"One-horse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... butter has been among the earliest industries. Away back in the history of the world, we find Adam and Eve conveying their milk from the garden of Eden, in a one-horse wagon to the cool spring cheese factory to be weighed in the balance. Whatever may be said of Adam and Eve to their discredit in the marketing of the products of their orchard, it has never been charged that they stopped at the pump and ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... himself, Harrison Cressy discovered to his annoyance that there was no train out of Dunbury for two hours. That was the worst of these little one-horse towns. You might as well be dead as alive in 'em. By the time he had smoked his after-dinner cigar he felt as if he might as well be dead himself. He felt suddenly heavy, old, almost decrepit, though that morning when he had left Boston he had considered himself in the prime of life and vigor. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... difficulties were overcome, I found myself in the midst of about a score of tents and vans of all sizes and descriptions, connected with which there were not less than thirty-five grown-up Gipsies and about sixty poor little Gipsies. The first van I came to was a kind of one-horse cart with a cover over it; inside was a strong, hulking-looking fellow and a poor, sickly-looking woman with five children. The woman had only been confined a few days, and looked more fit for "the box" than to be washing on ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... superintendent in consternation. "Comparison! There is no comparison. The old one-room school, like the one-horse plough, has seen its day. The farmers in this country, after figuring it out, have reached the conclusion that the one-room school is in the same class with a lot of other old-fashioned machinery—good in its day, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... "I know," he said. "Fact is, I ain't up-to-date enough, myself, that's what's the matter. She's a mighty able, ambitious woman, your mother is, Gertie, and I don't wonder she gets to thinkin', sometimes, that Trumet is a kind of one-horse town. I like it; I AM one-horse, I suppose. But she ain't, and she ain't satisfied to be satisfied, like me. It's a good thing she ain't, I guess. Somebody's got to live up to the responsibilities of ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... shining light, it seemed to me, upon her fair young face. "Momma says she is getting just a bit tired of this one-horse sort of place. She is quite looking forward to ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... wherever night should find us, and taking up the chase again upon the following morning, until continual fatigue should wear out the fierce brute. I had two horses with me, and Tim Matlock; so I made up my mind at once, got a light one-horse sleigh up in the village, rigged it with all my bear-skins, good store of whiskey, eatables, and so forth, saddled the gray with my best Somerset, holsters and surcingle attached, and made one of the party ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... the oddest acquaintance, Miss Monfort, for a young lady of fashion, certainly! This old man keeps a little one-horse book-store somewhere, I am told, and makes it his constant theme ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Miss B. and Miss Z. returned from a drive with Plantagenet Gaunt in their one-horse fly, and being informed of Davison's arrival, and that he was closeted with Miss Raby in the little school-room, of course made for that apartment at once. I was coming into it from the other door. I wanted to know whether ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... along the road-side. A minute or two might have been thus occupied, when the trotting of a horse and the sound of wheels announced the near approach of one of those vehicles which have got to be almost national; a dearborn, or a one-horse wagon. As it came out from behind a screen of bushes formed by a curvature in the road, I saw that it contained the Rev. Mr. Warren and his ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... given at Clunes, a township about fifteen miles distant; and we decided to accept the invitation. As there had been no rain to speak of for months, the tracks through the bush were dry and hard. We set off in the afternoon in a one-horse buggy, and got down to Clunes ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... a month and twelve days younger than you were, but will go on growing older for the future in the regular and human manner from one 13th November to the next. The effect on me is more doubtful; I may, as you suggest, live for ever; I might, on the other hand, come to pieces like the one-horse shay at a moment's notice; doubtless the step was risky, but I do not the least regret that which enables me to sign myself your revered and ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... times. In the first administration of President Cleveland, Mrs. Cleveland, a bride, used to drive her husband in from Oak View or, as it was popularly called, Red Top, to his office at the White House nearly every morning in a low, one-horse phaeton. No secret-service entourage in those days! In the evenings she came again in style in a Victoria, and frequently they would stop opposite Tudor Place and watch the game in progress. There was a good deal of intimacy between ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... a one-horse wagon, with one seat. The horse was well enough, but the seat was narrow for three people, and the entire establishment had in it not much prophecy of Baddeck for that day. But we knew little of the power of Cape Breton driving. It became evident ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and I was but thirteen, my last birthday, the night I came to Applewale House. My aunt was the housekeeper there, and a sort o' one-horse carriage was down at Lexhoe waitin' to take me and ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... finish; I