"Washtub" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers. Every washtub and milkcan and gravestone will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most barren and forlorn doctrine,—as ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... curtains, and tapestry should certainly be fast to light, but no one expects them to undergo the fatigue of the weekly washtub; and just as little as we look for the exposure of flannels and hosiery, day by day and week by week, to the glare of sunlight, much as we desire that the colors shall not run ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... be worn as guard chain and lengthened out with a spring. He put it round his neck, but the spring got loose and turned it into a ladder and almost choked him to death. Then he invented a patent boot heel to crack nuts with, but he mashed his thumb with it and gave it up. Why, he has a washtub full of inventions. One of them is a prayerbook that always opens at the right place. We tried it one morning at church, but the wheels and springs made such a noise that the sexton took William by the collar and told ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... three, and the dishes were cleared from the table. Then with the hall door locked as a precaution, Johnnie spread the oiled table-cloth on the floor (though Mr. Perkins demurred a little at this), planted the washtub at the center of the cloth, half filled the tub from the sink spigot, warmed the water with more from the teakettle, and took a long-deferred, much-needed rub down. It was soapy, and thorough. And he proved to himself that he really liked water very much—except, perhaps, ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... over the washtub, to eke out their scanty earnings, had rendered his wife—once the "Fay" of the "Love Songs"—both muscular and short-tempered. On such occasions she would lay hands on the poet and thrash him till he wept. But throughout all he remained a poet, for the poet is born not made. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... winter put an end to the whitewashing season, and left uncle Wellington dependent for support upon occasional jobs of unskilled labor. The income derived from these was very uncertain, and Mrs. Braboy was at length driven, by stress of circumstances, to the washtub, that last refuge of honest, able-bodied poverty, in all countries where the use of ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... Dicey," Brother Williams would call out across the fence to his neighbour, "I don' believe you doin' anything to'ds dat Chris'mus celebration. Evah time I sees you, you's in de washtub tryin' to mek braid an' meat fo' dat ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... detail, why I came to contemplate a change of quarters. I detest a kicker. I have small use for any but the man who will take his allotted share with the rest of the world without either whining or snarling. Yet when an official government census enumerator falls asleep on the edge of a tenement washtub with a question dead on his lips, or solemnly sets down a crow-black Jamaican as "white," it is Uncle Sam who is suffering and ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... a wink the whole night through, sir," says the poor soul, "and I've wetted six—no, 'tis seven handkerchers till they're like clouts from the washtub, and I can hardly see ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... a lot of Sioux Indians who were on their way to fight the Chippewas borrowed my sister's washtub to mix the paint in for painting them up. They got their colored clay from the Bad Lands. They were going to ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... school. Every one who can afford it usually sends his children to our school, but there are others who are extremely poor but who are equally anxious to send their children also, and in order to do this they make great sacrifices. Many mothers work at the washtub from Monday morning till Saturday night, and do all kinds of manual labor, to obtain the money with which to keep their children in school. Some of our neediest pupils prove to be the best in their classes. One boy, whose widowed mother is unable to ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 9, September, 1896 • Various
... the washtub size made by the 75's to the great fissure-torn holes made by the big naval guns, and which would make an ample cellar for an ordinary dwelling house. I have seen horses which had fallen into these great holes ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... no time. He went to her father the day after she had sailed, having sent her a veritable washtub of flowers for bon voyage—and said briefly: "I have loved your daughter ever since I first saw her. I'm as poor as you were once, but if I see my way to making a fortune and can give her everything she ought to have will ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... use a washtub for the punch, to make enough for all of them," said Patsy. "And is ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... Jobson. "A washtub'll do. Me and Bert'll 'ave a washtub each brought up overnight; and it'll be exercise for the gals bringing the water up of a morning ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... it was an extravagant misuse of fuel, and occasioned extra towels in the family wash. But now, in Billy's house, with her own stove, her own tub and towels and soap, and no one to say her nay, Saxon was guilty of a daily orgy. True, it was only a common washtub that she placed on the kitchen floor and filled by hand; but it was a luxury that had taken her twenty-four years to achieve. It was from the strange woman next door that Saxon received a hint, dropped in casual ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... and to investigate has given place to a sort of civil apathy which passes for good form—that absolute indifferentism which is too much bored to care about other people's affairs, and which would not disturb itself if it heard of a neighbour deciding to cross the Atlantic in a washtub. "Nothing matters," is the general verdict on all events and circumstances. Nevertheless, the size, the swiftness and soundlessness of the "White Eagle" and the secrecy observed in its making, had ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... and was guilty of a k, he was ordered in immediately. Then the arrangements for ablution were peculiar. We fitted up a bathing-place in a brook, which somehow got appropriated at once by the company laundresses; but I had my revenge, for I took to bathing in the family washtub. After all, however, the kitchen department had the advantage, for they used my solitary napkin to wipe the mess-table. As for food, we found it impossible to get chickens, save in the immature shape of eggs; fresh pork was prohibited by the surgeon, and other fresh meat ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... hung the skin out and went into the kitchen, where Groa was busy washing, sat down on a box by the wall on the other side of the room, let his head rest on his hands, and looked wise. For a while there was silence. At last Groa looked up from her washtub and gave ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... would really be done by the two men if they were up in the woods together. Yet Mrs. Narnay and the children might get along better without Jim. Janice had made some inquiries and learned that Mrs. Narnay was an industrious woman, working steadily over her washtub, and keeping the children in comparative comfort when Jim was not at home to drink up a good share ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... promise!" she cried for both, and at this juncture Mrs. Fitch, who had run from the washtub to get into her Sunday waist, came out of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was called a hippopotamus, and he swam in a tank of water, next door to a pool in which lived some mud turtles and alligators. When the hippopotamus opened his mouth it looked big enough to hold a washtub. ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Aunt Lu's City Home • Laura Lee Hope
... don't like the Laundry, tell the Property Man, and he will put a washtub and clothes ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... was then in his prime—a large, fine-looking man, a gentleman in dress and manner, neither smoking, chewing, drinking, nor gormandizing. He was an effective speaker and actor, as one of his speeches, which he illustrated, imitating the poor wife at the washtub and the drunken husband reeling in, fully showed. He gave his audience charcoal sketches of everyday life rather than argument. He always pleased popular audiences, and even the most fastidious were amused with his caricatures. As the newspapers gave several columns ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... sixty miles to the little town where she lived, so I jumped out on the I. C. and finds her in the same cottage with the same sunflowers and roosters standing on the washtub. Mrs. Trotter fitted our ad first rate except, maybe for beauty and age and property valuation. But she looked feasible and praiseworthy to the eye, and it was a kindness to Zeke's memory to give her ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... friend in one of the apprentices. The farm donkey and himself had dragged it thither on a certain never-to-be-forgotten day, when Uncle Reuben had been on the other side of the mountain at a shepherds' meeting in the Woodlands, while Aunt Hannah was safely up to her elbows in the washtub. Boy's back and donkey's back had nearly broken under the task, but there the pan stood at last, the delight of David's heart. In a crevice of the wall beside it, hidden jealously from the passer-by, lay the other half of that perpetual entertainment it ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
