty, sinful girl, the hardened, grizzled sot, the poor old toothless crone, the little hunchback newsboy who lay in the same row, were guarded alike and beloved by the same Presence ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... another, stopped, crossed themselves, and bowed in all directions. Their steps resounded loudly through the silent and almost empty space, and echoed along the vaulted roof. An infirm old woman, wrapped in a threadbare hooded cloak, knelt by Lavretsky's side and prayed fervently. Her toothless, yellow, wrinkled face expressed intense emotion. Her bloodshot eyes gazed upwards, without moving, on the holy figures displayed upon the iconostasis. Her bony hand kept incessantly coming out from under her cloak, and making the sign of ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... crash or slide in his time. He became accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for a hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom he had such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... feigned anger, crying: "What foolishness is this? Am I old, that thou shouldst mate me with old women? Am I toothless? lame of leg? blind of eye? Or am I poor that no bright-eyed maiden may look with favour upon me? Behold! I am the Factor, both rich and great, a power in the land, whose speech makes men tremble and ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... down again, it was to fall, not upon the water, but into the throat of the voracious tyrant; who, although toothless and without any means of masticating, made shorter work of it by introducing them untoothed, and at a single gulp, into ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... into the wail. Maria could endure it no longer. She ran across the hall and flung open the door. The baby lay crying in a little pink-lined basket. Maria bent over it, and the baby at once stopped crying. She opened her mouth in a toothless smile, and she held up little, waving pink hands to Maria. Maria lifted the baby out of her basket and pressed her softly, with infinite care, as one does something very precious, to her childish bosom, and at once something ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Toothless, eyeless, hollow, dull, Why your smirk and empty smile As the hours away you wile? Has the earth become such bore That it pleases nevermore? Whence your joy through sun and rain? Is 't because of loss of pain? Have you learned what men learn not ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... globes, and chandeliers, then Dona Patrocinio would have another with four facades, six feet higher, and more gorgeous hangings. Then he would fall back on his reserves, his strong point, his specialty—masses with bombs and fireworks; whereat Dona Patrocinia could only gnaw at her lips with her toothless gums, because, being exceedingly nervous, she could not endure the chiming of the bells and still less the explosions of the bombs. While he smiled in triumph, she would plan her revenge and pay the money of others to secure the best orators of the five Orders in Manila, the most ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... voice of the priest was heard saying mass in the church, and Flemming saw the toothless old sexton treading the fresh earth into the grave of the little child, with his clouted shoes. He approached him, and asked the age of the deceased. The sexton leaned a moment on his spade, and ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... about in his saddle, like a diadem upon the head of a cow, and seeing so frolicsome and so pretty a lady by the side of so old a fellow, a peasant girl, who was squatting near the trunk of a tree and drinking water out of her stone jug inquired of a toothless old hag, who picked up a trifle by gleaning, if this princess was going ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... up, and her own face became transformed. The moment she had lived and waited for had come! The blank stare gave place to a broken, crinkling expression; the thin shapeless lips trembled over the toothless gums, and into the big eyes a wonder broke. A light seemed to shine forth—and the baby smiled into the adoring ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... attention, let him dance on his head in the middle of the street; after that he may hope to get consideration for his volume of poems. I am speaking of men who wish to win reputation before they are toothless. Of course if your work is strong, and you can afford to wait, the probability is that half a dozen people will at last begin to shout that you have been monstrously neglected, as you have. But that ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... and wake when we would sleep, and never cease to rummage and twitch us, until they see us safe landed at the grave. We can do nothing (but be poisoned) with impunity. What is worst of all, we must marry certain relatives and connexions, be they distorted, blear-eyed, toothless, carbuncled, with hair (if any) eclipsing the reddest torch of Hymen, and with a hide outrivalling in colour and plaits his trimmest saffron robe. At the mention of this indeed, friend Plato, even thou, although resolved to stand out of harm's way, beginnest ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... thoughtful of Miss Lucy, the gentlemanly behavior which belonged to a boy who lived in the finest house upon the Avenue. They were faces that he knew,—every one! They, were the faces of Shiner, and Battles, and Toothless, and Whistling Jerry. Behind these, Tom the Bugler, ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... and were taken to the rooms where the Englishman had stayed. These were bare and squalid, like hundreds of other rooms in the poorer quarters of Paris. The landlady, toothless and grimy, had not yet tidied up the one where the Englishman had slept: in fact she did not know ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Women gave a piteous cry, fierce and angry as the cry of old grey wolves that have been robbed of their prey, and gnashed upon him with their toothless jaws. ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... children of most four-legged people do. Sometimes a young Meadow Mouse does not want to stop drinking his milk when it is time for his mother to leave the nest, so he just hangs on to her with his tiny, toothless mouth, and when she goes she drags him along on the ground beside her. The ground is rather rough for such soft little babies, and they do not go far in this way, but are glad enough to snuggle down again with their brothers ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... about it from that angle at all, Mart.... You're still the ground-and-lofty thinker of the outfit, ain't you? Now that you mention it, though, we may find that the Last of the Mohicans ain't entirely toothless, at that. But say, Mart, how come I'm as wild and cock-eyed as I ever was? Rovol's a slow and thoughtful old codger, and with his accumulation of knowledge it looks like I'd ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... has to last him for life—perhaps for centuries—for no one can tell how long the mighty elephant roams over this sublunary planet. When the tusks get broken—a not uncommon thing—he must remain toothless or "tuskless" for the rest of his life. Although the elephant may consider the loss of his huge tusks a great calamity, were he only a little wiser, he would break them off against the first tree. It would, in all probability, be the means ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... it would be impossible to know, for such things were not kept track of so long ago. She speaks no English. When asked about her age she merely shrugs her small shrunken shoulders, draws her shawl around them, and with a pleasant toothless smile, says: "O, I never know that, but I remember ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... estimate. But when it's a question of that, he sits there and sucks at his toothless old gums and giggles that it's the first hundred years that are the hardest to get through with and he's gettin' away ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... whose nickname was Brains, and a young Tartar, whose name nobody knew, were sitting on the bank of the river by a wood-fire. The other three ferrymen were in the hut. Simeon who was an old man of about sixty, skinny and toothless, but broad-shouldered and healthy, was drunk. He would long ago have gone to bed, but he had a bottle in his pocket and was afraid of his comrades asking him for vodka. The Tartar was ill and miserable, and, pulling his rags ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... and fearfully, The tale of ghostly mystery; For toothless crones and graybeards said That from the presence of the dead An influence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... narrows, till there is scarcely room for the movement. Men of letters and of politics, breathing hard, thrust their heads forward, while their decorations swing like cow-bells, and grinning from ear to ear show their watery lips and toothless jaws with grotesque animal cachinnations. Even the Prince d'Athis stoops with less contempt for humanity, as he gazes upon this marvel of youth and fairy grace, who with the tips of her toes takes off the masks of convention; and the Turk, Mourad Bey, who has sat ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... for a ramble at night, Through Garrisowen Union to see every sight. The ould men were dreaming of meat to come near them, And the Devil cocked ears at the words for to hear them. 'Twice a year we get meat,' said the toothless oul' men, 'Oh, Lord send the meat won't be too tough again.' To clear away dishes Mick Fogarty goes, May the Devil burn the nails off his toes. Deep dreaming that night of fast days before, Sagging the walls with the pull of his snore, In his chamber above Thomas Muskerry ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... I see what you mean. It was a great loss to you in one sense, but of course you couldn't have the same feeling about her as in the case of Mrs. Chance. She was, I understand, a toothless old hag, more ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Huff settled in a pleasant street in a good comfortable home, not so very fur away from the Fair ground. She's a widder with one son, young and good lookin', jest home from school; and a aged parent, toothless and no more hair on his head than on the cover of my glass butter dish. And I'll be hanged if I knowed which one on 'em Blandina paid the most devoted attention to whilst we wuz there, but ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... beauty, money, promotion, wealth, worship, pleasure, honour, knowledge, or any other benefit whatsoever.' As to the preternatural gifts of these hags, he sensibly argues: 'Alas! what an unapt instrument is a toothless, old, impotent, unwieldy woman to fly in the air; truly, the devil little needs such instruments to bring his ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... said. "You think I do not understand; but I do. You are giving up everything for us. Even if you live through it, this House, which has been your charge for many years, will be dissolved; your sheep will be scattered to starve in their toothless age; the fold that has sheltered them for four hundred years will become a home of wolves. I understand full well, and she"—pointing to ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... dull; and, by the necessity of his nature, incapable of being in deadly earnest, which his splendid antagonist at all times was. His encounter, therefore, with Mrs. Lee presented the distressing spectacle of an old, toothless, mumbling mastiff, fighting for the household to which he owed allegiance against a young leopardess fresh from the forests. Every touch from her, every velvety pat, drew blood. And something comic mingled with what my mother ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the dhows, which were now well inshore and almost on the rocks—which latter seemed to jut out from this coast in the most shapeless, uncanny fashion, like the solitary tusk or two still possessed by some nearly toothless old hag. ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... has brought with him a disgusting old fellow, all bent and wrinkled, with a most pitiful appearance, bald and toothless; upon my word, I even believe he is circumcised ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... stroke of his pick; he might strike the rich 'lead' which was supposed to exist round there. (There was always supposed to be a rich lead round there somewhere. 'There's gold in them ridges yet—if a man can only git at it,' says the toothless old ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... course. Its busy cobbled streets were quite empty except for a few strolling soldiers in khaki, and just here and there the same toothless old woman who is always the last to leave a doomed city. At the typhoid hospital we gravely offered the cases of milk which we had brought with us as an earnest of our good conduct, but even the hospital was nearly ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... There was something grotesque in their decrepitude. Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one's ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... said the prince; but with that the witch dragged it away again, and came back with an old, wrinkled, toothless hag, whose hands trembled with age. 'You can have no other princess,' said she. 'Will you ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... modifies character; she spoke Spanish very badly, but he himself did not speak it well; at least, the head of the Customs department had so notified him in his discharge from his position, and besides, what did it matter? What if she was old and ridiculous? He was lame, toothless and bald. When some friend jested with him, he would respond: "Give me bread and call ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... the old man whether he was well, whether he had enough work for a living, whether he was happy. To all these questions he replied with the charming affirmative of Italy, the musical si, which sounded melodious even in his toothless mouth. She made him tell his sparrow's story. The poor bird had once dipped its leg in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Have stolen her. You ingrate Henry Greene, I picked you from the gutter of Houndsditch, And paid your debts, and kept you in my house, And brought you here to make a man of you! You Robert Juet, ancient, crafty man, Toothless and tremulous, how many times Have I employed you as a master's mate To give you bread? And you Abacuck Prickett, You sailor-clerk, you salted puritan, You knew the plot and silently agreed, Salving your conscience with a pious lie! Yes, all of you—hounds, rebels, thieves! Bring back My ship! Too ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... soon my hour-glass will run out, and I shall have to stop and go away.' Let me beseech you for one half-hour's meditation on that fact before this day closes. You will forget my words then, when with your own eyes you have looked upon that truth, and felt that it is not merely a toothless commonplace, but belongs to and works in thy life, as it ebbs away ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... say that that is capable of some particular faculty or possession has suffered privation when the faculty or possession in question is in no way present in that in which, and at the time at which, it should naturally be present. We do not call that toothless which has not teeth, or that blind which has not sight, but rather that which has not teeth or sight at the time when by nature it should. For there are some creatures which from birth are without ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... which, sated with victims and torpid with age, contemplates in the plain the ravages of a lion among a herd of cattle, which he himself dares not attack. From time to time his eye brightens; the smell of blood rejoices him, and he laps his burning tongue over his toothless jaw. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... within box or bottle upon her dressing-table, her face and form in all their loveliness were genuine, the double row of white even teeth, that gave a great charm to her pretty mouth, had never dreamed their early days away in dental show-cases, nor bathed all night by a toothless maiden's bed-side in a glass of water; much less did she ever tempt herself to encourage the authors of those wonderful advertisements that grace our daily papers, and which introduce to the world, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... him. He had been tricked, foiled, and outwitted! The old Canterville look came into his eyes; he ground his toothless gums together; and, raising his withered hands high above his head, swore according to the picturesque phraseology of the antique school, that, when Chanticleer had sounded twice his merry horn, deeds of blood would be wrought, and ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... to clean her cocoa-nut shoes with oil and to rub them up. Then he learnt to catch the little sun moths and rub them through the finest sieves, and the flour from them he made into soft bread for the toothless ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... over on his seat, his eyes gleaming in a fixed and intense glare at the attorney; his hands were clenched, his lips parched, and his mummy-like cheeks sucked, as before, into his toothless jaws. In addition to all this, there was a bitter white smile of despair upon his features, and his thin gray locks, that were discomposed in the paroxysm by his own hands, stood out in disorder upon his head. We question, indeed, whether mere imagination could, without having ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... there was still another. Olivier Delagarde had been unmasked, and the whole island had gone tracking him down. No aged toothless tiger was ever sported through the jungle by an army of shikarris with hungrier malice than was this broken traitor by the people he had betrayed. Ensued, therefore, a commingling of patriotism with lust of man-hunting and eager expectation ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tracks, his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and grouping these images. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Joe was in charge that Casey came to our place. A starved-looking, toothless little old man with a restless eye, talkative, ragged and grey; he walked with a bend in his back (not a hump), and carried his chin in the air. We never saw a man like him before. He spoke rapidly, too, and watched us all as he talked. Not exactly a "traveller;" ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... after the other given the child such gifts as each counted best, and the fifth had just stepped back to her place in the surrounding splendour of ladies and gentlemen, when, mumbling a laugh between her toothless gums, the wicked fairy hobbled out into the middle of the circle, and at the moment when the archbishop was handing the baby to the lady at the head of the nursery department of state affairs, addressed ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... could stay married as long as we needed her, and then, following the Newport plan, you could get rid of her and marry me later—that is—er—provided I was willing to marry you at all, and I am not so sure that I shall not be some day, when I am old and toothless." ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... children ran to her, frightened as young rabbits, and hid behind her skirts. Only the baby, grave and unalarmed, stood his ground and Susan snatched him up. Then the mother smiled, gratified and reassured. She had no upper front teeth, and the wide toothless grin gave her a look of old age that had in it ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... decrepitude; No faith, no art, no king, no priest, no God; While round the freezing founts of life in snarling ring, Crouch'd on the bareworn sod, Babbling about the unreturning spring, And whining for dead gods, who cannot save, The toothless systems shiver to ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... dear, strange man, he says his prayers to it! He had not been to bed, nor since then, properly! What has happened to him? Has he found out about the Serafina?" she whispered, with a glittering eye and a toothless grin. ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... springing up and vanishing within him; before him flashed the bald skull of his godfather with a little crown of silver hair and with a dark face, which resembled the faces of the ancient ikons. This face with the toothless mouth and the malicious smile, rousing in Foma hatred and fear, augmented in him the consciousness of solitude. Then he recalled the kind eyes of Medinskaya and her small, graceful figure; and beside her arose the tall, robust, and rosy-cheeked Lubov Mayakina with smiling eyes and with a ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... Head large; palate quite toothless; upper jaw with small close teeth; tympanum hid under the skin; toes of the fore and hind feet elongate, slender, quite free; ankle with a roundish external and a small conical inner tubercle; tongue small, oblong, roundish, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... went into the wretched shed the setting sun broke through the lowering grey clouds and shone full on the dead woman. It lighted each vicious line and hideous trait of the wrinkled, toothless face, and betrayed the mark of an evil life, ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... which he practised on others, was that one must get hardened. He had started out preaching it to his sister and brother-in-law. Failing there, he hammered it into the dogs with a club. At the Five Fingers the dog-food gave out, and a toothless old squaw offered to trade them a few pounds of frozen horse-hide for the Colt's revolver that kept the big hunting-knife company at Hal's hip. A poor substitute for food was this hide, just as it had been stripped from the starved horses ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... annihilation and existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled beauty and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost his radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were ready to bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be seized with pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... corpse; I turned the face to the light; I searched for a pulse of life, a breath. There was none: he was dead. A single blow had been given, and the blow had been sure. A ghastly grimace distended the thin lips of the toothless mouth; the eyes were starting from their orbits; the hands were clenched: it had been a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... when they send joy, this turns to their misfortune. Some day Zeus will destroy them, these many-tongued people, when they are born with grey locks on their temples. Yes, our children are born old men already, toothless, wrinkled and with bald heads. The father is not gracious to the child, nor the child to the father, nor the guest to his host, nor servant to fellow-servant, nor brother to brother. Children dishonour their old parents, revile them and speak ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... necessities of his neighbors for years, till he has got bloated like an ancient spider in its web. He hobbles up and down, never interchanging a word with his fellows, but unceasingly mumbling his huge toothless jaws; they say he never mutters anything but curses; if so, his daily expense in blasphemy is something fearful to contemplate. I think that cleanliness is as foreign to that horrible old creature's soul as godliness: he never shows a vestige ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... me of nothing so much as an Egyptian mummy," says Philip, presently: "he looks so hard, and shriveled, and unreal. Toothless, too." ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... vanished. The sergeant had not yet turned; every woman in the church was waiting to see his face, and he appeared to know it. At last he did turn, and stalked resolutely down the nave, braving them all, with a compressed lip. Two bowed and toothless old almsmen then looked at each other and chuckled, innocently enough; but the sound had a strange weird effect ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... days Wainamoinen floated on the waters; then he was rescued by a huge eagle that carried him on its back to Pohyola, the dismal Sariola, and left him on a barren promontory, where he bemoaned his unhappy fate. Here he was found by Louhi, the toothless dame of Pohyola, who took him home and fed him. Then she promised to provide him with a sledge that he might journey safely home if he would forge for her the Sampo, a magical jewel that gave success to its possessor. If he could ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... presided over, by two women—evidently grandmother and granddaughter. The former was as grotesque a type of the jolly old vendeuse of Paris as it would be possible to find. A low, winey humor twinkled in her little black eyes, hidden in wrinkly wads of fat; her nose glowed with good feeling; her toothless mouth smirked good-naturedly. A worn shawl covered her chunky shoulders, and a cap like a muslin and flannel extinguisher protected her bald old head from the weather. The granddaughter, being young and rather pretty, was less interesting as a picture of a curious type. The shop occupied ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... hand were drawn down so as nearly to close it, and were fixed; the nails on that hand were almost four inches long and extended above her wrist; the nails on her large toes had grown to the thickness of a quarter of an inch; her head was covered with a thick bush of grey hair; but she was toothless and totally blind, and her eyes had sunk so deeply in the sockets as to ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... Catholics; and if all the seventy members returned were of the Catholic persuasion, they must still plot the destruction of our religion in the midst of 588 Protestants. Such terrors would disgrace a cook-maid, or a toothless aunt—when they fall from the lips of bearded and senatorial men, they are nauseous, antiperistaltic, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... toothless smile received the empty glasses; and when the two machines had trundled away in the dimness, it stood looking after them—the deep smile of guileless, crafty old age—that suffers and waits—and clutches its morsel at last and fastens on ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... was opened; but should the curiosity of any future generation tempt the men of that day to peer into this receptacle of the dust of tyrants, the skull of the murdered Alexander will be found to be toothless. And all sorts of suppositions and theories may be based on this singular fact, and credited, until some antiquary of the period discovers in an ancient magazine published at the period of a former examination of the sepulchre this record, in which I am obliged ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... much meat," she continued, more harshly than before. "But of what worth to you and me? A few bones to gnaw in our toothless old age. But the back-fat, the kidneys, and the tongues—these shall go into other mouths than thine ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London |