named my boy Digby after that school! You see my father an' mother was determined to give me an education, an' I wa'n't intended for it. I was a great big, strong, clumsy lunkhead, an' the only thing I could do, even in a one-horse college, was to play base ball, so they kep' me along jest for that. I never got further than the second class, an' I wouldn't 'a' got there if the Faculty hadn't 'a' promoted me jest for the looks o' the thing. Well Prof. Millard was off in the country lecturin' somewheres ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cheapest of one-horse vehicles, with but one half-naked syce running at the pony's head, and never a footman near, passes the spanking Arabs; the plain turban of a respectable accountant in the Honorable Company's coal office at Garden Reach shows between ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... wages enters into the question the result is very different: carriage-hire is usually twice as high as in England and often more. However that may be, it is certainly very striking to see the immense number of one-horse "teams" that turn out for an afternoon or evening spin in the parks and suburban roads of places like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Many of these teams are of a plainness, not to say shabbiness, which would make an English owner too shamefaced ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... really doesn't care about anything; I'm sure of that. But she's got some object; so she goes from early morn till dewy eve, and of course some one's got to go with her; we can't let her wander around alone. Besides, what I'm afraid of is that she'll go all to pieces some day—like the deacon's one-horse shay, you know, and there won't be anything left but a little heap of alpaca clothes and congress gaiters. She's worn out six pair of gaiters since we started," he added, with a wail. "I know, because I've had to buy them. She hasn't had time." He shook his head ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... will probably be here in about a fortnight. Could you not contrive to put yourself in a Bridgwater coach, and T. Poole would fetch you in a one-horse chaise to Stowey. What delight ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... of the valley, four miles from the little village. The road was bad, for the heavy rains had washed much of it away, and it had been roughly repaired by fir-trees laid along the broken edges; but it was not impassable, and a one-horse carriage could run along it safely. The rain had passed away, and the sun was shining. The high mountains and the great rocks were clear from base to summit. If she came to-day there was a splendid scene prepared for her eyes. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... it in me. To think that they—they—should have the power to humiliate us. I don't get back my self-respect till we're on a level, or my joie de vivre until we're shooting downhill, and can hold our own with a forty horse-power motor, to say nothing of a one-horse, Italian ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Gold near Pike's Peak—Exodus from Missouri—The Creation of the Overland Stage Route to the Pacific Coast—Messrs. Russell and Jones' Failure— Russell, Majors, & Waddell's Successful Establishment of a New Line— Hockaday and Liggett's “One-horse” Affair—Advent of the First Stage-coach into Denver—Financial Embarrassment—Ben Holliday— Description of the Outfit of the Route—Incidents ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... took place; first, Pikey had to find his glasses, as he called his spectacles, to look out a one-horse-chaise ticket. Then he had to look out the tickets, when he found he had all sorts except a one-horse-chaise one ready—waggons, hearses, mourning-coaches, saddle-horses, chaises and pair, mules, asses, every sort but the one that was wanted. Well, then he had to fill one up, and ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... ago last fall," he said, "my wife and I bought and moved onto the farm where we now reside. We went on there in debt $3,700, on which we had to pay seven per cent. interest. I had one horse, an old one, and it had the heaves, a one-horse harness, and a one-horse wagon, three tillage implements, and nine cows that were paid for; and a wife and two babies, but no money. Now that was the condition in which we started on this farm, thirty-six ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... bronchos, mules and burros are fitted with massive shoes by this frontier Vulcan and sent rejoicing upon their winding and rocky ways. Our sleepy gaze follows along Santa Fe Avenue, and the eye sees little that is suggestive of a modern Western town. But soon comes noisily along a one-horse street-car, which asserts its just claims to popular notice in consequence of its composing a full half of a system scarce a fortnight old by filling the air with direful screeches as each curve is laboriously described. And later, when the magnificent overland train, twenty-six hours from Kansas ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... there were "two RICHMONDS in the field." Singularly coincidental with this, and well worth the attention of Shakespearean scholars, is the fact that Richmond, Va., is now running two mayors. Of course, Richmond, Va., cannot now be looked upon as a "one-horse" town. ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... design had to balance. Men die because a part gives out. Machines wreck themselves because some parts are weaker than others. Therefore, a part of the problem in designing a universal car was to have as nearly as possible all parts of equal strength considering their purpose—to put a motor in a one-horse shay. Also it had to be fool proof. This was difficult because a gasoline motor is essentially a delicate instrument and there is a wonderful opportunity for any one who has a mind that way to mess it up. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... grandmotherly flavor. A little brass plate, gleamingly polished, says HONORARY CONSULATE OF JAPAN. Beside immense motor trucks stood a shabby little horse and buggy, restored to service, perhaps, by the war-time shortage of gasoline. It was a typical one-horse shay ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... I perceived that my host was as full of his speculative schemes as ever; and soon he made the driver of the one-horse fly turn aside from the unfenced road and take the turf. "Coachman," he cried, "just drive along the railway; you won't have the chance ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Stanley, forty miles distant. But what a contrast was there between our leaving Rochester, five years before, and our removing from the colony! Then, we had five two-horse wagon loads of goods and furniture, and seven in family; now, our possessions were only a few articles, in a one-horse wagon, with an addition of two members to our household! The settlers collected about us, to take an affectionate leave of my wife and children; but tears and sobs, prevented an utterance of more than a "God bless ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... a one-horse country daily," he declared finally. "The Whig! You'd think Henry Clay ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... his wife, his son, Murdock, his daughter-in-law, Rose, and seven grandchildren. They live near White Oak, S.C., in a two-room frame house with a one-room box board annex. He works a one-horse farm for Mr. Cathcart and piddles a little at the planing mills at Adgers. His son does the ploughing. The daughter-in-law and grandchildren hoe and pick cotton and assist in the farm work. Henry is of medium height, dark brown complexion, and is ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... disposed toward me, but it was evident that he did not take my "one-horse" establishment seriously, and I left his store without an order. I was berating myself for having revealed the true size of my business. Somehow my failure in this instance galled me with special poignancy. I roamed around the streets, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Major Grover sartinly did seem to put the fear of the Lord into Phin this afternoon. . . . And that's no one-horse miracle," he drawled, "when you consider that all the ministers in Orham haven't been able to do it for forty odd years. . . . Um. . . . Yes, I kind of cal'late Phin'll keep his hatches shut. He ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a sale a new one-horse phaeton, so that they could go out twice a month. They set out one fine December morning, and after driving for two hours across the plains of Normandy, they began to descend a little slope into a little valley, the sides of which were wooded, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... grumpy-countenanced young man, made no answer. He began to pace the hall with looks of eminent dissatisfaction. But he had only taken a turn or two when a quietly appointed one-horse coupe brougham came up to the open door, and a well-known face was seen at its window. Mr. Gabriel Chestermarke, senior proprietor, had come an ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... the Admiral, Sir Alex. Cochrane, who asked me to dinner, where I met the Governor and some more bigwigs. The Admiral's secretary, Maxwell, who appeared to have a snug berth in the country, requested me to dine with him the day after, and he sent a kittereen, or one-horse gig, for me. I met at dinner some brother officers and a few military men. Our entertainment did credit to the donor, who appeared a hospitable, frank kind of man. In the evening I went on board, and next morning received a chest of money for the troops at Tobago. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... hurrain over a boy like me. I would rather go through the country quietly & enjoy myself in my own way, with the other boys, & not be made a Show of to be garped at by everybody. When the PEPLE cheer me I feel pleesed, fur I know they meen it; but if these one-horse offishuls cood know how I see threw all their moves & understan exackly what they air after, & knowd how I larft at 'em in private, thayd stop kissin my hands & fawnin over me as thay now do. But you know, Mr. Ward, I can't help bein a Prince, & I must do all I kin to fit myself ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... torch-light procession and Mardi Gras frolic she has had with us. It is tiresome, of course, to chase a pillow case up and down the wash-board all day, but it is easier and pleasanter than it is to run a one-horse Inebriate Home for ten years ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn-passage: a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lit street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... them come, say a little after bedtime, to the West house there, and I'll get a ladder ready and help them up on the hayloft,—but have you food and drink yourself?' 'Oh, I shall do well enough,' said he, 'and now farewell to you until the sun is down.' So then they drifted along the road to a one-horse farm, and that evening they came, sure enough, and I hid the two women and the children until the second night; then they slipped away again. Before I parted with them, the Poorman said, 'I'd like to repay you this piece of work: isn't there something ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... P. Henry in the character of seseshers! As well fancy John Bunyan and Dr. Watts in spangled tites, doin the trapeze in a one-horse circus! ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... ways of telling a story," he said. "Mine is the methodical way—I begin at the beginning. We will start, if you please, in the railway—we will proceed in a one-horse chaise—and we will stop at a village, situated in a hole. It was the nearest place to Sir Jervis's house, and it was therefore my destination. I picked out the biggest of the cottages—I mean the huts—and asked the woman at the door if she had a bed to let. She evidently ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... Sunday night, the sixteenth of October, 1859, John Brown drove his one-horse wagon to the door of the rude log house in which he had hidden with ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... (my boots were full of water and my cap dribbling pints of iced-water down the back of my neck) that I was not playing the wandering Jew round one-horse Picard villages in late December for the amusement I got out of it and that I could be relied on to return to England at the earliest opportunity, but for the present moment would she let us in out of the downpour, please? The voice soared to a ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... the yard and as she turned the corner of the house she saw a one-horse spring wagon standing before the gate, while a stiff, gaunt figure sat bolt upright on the seat, holding the lines. Kate was at the wheel looking up with a face of ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, "laying by" the corn. Joe threw his plow down in the furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless assured, then and there, that Isom would make an ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Italy and France. They repaired more than a thousand ships a month. They ferried nearly two-thirds of all the Americans that crossed the Atlantic. They took to the many different fronts more than half a million vehicles, from one-horse carts to the biggest locomotives; more than two million animals—horses, mules, and camels; and more than twenty-two millions of men. Add to this well over a couple of hundred million tons of oil, coal, and warlike stores; remember that ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... on him at his later lodgings in Turner-street, Commercial-road. He occupied the ground floor, consisting of two rooms. The back was his bedroom, and the front his library and workshop. It was what the Americans call a one-horse affair. Shelves all round the room were filled with books. Mr. Bradlaugh sat at a desk with his back to the fireplace. On his right was the door communicating with his bedroom facing him the door opening on the passage, and on his right (? left) the street window. The ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... do it sure as shooting!" he blustered. "If that machine isn't going to come up to the maker's guarantee, I will make my dad get me one that will. I won't tinker round with any one-horse bunch of junk like ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... Bontecou, 80 Broadway, New York, a cushion tire Credenta bicycle, 1892 model, with double chime bell (Harrison) and Orient lamp, in perfect condition, for a one-horse-power boat engine or a 5x7 photo camera ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... assuring herself that after all the matter was of no great importance, and that she should have attended to it herself, and must do it the next day, she was surprised to find how glad she was when, turning, she saw emerging from the woodland road a one-horse wagon with Mr. Lodloe sitting by the driver, and a female ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... Roman camp. The Roman road, now hardly traceable, cuts the road from Cranleigh near Ewhurst. Ewhurst lives comfortably fifty years behind Cranleigh, and is still, happily, what the late Louis Jennings called it in Field Paths and Green Lanes, "a one-horse place." When Mr. Jennings was at Ewhurst everybody was half-asleep. "At the post-office a woman and a girl turned out in some consternation to look at me, thinking, perhaps, that I had a letter concealed about me, and was about to post it, and thus overwhelm ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the thirty-ninth kilometer-stone we met my host, Tetuanui, in his one-horse vehicle, inspecting the road. He agreed, though a little reluctantly, to take us to the marae (pronounced mah-rye). We turned down a road across a private, neglected property, and for almost a mile urged the horse through brambles and brush that had overgrown the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... brother human downright soggy drunk; drunk all over; drunk in the eyes, in the mouth, in the small of his back, in his knees, in his boots, clear down to his toes! How one's heart is drawn toward him by this common bond of human infirmity! How it recalls the camp, the one-horse mining town, the social gathering of the "boys" at Dan's, or Jim's, or Jack's; and the clink of dimes and glasses at the bar; how distances are annihilated and time set back! Of a verity, when I saw that man, with reason dethroned and the garb of self-respect thrown aside, I was ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Silver Street, up Parson's Lane, by the Chapels (which might have taught me better), and then to be deposited like a dead log at Gaffar Westwood's, who it seems does not "insure" against intoxication. Not that the mode of conveyance is objectionable. On the contrary, it is more easy than a one-horse chaise. Ariel in the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... wedding trip was taken to Palatine Bridge, Deerfield, Union Springs, Farmington, Rochester and other points in New York State, to visit relatives of both families, all the long journey being made in a light one-horse wagon, many miles of it over ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... all the morning toils were over, the wide kitchen cool and still, and the one-horse wagon standing at the door, into which climbed Mary, her mother, and the Doctor; for, though invested with no spiritual authority, and charged with no ritual or form for hours of affliction, the religion of New England always expects her minister ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... cheap over here—15 cents a day American money would be a good wage for farm hands—but evidently the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, they must have two or three horses in order to get the best results from the soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in good condition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys (they use large donkeys for plowing, even if small ones for riding) they get the land in good condition in spite of the fact that they cannot get the good plows that any American farmer may ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... not buy and pay for two cents' worth of clams without trouble and a quarrel. One "course," in a two-horse carriage, costs a franc—that is law—but the hackman always demands more, on some pretence or other, and if he gets it he makes a new demand. It is said that a stranger took a one-horse carriage for a course —tariff, half a franc. He gave the man five francs, by way of experiment. He demanded more, and received another franc. Again he demanded more, and got a franc—demanded more, and it was refused. He grew vehement —was again refused, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fair First Days, Rattled down our one-horse chaise, Through the blossomed apple-boughs To the old, brown meeting-house, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... on one side of the door, and the other on the little bench on the other side of the door, each waiting until she should hear the clock strike five, to prepare tea. But it was not yet a quarter to five when a one-horse wagon containing four men came slowly down the street. Dorcas first saw the wagon, and she instantly ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... about me: not a sign of the hunt! Only odd remnants of the meet, straggling foot-passengers, terriers straining at a strap held by drunken runners—some in old Beaufort coats, others in corduroy—one-horse shays of every description by the sides of the road and sloppy girls with stick and tammies standing in gaps of the fences, straining their eyes across the ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... soon as we had notice, from the top of a bluff in the distance, that a herd of buffaloes was on the prairie, we prepared our horses; while some Indians were directed to follow our trail, with one-horse carts, to ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... of preparing the hills is to strike out furrows with a small, one-horse plough, as far apart as the rows are to be. As it is very important that the rows should be as straight as practicable, it is a good plan to run back once in each furrow, particularly on sod land where the plough will ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... screw propellers. He used, for the most part, small planes, carrying loads of only two or three pounds, and, under these circumstances, the weight carried was at the rate of 250 lbs. per horse power. His important statements with regard to these trials are that one-horse power will transport a larger weight at twenty miles an hour than at ten, and a still larger at forty miles than at twenty, and so on; that "the sustaining pressure of the air on a plane moving at a small angle of inclination to a horizontal path is many ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... make the portage from this place instead of from Cape Charles, which, though more than fifteen miles further south, and nearer to my starting-point on the other side, did not possess facilities for transportation. The slow one-horse conveyance arrived at Cherrystone half an hour after the steamer N. P. Banks had left the landing, though I heard that the kind-hearted captain, being told I was coming, waited and whistled for me till ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... leave to remark, was the one-horse hack vehicle of Dublin and the country round, which has since given place to the jaunting car, which is, in its turn, half superseded ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... morphine when he meant quinine, there would soon he an opening into the Doctors' Paradise,—the streets with only one side to them. Then I would have him strike a bold stroke,—set up a nice little coach, and be driven round like a London first-class doctor, instead of coasting about in a shabby one-horse concern and casting anchor opposite his patients' doors like a Cape-Ann fishing-smack. By the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces in the background. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... on the Natal sugar plantations, and in that particularly one-horse Colony, every native of India is known indiscriminately by the term of "coolie." John, it is true, was a native of India, but he was no "coolie"; he could read, write, and speak English, and was altogether a superior person. I would not take him up country to be bullied ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... one-horse chaise, said to be so called by a Lord Chief Justice, from their being so frequently used on Sunday jaunts ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... man's habitation,—a little, low frame house, on a knoll, surrounded by the quaint devices and rude makeshifts of these quaint and rude people. A few poles stuck in the ground, clapboarded with cedar-boughs and cornstalks, and supporting a roof of the same, gave shelter to a rickety one-horse wagon and some farm implements. Near this there was a large, compact tent, made entirely of cornstalks, with, for door, a bundle of the same, in the dry, warm, nest-like interior of which the husking of the corn crop ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne tearing down the Park slopes after her staghounds, in her one-horse chaise—a hot redfaced woman.... She was neither better bred nor wiser than you and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand basin. Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for having her rise off ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... owner alone is the one these one-horse-chaise reformers would start their Dobbin after. The large landowner should be cut down in his holdings, and their plan is just the one to fix him and make him let go. They will tax him in such a way that he cannot pay, and then they have got him, they tell us, as they leisurely jog along over ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... rode towards Kilcullen, I saw a crowd of the peasant-people assembled round a one-horse chair, and my friend in green, as I thought, making off half a mile up the hill. A footman was howling 'Stop thief!' at the top of his voice; but the country fellows were only laughing at his distress, and making all sorts of jokes at the adventure ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with a quick half-suppressed sigh, "and as I adore children, I am afraid I can't quite sympathize—O Ermie, what a queer old shandrydan is coming up the avenue! Who can be in it? Who can be coming here at this hour? Why, I do declare it's the one-horse fly from the station! Noah's Ark, we call that fly, it's so rusty and fusty, and so little in demand; for you know, when people come to Glendower, we always send for them, and I don't think the station is any use except for shunting purposes, ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the winter carriages immensely; the open carriole is a kind of one-horse chaise, the covered one a chariot, set on a sledge to run on the ice; we have not yet had snow enough to use them, but I like their appearance prodigiously; the covered carrioles seem the prettiest things in nature to make love in, as there are curtains to draw before ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... and a large manufacturing firm near Boston. Mr Bell of Toronto exhibited his excellent plough, straw-cutter, and reaping machine. The first prize for the latter article was awarded to Mr Helm of Cobourg for the recent improvements which he has effected. Mr Clark of Paris exhibited his one-horse thrashing-mill, which attracted ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... Governor's gate and down Northwest Street to the Circle, where a strange sight met my eyes. A crowd like that I had seen on the dock had collected there, Mr. Swain and Mr. Hammond and other barristers holding them in check. Mounted on a one-horse cart was a stuffed figure of the detested Mr. Hood. Mr. Hammond made a speech, but for the laughter and cheering I could not catch a word of it. I pushed through the people, as a boy will, diving between legs to get a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his one-horse van journeyed from Milbrook to Seacombe every Tuesday and Friday, passing Mrs. Barnes' cottage on their way; and on Wednesdays and Saturdays he journeyed home again. The two places were only ten miles apart, but, as ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... such a good man at his job should be practicing in a little one-horse place like ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... a detective, and know my business without receiving instructions from the police of a one-horse town," retorted Dyke Darrel in anger. "I am willing, however, to visit your chief, ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... Henry in the characters of seseshers! As well fancy John Bunyan and Dr. Watts in spangled tites, doin the trapeze in a one-horse circus. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... walked to-day through the principal street of Tokio from end to end, a distance of three miles. It is a fine, broad avenue, crowded with people and vehicles drawn or pushed by men. There is also a line of small one-horse wagons running as omnibuses on the street—novel feature, unknown anywhere else in the Empire. Our appearance attracted such crowds whenever we stopped at a shop, that the police had to drive the gazers away. The city ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... what a man gets for running around in such one-horse countries. In Leipzig they sat a nigger down beside me at the table. In Amsterdam they had cheese for breakfast. In Munich the head waiter had never heard of buckwheat cakes. In Mannheim they charged me ten pfennigs extra for a cake ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... intellect, but of appetite." What was judgment given us for if not to control our appetites? If Appetite be paramount to judgment why do we hang rape-fiends? Let me tell you the idea that the brainiest men of the world die drunkards is the merest moonshine. If only men of genius drank liquor a one-horse still would supply the demand and be idle six months in the year. Take the thousand greatest men the world has produced —the Thousand Immortelles—and not 2 per cent. of them died drunkards, yet 98 per cent. ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and the new. Really it amounts to this, that hardly any institution in England thinks for itself. Museum authorities, like sheep, follow the lead of the most ancient bell-wether; and the reason of this is not far to seek. Curators, as a rule, are men with one hobby—"one-horse" men, as the Americans so aptly put it—"sometimes wise, sometimes otherwise," but in many cases totally devoid of that technical education so much needed in reconciling the divergent atoms of the institutions they represent; in fact, head ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... organizing, aren't you," goes on Old Hickory. "Well, here's an opportunity to spread yourself. One of the manufacturing units we control out in Ohio. Three thousand men, in a little one-horse town where there's nothing better to do in their spare time than go to cheap movies and listen to cheaper walking delegates. I guess they need you more than we do in the bond room. Organize 'em as much as you like. Show 'em how to play. Give that He-Crab ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... Jimmie. "Mifflin! You can be mighty good and glad it isn't. I don't know where you got your idea of Mifflin, Mary Rose, for it's about the deadest one-horse town I ever ran across. And the people. Huh! A collection ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... little one-horse jaunting car, consisting of a wooden seat on an axle-tree, and four poles which supported a tarpaulin to shelter us against the rain. These cars changed horses every four or five miles, and served to convey to Paris the masons from the Bourbonnais and from Auvergne, the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... commonest vehicle known to the people of the Hoosier capital. The panic of 1873 had hit the town so hard, the community's punishment for its sins of inflation had been so drastic, that it had accepted meekly the rebuke implied in its designation as a one-horse town. In 1884 came another shock to confidence, and in 1893, still another earthquake, as though the knees of the proud must at intervals be humbled. The one-horse station wagon continued to symbolize the quiet domesticity of the citizens of the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... attached. On this animal he would set out from home, to be gone for weeks together, with no baggage but a pair of saddle-bags containing a change of linen, and an old cotton umbrella to shelter him from sun or rain. When he got a little more of this world's goods he set up a one-horse buggy, a very sorry and shabby-looking affair which he generally used when the weather promised to be bad. The other lawyers were always glad to see him, and landlords hailed his coming with pleasure; but he was one of those gentle, uncomplaining men whom they would put off ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... we crossed a frozen stream tributary to the Ingodah, and proceeded rapidly over an excellent road. We met several carts, one-horse affairs on two wheels, laden with hay for the Chetah market. One man generally controlled three or four carts, the horses proceeding in single file. The country was more open than on the other side of Chetah, ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... with these directions, I took a one-horse carriage this morning for Coniston Waters, in order to ascend the 'Old Man.' The waiter at the 'Salutation' at Ambleside, which we made headquarters, told me that I could not make the ascent, as the day would not be fine; but I have not travelled six months ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... in the wind, Winifred? Professor Black, who leads the choir in the Linden Street church, is going to get up a comic opera with a cast from the various choirs, and I am invited. We are to go to Northville and give it in the little one-horse theater there. Won't it be gay? We shall astonish the natives of that small town! Have you ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... were up. Then again, he wanted to see the wagons brought on so he could count them and get a fair inventory of the show and what it possessed. He soon discovered that the Sully Hippodrome Circus was no one-horse affair, though considerably smaller than the one ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... ever known life in a great city. Mr. Evarts, Mr. Sam Hooper, of Boston, and perhaps one or two of the diplomatists had alone mixed in that sort of world. The happy village was innocent of a club. The one-horse tram on F Street to the Capitol was ample for traffic. Every pleasant spring morning at the Pennsylvania Station, society met to bid good-bye to its friends going off on the single express. The State Department was lodged in an ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... often tells you all you want to know about a person. Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly pronounced haaelth)—instead of, How do you do? or, How are you? Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety one-horse wagon a "kerridge." Or telling a person who has been trying to please you that he has given you pretty good "sahtisfahction." Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing, or that you have been "stoppin'" at Deacon Somebody's,—and other such expressions. One of my friends had a little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... afforded us a tolerably accurate idea, at the risk of our bones, of the nature of French crossroads. Having understood that the road from Montelimart to Grignan was inaccessible to four-wheeled carriages, we set off at four in the morning in a patache, the most genteel description of one-horse chair which the town afforded. Let no one imagine that a patache bears that relation to a cabriolet which a dennet does to a tilbury; for ours, at least, would in England have been called a very sorry higgler's cart. The inside accommodations were so arranged, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... thing you can tell a gentleman by—his freakishness. A gentleman ain't accountable to nobody, any more than a tramp on the roads. He ain't got to keep time. The governor got like this once in a one-horse Mexican pueblo on the uplands, away from everywhere. He lay all day long ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... church, too. And here to the left you see Stillwell's corrals and bunk-houses and his stables all falling to pieces. The ranch has gone to ruin. All the ranches are going to ruin. But most of them are little one-horse affairs. And here—see that cloud of dust down in the valley? It's the round-up. The boys are there, and the cattle. Wait, I'll get ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... will be satisfied to know that two days after found me in an open carriage on my way to Rochester. The road lay entirely through cultivated land, and had no peculiar features. The only thing I saw worth noticing, was two men in a light four-wheel one-horse shay, attached to which were at least a dozen others, some on two wheels, some on four. I of course thought they were some country productions going to a city manufacturer. What was my astonishment at finding upon inquiry, that it was merely an American phase of hawking. The ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... the occurrences that ensued. How Mr. Theodosius and Miss Lavinia danced, and talked, and sighed for the remainder of the evening—how the Miss Crumptons were delighted thereat. How the writing-master continued to frisk about with one-horse power, and how his wife, from some unaccountable freak, left the whist-table in the little back-parlour, and persisted in displaying her green head-dress in the most conspicuous part of the drawing-room. How the supper consisted ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... it used to be," he would regretfully say, as entire weeks would elapse without a fatal termination of a row; "fellers who used to shoot on sight only sit around and jaw now. It's gettin' slow as any d——d one-horse town east of the Mississippi." And in the general gloom of the situation Mr. Perkins had more than once regretted that he had not gone ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... stipulations, the committee of twelve commenced their duties. When it came my turn to receive the property necessary to take me out of the State I was told to fit myself out comfortably. I told them that I had a wife and one child; that I had two good wagons, one a heavy one-horse wagon, with thills, and that I had a large mare which was equal to a common span; that the mare and wagon would do me. I wanted some bedding and our clothing, and some other traps of little value. I had a good milk cow that I wished to ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... volunteer for service in the coming invasion of Britain. Through Quintus he invited Caesar's criticisms on his own very poor verses, and wrote a letter, obviously meant to be shown, expressing boundless gratification at a favourable notice: "If he thinks well of my poetry, I shall know it is no mere one-horse concern, but a real four-in-hand." "Caesar tells me he never read better Greek. But why does he write [Greek: rhathumotera] ['rather careless'] against one passage? He really ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... were burned at the stake for entertaining are now the commonplace axioms of every school boy's thought; our economics change until schools of thought shaped to old industrial conditions are as outmoded as a one-horse shay beside an automobile; our philosophy changes like our science when Kant, for example, starts a revolution in man's thinking, worthy, as he claimed, to be called Copernican; our cultural habits change until marooned communities in the Kentucky mountains, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... its slow march again. It was a one-horse express-cart, belonging, as I afterwards learned, to a compatriot of Korwsky the tailor. This man, Simon Karlin, earned a meager living for himself and his family by miscellaneous delivery in his neighborhood; but now he was so fascinated ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... thing as foolish as anything I ever heard of. I had calls to pay, and I asked Bee to go with me. She said she'd go if I'd get a carriage, so I said I would, and told her to order it. But it seems that all the good ones were engaged for a funeral, and they sent us a one-horse brougham with the driver not in livery. We didn't notice it until we opened the front door. Then Bee sailed in. 'Why are you not in livery?' she demanded. 'I shall certainly report you to Mr. Overman. He ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... relief, I carried William off and in the road just outside the town we ran against the Chestertons who had been for a drive in Romney Marsh; Chesterton was heated and I think rather swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we chatted in the road and William got his ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... lost no time in putting himself in communication with the sheriff there, who seemed to Mr. Hunter not to be entirely reliable; indeed, from a careful survey of faces of the loungers in the bar-room of the one-horse town of border settlers, the sheriff appeared to be hand-in-glove with the thief, so he concluded that his only chance of any help in the matter could come from the landlord and the telegraph operator,—the ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... midst of rude plenty. If further demonstration be needed, I will point to the groceries and wine stores of Ennis. There are at least three of these almost on the scale of Fortnum and Mason's or Hedges and Butler's. Now Ennis is what an American traveller might be tempted to call a "one-horse" town of some six or seven thousand inhabitants, yet its grocery and drapery stores would hardly be beaten in York or Chester. Every imaginable eatable or drinkable can be obtained always for ready money, and very often on credit, and I am informed that ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... master had a job thirty miles distant, he frequently walked the distance on a hot summer's day, with his carpenter's tools upon his back. At that time light vehicles, or any kind of one-horse carriage, were very rarely kept in country places, and mechanics generally had to trudge to their place of work, carrying their tools with them. So passed the first ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... guests. "You have seen a thousand of them laboring in this valley. Hundreds of them carry babies on their backs or set them to sleep on a gunnysack between the rows of vegetables. There is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling with a one-horse cultivator, while her sisters and her mother hold up their end with five male Japs in the ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... had brought the little one-horse sleigh for his daughter, and, soon after breakfast, Ellen saw it drive off with her. Mr. Van Brunt then harnessed his own and carried Ellen home. Ill though she felt, the poor child made an effort, and spent part of the morning in finishing the ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... she exclaimed, in great excitement, evidently mistaking the words. Then regaining her husband, she again grasped his arm, and the mass at the same time opening its ranks, the two hastened on to a couple of those little black one-horse vehicles, chancing there to stand, which run to St. Cloud. In one of these already sat the Duchesses of Montpensier and Nemours with two of the children. In the other stood the two remaining children. ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg |
