"Tattered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some vacant space in a hive of bees. A chamber just over the bees seems to be preferred, as here they get the benefit of the warmth generated by the insects. One very cold winter I wrapped up one of my hives with a shawl. Before long I noticed that the shawl was beginning to have a very torn and tattered appearance. On examination, I found that a native mouse had established itself in the top of the hive, and had levied a ruinous tax upon the shawl to make itself a nest. Never was a fabric more completely reduced into its original elements than were large ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... pockets, bringing to light an unopened package and a tattered remnant which proved to contain one dilapidated cigarette. He studied it thoughtfully. "I'll smoke this wreck," he decided, "while it's still smokable. We'll save the rest of them—I'm afraid it'll be a long time between smokes. Well, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... the summer, and might not have known enough to ask us to dinner if they had been at home, and so all the grand empty salons, with their resounding pavements, their grim pictures of dead ancestors, and tattered banners with the dust of bygone centuries upon them, seemed to brood solemnly of death and the grave, and our spirits ebbed away, and our cheerfulness passed from us. We never went up to the eleventh ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to tell you is how easily some of your pictures can be turned into tableaux-vivants, or even acted. There was "Pattikin's House;" I am sure we had the greatest fun with those pictures, we being so many girls: and "The man all tattered and torn that married the maiden all forlorn;" that was on p. 652 of the volume for 1876: "The Minuet," in January, 1877: "Hagar in the Desert," in June, 1877; my aunty did that, and it was lovely: the little girl in "The Owl That Stared," ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... cold showery morning when we landed, to photograph a party of natives, and see them throw boomerangs and spears. They were the most miserable-looking objects I ever beheld; rather like Fuegians. The group consisted of two men, dressed partly in tattered European clothes, and partly in dirty, greasy kangaroo-skins heaped one on the top of another, and two women in equally disreputable costumes. One of the latter had a piccaninny hung behind her in an opossum-skin, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... selfish reflection, he did not observe, or, if he did, cared not for, the frail figure and sweet face of one who cautiously tiptoed into the greenroom. It was Orange Moll, whose sad countenance and tattered garments betokened a sadder story. Her place was in the pit, with her back to the stage, vending her oranges to artisans, girls with vizards or foolish gallants. She had no right ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... for us to fight for. Peace has been proclaimed. The conqueror takes from you a plot of ground twenty-four hundred square miles in extent. The one lying here takes from you only six feet of earth. To you remain your tattered flag and your wounds. Return to your homes. My sword has finished its work, and will accompany the saint ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... the dull thud of hoofs pounding rapidly upon soft turf was borne to their ears, and a moment later a big gray horse ridden by a little negro boy, as tattered a specimen of his race as one might expect to see, came pounding into sight. With some difficulty he brought the big horse to a standstill in front of them and grabbing off his ragged cap stammered out ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... said Jack; "but still let us reconnoitre. It's not a farm-house; it must belong to a person of some consequence—all the better—they will see that we are gentlemen, notwithstanding our tattered dress. I suppose we are to stick to the story ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... reached the house, and inquired for Miss Atkins (for that was the lady's name), he was shown up three pair of stairs, into a small room lighted by one narrow lattice, and patched round with shreds of different-coloured paper. In the darkest corner stood something like a bed, before which a tattered coverlet hung by way of curtain. He had not waited long when she appeared. Her face had the glister of new-washed tears on it. "I am ashamed, sir," said she, "that you should have taken this fresh piece of trouble about one so little worthy of it; but, to the humane, I know there is a pleasure ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... Side by side with the velvet and furs were the poor tattered garments of the little sweeper. Side by side were the two child faces, one so rosy and radiant, the other so pale and care-worn; and the brougham rolled them both ...
— Harper's Young People, December 16, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a basket; the girl, warming her hands by a few withered sticks that are blazing on the ground, and a wretched mendicant,[3] wrapped in a tattered and parti-coloured blanket, entreating charity from the rosy-fingered vestal who is going to church, complete the group. Behind them, at the door of Tom King's Coffee-house, are a party engaged in a fray, likely to create business for both surgeon and magistrate: ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... cannot but he seizes the colours of the 33rd whose young lieutenant has just fallen, and who threaten to yield under the devastating cross-fire: he brandishes the tattered colours, high up above his head—as high as he can hold them—he calls to his men to rally, ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... I went to walk by the river-side, for I had no appetite. Everything around seemed gloomy: a cold and damp easterly wind blew from the mountains, and black, heavy clouds spread over the plain. I observed at a distance a man in a tattered coat: he was wandering among the rocks, and seemed to be looking for plants. When I approached, he turned round at the noise; and I saw that he had an interesting countenance in which a settled melancholy, strongly marked by benevolence, formed the principal feature. His long black ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... it from the opposite end, to the beating of many drums. The first thing Walker noticed was that he wore a square-skirted eighteenth century coat and a tattered pair of brocaded knee breeches on his bare legs; the second was that he limped—ever so slightly. Still he limped and—with the right leg. Walker felt a strong desire to see the man's face, and his heart thumped ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... afternoon, when the light was nearly gone out of the sky, a band of venerable pilgrims stood at the great gates of the Monastery. Their garments were tattered, their shoes were in sad disrepair. They had walked (they said) all the way from Jerusalem. Might they find shelter for the night? The tale they told, and the mere sight of their trembling old beards, would have melted ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... mosaics, and the semi-dome is mosaic work to match. This sounds a mere catalogue, but it is quite impossible to give any idea of this singularly richly-decorated chapel without descending to detail. The tattered colours used at the Crimea and Waterloo hang from their staves on the pillars. Anyone is admitted to parade service on Sunday mornings by ticket, to be procured beforehand by writing ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... maternal in a woman that makes a man turn to her when everything else fails. The eternal boy in him goes to have his wounded pride bandaged, his tattered self-respect repaired. If he loves the woman, he wants her to ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... not for nothing they get kept at sea, ye may take your oath. And many's the one that leaves this in the highest of expictations, and is glad enough to get back to it in a tattered shirt and a whole skin, and with an increase of contintment under the ways of ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... together money to pay the pawnbroker's interest year by year, and prevent its running out; so that if anything came of it, it could still be redeemed. Nothing had come of it; and, as I tell you, she died with the scrap of paper, all worn and tattered, in her hand. The time was out in two days; I thought something might one day come of it too; and so redeemed ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... all this strange history could Alan decipher, so with aching eyes he shut up the stained and tattered volume, and at last, just as the day was ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... features everywhere, in the pastoral scenes that began as soon as the town ended. Women carrying sails and nets toiled through the green aisles of the roads and lanes. Fishing-tackle hung in company with tattered jerseys outside of huts hidden in grasses and honeysuckle. The shepherdesses, as they followed the sheep inland into the heart of the pasture land, were busy netting the coarse cages that trap the finny tribe. Long-limbed, vigorous-faced, these shepherdesses were Biblical figures. In their coarse ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Prince's chamber is prepared, with all 510 The very furniture the Prince used when Last here, in its full splendour. (Aside). Somewhat tattered, And devilish damp, but fine enough by torch-light; And that's enough for your right noble blood Of twenty quarterings upon a hatchment; So let their bearer sleep 'neath something like one Now, as he one day will for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... considered her with surprise; then he scratched his head and shifted his weight from one tattered sole ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the Grand Canal—and lacks absolutely that charm of infinitely varied, if somewhat faded or even shabby, colour that characterizes the "Queen of the Adriatic," there is yet certainly nothing monotonous in her monotone of mellow red-brick; and certainly nothing so dilapidated, and tattered, and altogether poverty-stricken as one stumbles against in Venice in penetrating every narrow lane, and in sailing up almost every canal. Of Venice we may perhaps say, what Byron said of ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... mountain ridge they saw Jerusalem's empty streets; her shrine Laid waste where Greeks profaned the Law With idol and with pagan sign. Mourners in tattered black were there With ashes ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... cotton handkerchief, which was tied round his waist, were his only apparel. By far the most showy and conspicuous object in the yard, was an immense umbrella, made of figured cotton of different patterns, with a deep fringe of coloured worsted, which was stuck into the ground. But even this was tattered and torn, and dirty withal, having been in Forday's possession for many years, and it is only used on public and sacred occasions. I had been sitting amongst the revellers till the speaker had finished his harangue, when I embraced the opportunity, as they were about ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... pleasant spectacle. A kindly smile lit up the clear eyes, and moved the lips half-concealed by the grizzled mustache. The bonhomie of this smile was irresistible, and the aged private soldier, in his poor, tattered fighting-jacket, was made to feel by it that his commander-in-chief regarded him as a friend ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... maintenance, and also with little articles of luxury for his patron's use, in supplying which much precaution was necessarily used. After some compliments, the Baron occupied his usual couch, and Waverley reclined in an easy chair of tattered velvet, which had once garnished the state bed-room of Tully-Veolan (for the furniture of this mansion was now scattered through all the cottages in the vicinity), and went to sleep as comfortably as if he had been in a ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the poor old soldier was close upon them, holding out his hat for a gift. Aunt Amy stopped, asked him several questions, and, finding that he was pious, cheered him with gentle words of hope. She then dropped a piece of gold in his tattered ...
— Aunt Amy - or, How Minnie Brown learned to be a Sunbeam • Francis Forrester
... to my ideal, Mate, never fear. I've held on to her garments until they are tattered and torn. You introduced me to her and I have never lost ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... 14 a large caravan hove in sight, composed of perhaps a score of horse-sleds, which, as we neared it, halted, and a European emerged from the leading sled to greet us. This bearded giant in tattered furs proved to be the Russian naturalist, Yokelson, returning to Europe after a two years' exploration in North-Eastern Siberia—principally in the neighbourhood of Kamtchatka and the Okhotsk Sea. From Gijiga, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... girl, she's so scared she can't talk and so mad she can hardly see. She stands there limp in a tattered skirt with some of her gray store hair that has slipped its moorin's restin' jaunty over one ear and ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... fall in love, as they call it, a hundred times; bestowing their affections, such as they are, sometimes on one, sometimes on another; until at last perhaps the owner of a handsome face offers his hand and gets in return the tattered thing they call their heart. God help me! this is called love. But thank God, for the credit of human nature, there are others who love as they should—purely, nobly, with their whole soul. These love once, and only once; and wo to the man who unwisely, or for his own ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... and once trembled at the war-cry of the Knisteneaux, and once forgotten to throw into the fire the tongue of a beaver as an offering to the Being who bade it cross his hunting-path in a season of scarcity; and though the maiden had suffered her father to wear tattered mocassins, and her brothers broken snow-shoes, and thought of her lover when she should have been thinking of the Master of Life—still the canoes did not sink, but floated slowly on, level with the water, towards the Happy ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the shelves of old libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a pile of dusty books in a barrel,—there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some colonist, in affectionate ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the Cap Martin—the steep pathway to it—and Richard mounting it, with that pale look, those tattered, sea-stained leaves in his hand—and the tragedy that had to be told, in his eyes, and on his lips. Could any other human being have upheld her as he did through that first year—through the years after? Was it not to him that she owed everything that had been ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Fakir, renouncement, fakir's garments be; In lowliness; patched and tattered clothes His robe of tatters and of rags still fares the devotee. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the well-remembered march swells upon the ear; the very notes of that rough voice which we have heard amidst the crash of battle and the rolling of artillery, speak softly to our senses like a father's welcome; from the well-tattered flag that waves above us to the proud steed of the war-worn trumpeter, each has ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... along the highway a dusty tramp forlorn, A tattered coat conceals beneath a bent and aged form, With hardened weary visage, a bell he faintly rings; The air is rent with pitying notes, ...
— Poems - A Message of Hope • Mary Alice Walton
... beyond Parc-an-als, where a spring gushes from the face of the cliff, he came upon a man who stood under it catching the trickle in a stone basin, and halted a few paces off to watch him. The man's hair and beard were long and unkempt, his legs bare, and he wore a tattered tunic which reached below the knees and was caught about his waist with a thong girdle. For some minutes he did not perceive the Singer; but turned at length, and the two eyed ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... looking at popguns!" said Rob shortly. But when he saw how tattered the boy's jacket was, he said more softly, ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... great honour came to light; the Papists' confutations are kept in darkness, and do stink. Oh, said Luther, how willingly would I that their confutations might appear to the world; then I would set upon that old torn and tattered skin, and in such sort would baste it, that the flitches thereof should fly about here and there; but they shun the light. This time twelvemonths no man would have given a farthing for the Protestants, ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... years ago, a tattered flag, its broad stripes and bright stars still gleaming through the smoke of a fierce battle, moved Francis Scott Key to scribble a few words on the back of an envelope, the words that became our National Anthem. Today, that Star-Spangled ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... removed the soldiers presented a ghastly sight. Their clothes were tattered and torn, blood-stained and mudstained, while the raw wounds seemed to glare wickedly against the sun, air, and dust. It was pitiable to see the men striving to protect their injuries from the driving sand, in vain, because the sand penetrated everywhere. Consequently ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... hills bounding the Thessalian plain-land lingered the last bars of light. It was oppressively warm, and man and beast were utterly fatigued. Quintus Drusus stripped off his armour, and flung himself on the turf inside his tattered leather tent. Vast had been the changes eighteen months of campaigning had made in him. He had fought in Italy, in Spain, in the long blockade of the Pompeians at Dyrrachium. He had learned the art of war in no gentle school. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Roman winter; grim, portentous old hags, such as Michael Angelo painted, draped in majestic raggery; mothers and swarming bambins; slouching countrymen, dark of beard and noble of countenance, posed in superb attitudes, lazy, tattered, and majestic. There came the red troops, the black troops, the blue troops of the army of priests; the snuffy regiments of Capuchins, grave and grotesque; the trim French abbes; my lord the bishop, with his footman (those wonderful ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and why nobody ever wrote to him. Had the man committed some terrible crime, and fled to the army to hide his guilt? Blakely suggested that he must have murdered "the old folks." What did he mean by eternally conning that tattered Latin grammar? And was his name Bladburn, anyhow? Even his imperturbable amiability became suspicious. And then his frightful reticence! If he was the victim of any deep grief or crushing calamity, why did n't he seem unhappy? What business ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... less care, took no thought for the life of her patient. She was intent on making him fit to put between her clean sheets. She found the tattered garments none too tenacious in their hold to the little, half-naked body. One or two buttons and a string were their only attachments. Norah pulled them off with gingerly fingers, and holding them at arm's length took them to the bath-room window whence she pitched them down ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... was in better condition than I, his clothes were not torn to shreds or covered with blood, his red flannel waistcoat and purple breeches were intact, while my figure could only inspire pity or terror, so bloodstained and tattered was I. I took off my stockings, and the blood gushed out of two wounds I had given myself on the parapet, while the splinters in the hole in the door had torn my waistcoat, shirt, breeches, legs and thighs. I was dreadfully wounded all over my body. I made bandages of handkerchiefs, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot order, he was born with the nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at their hands the most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimental banner; and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one hoarse cry and fell upon the tyrant ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... battlefield where, not long since, so many of our bravest had fallen that Britain might still be Britain. Even yet, upon its torn and trampled surface I could read something of the fight—here a broken shoulder belt, there a cartridge pouch, yonder a stained and tattered coat, while everywhere lay ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... the horrible cough that tore him as with the cruel wind. He was a dreadful creature, with watery eyes, and a head and moustache of dirty gray. His long and unvenerable hairs strayed loose beneath the dunghill relic which crowned them. The rain was in his hair and beard, and had so soaked his tattered dress that it clung to him like the feathers of a drenched fowl. He shook and wheezed and panted, and gripped the air with tremulous fingers, and through the rents in his clothing his white flesh gleamed ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... ev'ry thing That to the feaste was appertinent; Right nought was she abash'd* of her clothing, *ashamed Though it were rude, and somedeal eke to-rent;* *tattered But with glad cheer* unto the gate she went *expression With other folk, to greet the marchioness, And after ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... ripple along its banks, he felt the slow and dreamy motion of the boat it bore; and his mind was filled with unaccustomed thought, and a strange yearning which he did not understand. There was something singularly attractive about the lad, although his clothes were tattered, his golden hair and delicate skin were begrimed, his great bright eyes had no intelligent expression in them, and there was that discontented undisciplined look about his mouth which is common to uneducated men. He had no human knowledge, but he had capacity, and he had music, the divine ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... brought her hand back to her lips and kissed it. Then another did the same—a thin, dark-browed girl with a ragged red shawl on her head. The uncouth men stood shoulder to shoulder, staring with unwinking eyes. A tall, pale shepherd youth was erect and motionless in a tattered hat and a brown cloak, overtopping the others by his head and thin throat, and there was something Sphinx-like in the expression of his still, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Robin had picked up at a bookstall a copy of an early and quite valuable edition of Burns' poems. He had sat smoking with me in the library late the same night, turning over the pages of the tattered volume, and quoting bits, in broad vernacular, from "Tam o' Shanter" and "The Cottar's Saturday Night." Suddenly he began, ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... than we care to say to read her mother's and Isabella Keith's letters, written immediately after her death. Old and withered, tattered and pale, they are now: but when you read them, how quick, how throbbing with life and love! how rich in that language of affection which only women and Shakespeare and Luther can use,—that power of detaining the soul over the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the middle of the freight-car, looking down in wonder at the fugitives, was a tall vagabond of the most picturesque type. No ragamuffin was ever so tattered and torn as this rakish individual. His clothes barely hung together on his lank frame; he was barefoot and hatless; a great mop of black hair topped his shrewd, rugged face; coal-black eyes snapped and twinkled beneath shaggy brows and a delighted, knowing grin spread slowly ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... usual tasks of dish-washing, table-setting, and looking after the children. Mell was tired of the heat; tired of the smell of soap, of being lectured; and when supper was over was very glad to sit at peace on the door-steps and read her favorite book, a tattered copy of the Fairy Tales. Soon she forgot the trials of the day. "Once upon a time there lived a beautiful Princess," she read, but just then came a sharp call. "Mell, Mell, you tiresome girl, see what Tommy is about;" and Mrs. Davis, dashing past, snatched Tommy away from ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... heard of Virginia's death when, at the end of the Seven Days, he was brought wounded into Richmond. As he lay upon church cushions on the floor of an old warehouse on Main Street, with Big Abel shaking a tattered palm-leaf fan at his side, a cavalryman came up to him and held out a hand that trembled slightly ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... shoes upon velvet carpets, ran with bare and bleeding feet over stocks and stones, vainly asking help, which none gave her; for, indeed, seeing her thus, in mad flight, in a nightdress, with flying hair, her only garment a tattered silk petticoat, it was difficult not to—think that this woman was, as her brothers-in-law ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... in the little drawing-room, divided from each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with tattered school-books. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... foot, which are suspended over the royal arms at the east end of nave. They were presented to the corporation by Lieut. Col. Stovin, of that regiment, and how much their intrepid defenders suffered in guarding them, may be known from their worn and tattered appearance. ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... fare and home) the fatted beam, You may, who can say, fall into some place of easy virtue! Through your dislike of the gauze hat as mean, You have come to be locked in a cangue; Yesterday, poor fellow, you felt cold in a tattered coat, To-day, you despise the purple embroidered dress as long! Confusion reigns far and wide! you have just sung your part, I come on the boards, Instead of yours, you recognise another as your native land; What utter perversion! In one word, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... was in the open, his own somewhat tattered hope that Ashe had been able to impress his captors with his knowledge and potential. Trained to act as contact man with other races, there was a chance that Gordon had saved himself from whatever fate had been planned for the prisoners the Foanna had claimed. If that happened, Ashe could be their ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... without.] There is music in the streets nearly all the time, now, and everybody looks so cheerful and bright. [Distant fife and drums heard playing "Johnnie Comes Marching Home." EDITH springs up and runs up to window, looking out.] More troops returning! The old tattered battle-flag is waving in the wind, and people are running after them so merrily. [Music stops.] Every day, now, seems like a holiday. [Coming down.] The war is over. All the women ought to feel very happy, whose—whose husbands ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... there are patches of untidiness. 'Shells,' says the officer laconically. There is a racket of guns before us and behind, especially behind, but danger seems remote with all these Bairnfather groups of cheerful Tommies at work around us. I pass one group of grimy, tattered boys. A glance at their shoulders shows me that they are of a public school battalion. 'I thought you fellows were all officers now,' I remarked. 'No, sir, we like it better so.' 'Well, it will be a great memory for you. We ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the opposite end of a miserably furnished bed-chamber, lying back feebly in a tattered old arm-chair, was one more among the thousands of forlorn creatures, starving that night in the great city. A white handkerchief was laid over her face as if to screen it from the flame of the fire hard by. She lifted the handkerchief, startled by the sound of my footsteps as ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... hours, the same staggering release from labor and the welcome hardness of a sleeping spot on a wooden floor. Night after night it was the same—starlight and snow, fair weather and storm. Barry Houston had become a rough-bearded, tattered piece of human machinery like all the rest. ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... would often say to me, sighing and flinging back his hair in his picturesque literary way, "one must never judge by appearances! Look at this book: it has long ago been read. It is warped, tattered, and lies in the dust uncared for; but open it, and it will make you weep and turn pale. My sister is like that book. Lift the cover and peep into her soul, and you will be horror-stricken. Vera passed in some three months through experiences that would ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... involuntarily connected with the figure of a tall old man, clad in a ragged mantle, with a stout staff in his left hand, and a platter to receive an obolus in his right, accompanied by a fair boy grasping his tattered garments, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... saw that he had a tattered piece of a book in one hand, which he slipped inside his jacket as carefully as if ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... long miles they covered, at a man-killing pace that brought them into the fort, hollow-eyed and gaunt, and with their bodies swollen and raw from the sting of black flies and mosquitoes that swarmed through the holes in their tattered garments. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... younger man, clad in a jersey and sea boots, was busy coiling down something in the bows. "How about this spot," he said presently, looking up over his shoulder, "for the first one?" The rower fumbled about inside his tattered jacket, produced something that glistened in the sunlight, and ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... time like a volunteer. Her little bare feet imprinted cold kisses on the paving-stones as she put them down and drew them up alternately. The chilling rain was having a good time with her scalp, and toyed soppily with her hair—her own hair. The night-wind shrewdly searched her tattered garments, as if it had suspected her of smuggling. She saw crowds of determined-looking persons grimly ruining themselves in toys and confectionery for the dear ones at home, and she wished she was in a position to ruin ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... for it, he had to be left there, and I went away with an anxious mind as to what his busy teeth would be employed upon all night; and, sure enough, next morning a velvet curtain was found nibbled and tattered, and being converted into a nest for the enterprising gerbille! They became very amusing, tame little creatures, ready to take dandelions, nuts, or any little dainty, ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... acquaintance turned up safe and sound in Sunwich. Captain Nugent walking into the town saw him first: a tall, well-knit young man in shabby clothing, whose bearing even in the distance was oddly familiar. As he came closer the captain's misgivings were confirmed, and in the sunburnt fellow in tattered clothes who advanced upon him with out-stretched hand he reluctantly recognized ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... the avenue, under an old gateway and into a fair courtyard, which I seemed to have seen before in the pages of Country Life. The house was beautiful. There it lay, in the hot sunshine, all grey and warm and peaceful—a perfect specimen of the Tudor period, and about its walls a tattered robe of wisteria. It seemed to be smiling in its sleep. As we drove up to the great stone steps, the studded door was opened and a manservant appeared. ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... the woman danced. The lanthorn overhead threw a weird light on red caps and tricolour cockades, on the sullen faces of the men and the shoulders of the women, on the dancer's weird antics and her flying, tattered skirts. She was obviously tired, as a poor, performing cur might be, or a bear prodded along to uncongenial buffoonery. Every time that she paused and solicited alms with her tambourine the crowd dispersed, and some of ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... herself, made no mention. When she spoke from the depths of her bitterness of the war and the ruin it had left, her resentment was general rather than personal. Above the mantel in her room hung the sword of Julius Webb, sheathed under the tattered colours of the Confederate States. At her throat she wore a button that had been cut from a gray coat, and, once, after the close of the war, she had pointed to it before a Federal officer, and had said: "Sir, the women of the South have never surrendered!" ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... torn card-board which she threw before her as she leaped. She lit upon her toes and headed for the gate at top speed, pursued by a pale young man whose thin arms strove spasmodically to reach her. Scattering snow behind them, hair flying, the pair sped on like two tattered branches before a high wind; for, as they came nearer Eugene (of whom, in the tensity of their flight, they took no note), it was to be seen that both were so shabbily dressed as to be almost ragged. There was a brown patch upon the girl's faded skirt at the knee; the shortness of the ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... cabmen, peevish at the paucity of fares, curse with triple intensity the wood pavement and the luckless garrons that slide and stumble over it; the blue and benumbed fingers of Italian grinders can scarcely turn the organ handles; tattered children and half-starved women, pale, shivering, and tearful, pester the pedestrian with offers of knitted wares, and of winter nosegays, meagre and miserable as themselves. The popular cheerfulness and merry-making of Christmas time are over, and have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... into the houses and at the people who passed me. Here sat a family at breakfast, and I stood at the window looking in. O motley meal! fantastic vision! The good mother saw her lord sitting opposite, a grave, respectable being, eating muffins. But I saw only a bank-bill, more or less crumbled and tattered, marked with a larger or lesser figure. If a sharp wind blew suddenly, I saw it tremble and flutter; it was thin, flat, impalpable. I removed my glasses, and looked with my eyes at the wife. I could have smiled to see the humid tenderness with which she regarded her strange ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... jackets. When I come to a town, I throw a handful of small silver coin into the middle of the first group of boys I find in my path. The next time they see me coming they cry out lustily, 'Off with your hats, boys: here comes the rich lady!' Off go the tattered hats and caps, and my small coin ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... creature, his breast was uncovered, his eyes were bloodshot, his hair was rough and curly, his face yellow; he was dressed in a ragged shirt and a straw petticoat. He would have been called a horrible old man in his tattered straw hat. This Coimbra was the confidant, the tool of Alvez, an organizer of raids, worthy of ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... by muddy roads, and through the most shattered and tattered of villages, where there is not a whole window among all the houses, or a whole garment among all the peasants, or the least appearance of anything to eat, in any of the wretched hucksters' shops. The women wear a bright red bodice laced before ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... was a man who sat at a side table, his head resting in both his hands, so that his face could not exactly be recognized. Raven black long hair, slightly tinged with gray, fell down on his broad shoulders; the man wore sailor's clothes, but they looked tattered and worn out. Before him stood a large, half-emptied bottle of liquor. He sat motionless, and, in spite of the noise around him, remained at the table without stirring. The glance of the English sailor was at different times directed toward ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... jaguar pounced upon another man as he stooped to get water from a stream. An Indian arrow found the heart of another. The sun, fatigue, fevers, bruises, and the endless racking of limbs and brains, reduced the spirits and strength of the men. They became gaunt, hollow-eyed, tattered, unshorn, uncombed, unkempt, yet they toiled on, silent—save when they cursed and railed at fate—dogged, fiercely purposeful, resolved to die rather than turn back. Song and jest were rarely heard ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... a mouldering abbey's broadest wall, Where ruining ivies propped the ruins steep, Her folded arms wrapping her tattered pall, Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep. The fern was pressed beneath her hair, The dark green adder's tongue was there; And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak, The long, lank leaf bowed fluttering o'er ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... there until the sound of the retreating cab died away in the avenue, then, tossing back her hair, rearranging her rather tattered garden hat, and hastily wiping some tears from her eyes, she came out from her retreat, and began to look around her for some amusement. What should she do? Where should she go? How should she occupy herself? Sounds of laughter and merriment filled the air; the ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... about this time, having nothing else to do, like that old king of Bible renown, he dreamed a dream. But unlike the royal dreamer, he asked no seer or prophet to interpret his dream to him. He merely drove his hand down into his inside pocket, and fished up an ancient dream-book, greasy and tattered with use. Over this he pored until his eyes bulged and his ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... was not ugly. Under his white hair, which "looked every way for Sunday," were blue eyes and ruddy cheeks, and a mouth as pretty as it was solemn. The comical little fellow wore an unbleached cotton shirt, and tattered pantaloons, with home-made suspenders or "gallowses." The pantaloons had always been old, I think, for they were made out of a pair of his father's—his "daddy's," as he would have told you—and nobody ever knew his father to have a new pair, so they ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... to take their orderly turns at the incoming casualties, and as we looked a more serious case was brought in on an ambulance by two policemen. The patient was a ragged, disreputable-looking fellow of middle age, in grimy and tattered clothes, whose head had been roughly bandaged by the policemen who brought him. He had been knocked down and kicked on the head by a butcher's cart-horse, it seemed, in Moorgate Street, and he was quite insensible. ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... load it with sea ice, and then receding leave it piled with fantastic hummocks and pressure ridges like the Arctic sea. It has gleams of emerald and azure welling from its hummocks under gray skies. The tattered crimson of windy sunsets gets tangled in its floes and flutters in ragged beauty, and it treasures the sun's gold in the dusk of still evenings. Spring tints it with soft graygreens and autumn seems to use ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... called at Rydal Mount yesterday early, to wish our dear friends the blessings of the season. Mrs. W. met us at the door most kindly, and we found him before his good fire in the dining-room, with a flock of robins feasting at the window. He had an old tattered book in his hand; and as soon as he had given us a cordial greeting, he said, in a most animated manner, 'I must read to you what Mary and I have this moment finished. It is a passage in the Life of Thomas Elwood.' He then read to ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... name of Madgy Burke. She scrambled on a high jut of rock in the cavern; she had a bundle of straw under one arm, and a light flickering in the other hand, her grizzled locks streaming, her garments loose and tattered, all which became suddenly visible as she set fire to a great wisp of straw, and another and another she plucked from her bundle and lighted, and waved the light above and underneath. It was like a scene in a melodrama of Cavern and Witch—the best cavern scene ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... frown dividing his white brows, the thin hand on the table closing and relaxing. He was not talking to his daughter, but to his conscience. It was the old threadbare, tattered tale—spawn of the Goddess fortune; a thing of misbegotten ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... and being distraught He called not to her, but he looked again: She wore a tattered cloak, but she had naught Upon her head; and she did quake amain, And spread her wasted hands and poor attire To gather in the brightness ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... three things in the world men will die for. The Nation is one. They will die for the land where their fathers sleep. They will fling fortune, hope, peace, family bliss, life itself, all into the gulf, to save its hearths from shame, its roof trees from dishonor. They will follow the tattered rag they have made the symbol of its right, through bursting shells and hissing hail of rifle shot, and serried ranks of gleaming bayonets, 'into the jaws of death, into the mouth of Hell,' when they are ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and brandishing his sword, Endicott thrust it through the cloth, and, with his left hand, rent the red cross completely out of the banner. He then waved the tattered ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... Federals or Confederates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tattered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest-home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket,—as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle's nest! I could not help laughing; and the robins seemed to ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... happily! So fledglings wild, New-hatched in warmer nest 'neath sheltering bough, Chirp merrily to feel their feathers grow. Your mouth's a rose, Jeanne! In these volumes grand Whose pictures please you—while I trembling stand To see their big leaves tattered by your hand— Are noble lines; but nothing half your worth, When all your tiny frame rustles with mirth To welcome me. No work of author wise Can match the thought half springing to your eyes, And your dim reveries, unfettered, strange, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... again the stately emblem on the Bay State's rusted shield, Give to Northern winds the Pine-Tree on our banner's tattered field. Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board, Answering England's royal missive with a firm, "Thus saith the Lord!" Rise again for home and freedom! set the battle in array! What the fathers did of old time we their ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Quartermaster in charge, who freely gave me permission to take passage in her, advised me not to risk returning to shore. So, reluctantly, I resigned my pony, endeared to me by a hundred adventures, and directly I was floating down the James, with the white teams and the tattered groups of men, receding from me, and each moment the guns of Malvern Hills growing fainter. Away! praised be a merciful God! away from the accursed din, and terror, and agony, of my second campaign,—away forever from ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... ball far up into the blue across the sky, and the second morning shone upon the world, on lakes and oceans, and on drops of dew. But as the ball went bounding on its way, the prowling mists and the rain conspired together and took it and wrapped it in their tattered cloaks and carried it away. And through the rents in their garments gleamed the golden ball, but they held it fast and carried it right away and underneath the world. Then on an onyx step Inzana sat down and wept, who could no more be happy without her golden ball. And again the ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Clips and empty cartridges, tarnished with verdigris, lay on the ground, which, while wet, had been torn up by the hoofs of horses. Hard by the kitchen garden were graves, tagged and numbered. From the oak tree by the kitchen door, in tattered, weatherbeaten garments, hung the bodies of two men. The faces, shriveled and defaced, bore no likeness to the faces of men. The roan horse snorted beneath them, and the rider caressed and soothed it ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... in the habiliments of a private of the infantry of the line; that is to say, he wore a long-skirted, blue coat, faced with red, much soiled and stained; kerseymere breeches that were once white, met at the knee by tattered gaiters of black cloth, an old battered chapeau, and a haversack, which he carried slung over his right shoulder, on a sheathed sabre. From time to time, he paused and wiped the heavy drops of perspiration that gathered ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... almost bare, the bedstead of blistered iron, the mattress thin, the bedding tattered and worn. A soapbox was the chair on which Nellie had been sitting; there was no other. Against the wall, above a rough shelf, was a piece of mirror-glass without a frame. The window in the sloping roof was uncurtained. On the poor bed, under the ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... and seemed at last almost to stop; his blue eyes became heavier and glazed at times; and presently he fell into the habit of going out in the evenings, and not returning until I had cried myself to sleep, under my tattered quilt, with Samuel hugged close in my arms. Sometimes the red-haired girl would stop after her work for a few friendly words, proving that a slovenly exterior is by no means incompatible with a kindly heart; but as a usual thing I was left alone, after the boys had gone home from their play in the ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... had turned him down for good, Slade fished down in his warbag and hauled out an old tattered document from an oilskin case. 'Hold on a minute,' said he, 'you old shellback. I've proved to you that I can write; and I've proved to you that I have fought, and now here I'll prove to you that I can sail. If writing, fighting, and sailing don't ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... had travelled in this manner for some months, when she drew near her native glen, and the cottage that had been her father's, that had been her own, stood before her. She had travelled all the day and sold nothing. Her children were pulling by her tattered gown, weeping and crying, "Bread, mother, give us bread!" and her own ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... didn't come up much higher than his elbow, stepping forward exhibited a pale face with a long drooping nose and no chin to speak of. He seemed to have just scrambled out of a dust-bin in a tam-o'-shanter cap and a tattered soldier's coat much too long for him. Being so deadly white he looked like a horrible dirty invalid in a ragged dressing-gown. The coat flapped open in front and the rest of his apparel consisted of one brace which crossed his naked, bony ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... unarmed peasantry, maddened by despair, would resist, and a conflict ensue in which victory did not always determine on the side of arms and discipline. The military were often in requisition to seize carts of corn under process of removal, or to enforce the expulsion of some tattered, hungry, sick, woe-stricken family from their miserable holding into the "wide wide world," houseless and hopeless. Frequently the parish allowed an outcast of this description at the rate of seven-eighths of a penny per ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... for him all day and into the dark night, and loves to; but he turns his face to the wall, puts his one movable hand against his face, sobs so that his tears wash through his fingers and wet his pillow as with driving rain,—then poverty is pitiful. Or, when one sees his children hungry, tattered, with lean faces and eyes staring as with constant fear; sees them huddling under rags or cowering at a flicker meant for flame,—then poverty is hard; and then, "The poor always ye have with you," said our Christ, which ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... that another may be educated; he is abused that another may be exalted; he rests his toil-worn limbs on the cold, damp ground that another may repose on the softest pillow; he is clad in coarse and tattered raiment that another may be arrayed in purple and fine linen; he is sheltered only by the wretched hovel that a master may dwell in a magnificent mansion; and to this condition he is bound down as by an ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... Justin Peabody, Nancy's hero, to make a living anywhere, even in the West. The Dorcas members leave the church for their Saturday night suppers of beans and brown bread, but Nancy returns with her lantern at nightfall to tack down the carpet in the old Peabody pew and iron out the tattered, dog's eared leaves of the hymn-book from which she has so often sung "By cool Siloam's shady rill" with her lover in days gone by. He, still a failure, having waited for years for his luck to turn, has ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... purpose. On the second night Loaysa passed in the tools, Luis went to work with them, whipped off the staple in a trice, opened the door, and let in his Orpheus. Great was his surprise to see him on his two crutches, with such a distorted leg, and in such a tattered plight. Loaysa did not wear the patch over his eye, for it was not necessary, and as soon as he entered he embraced his pupil, kissed him on the cheek, and immediately put into his hand a big jar of wine, a box of preserves, and other sweet things, with which his wallet was well stored. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... attention. All, as soon as they emerge from underground, are cripples, whose limbs have been amputated at the joints, some higher up, some lower down. I see one mutilated Beetle who has only one leg left entire. With this odd limb and the stumps of the others lamentably tattered, scaly with vermin, he rows himself, as it were, over the dusty surface. A comrade emerges, one better off for legs, who finishes the cripple and cleans out his abdomen. So my thirteen remaining Necrophori end their days, half-devoured by their companions, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... her pretty head and began to sob hysterically, standing there under the growing daylight of the Boulevard, in her tattered ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... old bedstead, which turned up during the day. The tattered remains of a checked curtain were drawn round the bed's head, to exclude the wind, which, however, made its way into the comfortless room through the numerous chinks in the door, and blew it to and fro every ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... hat and coat as usual behind the screen. She was choosing a book from the tattered row of old favourites on the shelf when she heard a step outside. She listened, thinking that it was Camille, and fearing that the commission had not been given him. It was not like him ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Bologna, and many a stark mosque on many a sandy desert show only bare skeletons of whose completed glory we can only guess. In them the fabric was a framework for the display of the lapidary or the ceramic art—a garment destroyed, rent, or tattered by time and chance, leaving the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... London, in describing 'the blockhead's insults,' while he mentions 'the tattered cloak,' passes over the ript shoe. Perhaps the wound had gone too deep to his generous heart for him to bear even to think ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... irresistible in the long dark eyes of his companion forbade him to speak; and as though his inmost thought had been discerned by that wondrous gaze, she said to him, in the same clear voice, "I will provide." Then shame made him blush at the thought of his wretched aspect and tattered apparel; but he observed that she also was poorly attired, like a woman of the people,—wearing no ornament of any sort, nor even shoes upon her feet. And before he had yet spoken to her, they came before the ancestral tablets; and there she knelt with him and prayed, ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Heiterwand. He felt he had to take the shorter, more difficult route so as not to keep his father in suspense on the day of the festivities. Even if he did not spare his parents this anxiety, still he and his brother arrived shortly after the celebrations, in tattered clothes but fresh and shouting in spite of the ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... of black silk breeches. There was one—he of the injured arm—resplendent in a redingote of crimson velvet, whilst he of the limp supported himself upon a gold-headed cane of ebony, which was in ludicrous discord with the tattered blue coat, the phrygian cap, and the toes that peeped through his ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... the path its dizzy ledge Around a precipice's edge, When lo! a wasted female form, Blighted by wrath of sun and storm, 505 In tattered weeds and wild array, Stood on a cliff beside the way, And glancing round her restless eye, Upon the wood, the rock, the sky, Seemed naught to mark, yet all to spy. 510 Her brow was wreathed with gaudy broom; With gesture wild she waved a plume ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... secured the clothes and went into the timber. From a birch tree he pulled off a pile of bark, and as he stripped he put his old clothes on it. McTabb could hear the crackling and snapping of the fire when Billy reappeared arrayed in Indian Joe's "second best"— buckskin trousers, a worn and tattered fur coat, a fisher-skin cap, and moccasins a size too small for him. For fifteen minutes the two men talked, McTabb still drawing the dead-line at fifty paces. Then he went back and brought ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... others grew rather to dislike them: most felt merely a vague sentiment of distrust and repulsion, alike for the haughty British officer in his scarlet uniform, and for the reckless backwoodsman clad in tattered homespun or buckskin. They remained the owners of the villages, the tillers of the soil. At first few English or American immigrants, save an occasional fur trader, came to live among them. But their doom was assured; their ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... replied, sadly, "and for you, too, my devoted wife, but"—and he pointed to his tattered garments—"how can I go out in these? Who will employ a man so ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... your way," said Mr. Thomson. "I wished to do honour to your arrival; because, my dear fellow, it is my own youth that comes back along with you; in a very tattered and withered state, to be sure, but—well!—all that's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the position of a trader who repudiates ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... constant rain cast a shadow over the sunny Hoogeveld and made our lives sombre and almost unbearable. Then our tattered garments could not dry on our bodies, and everything about us was wet and dirty. Even in dry weather fuel was almost unattainable, for the treeless Hoogeveld had been almost exhausted by the many large commandos which had visited the ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... high out of the water, and amidships close down to the water-line. The Arabs squatting on the painted poops of these ships seemed sullen. They looked as cut-throat a lot as you could desire. When the boats were loaded up they drifted off, and by means of a tattered bit of sacking for a sail, and a long pole, managed to reach their destination somehow. It was curious to see these primitive craft filled with the black cases of ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... saw a small, dirty-faced boy of six, with bare feet and tattered attire, who was gazing with a look of greedy desire at the ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... little on the starboard bow, heading north under two close-reefed topsails. She was low in the water, and making heavy weather of it. The crew were seen in the mizen rigging, frantically waving. A tattered flag was flying beside them, but its nationality could not be discerned. It was impossible to render the assistance that was so eagerly sought for, but even if it had been possible it was too late, for a sea was seen to break right over her stern, ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... was lost, the forest swallowed us. Ferns joined their fronds above a horseman's head. High over these, the dead and the living rose and were hung with tattered parasites. The breeze no longer reached us; it was steaming hot; and the way went up and down so abruptly, that in one place my saddle-girth was burst and we must halt for repairs. In the midst of this rough wilderness, I was reminded of the aim of our excursion. The schoolmaster and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Not perhaps in the great centres, where the garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque, intended to be worn but a short time, have been imported from other countries; but yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering from the twisted iron hooks (made for the display of precious brocades and carpets on pageant days) which still remain in the stained whitewash, the seams of battered bricks of the solid old escutcheoned palaces; see them sometimes ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... in that direction. She busied herself with Mrs. Leonard, and the distribution of food to others, till six o'clock, and then she stood near the door to watch till her true knight should appear in his shirt-sleeves, with a shovel on his shoulder, and an old burned, tattered felt hat on his head, instead of jewelled ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... lowering sky overhead and the daylight beginning to fade, it was a desolate picture; one into which the lonely figure of the man in tattered deerskin jacket and shapeless hat somehow fitted. His attire matched the gray-white coloring of rock and boulder; his spare form and agile movements, together with the intentness of his bronzed face and the steadiness of his eyes, hinted at the quickness of observation, the stubborn endurance, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... years more, half-clad in flannel shirt and overalls, he lived in flimsy tents, tattered canvas houses, and sometimes holes in the ground. One abode of luxury, long cherished in memory, was a ten-by-twelve redwood shanty on Feather River. It not only boasted a window, but there was a round hole in the "shake" roof, fastidiously cut to fit a stove-pipe. That he never possessed ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... his wallet, and finally produced from among all sorts of rubbish an old, tattered map of the country, in the corner of which the emperor in his royal robes was still to be discerned, a sceptre in his right hand, the orb in his left. This map he carefully spread out upon the ground; the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... he fell in with an old tattered copy of Luther's "Commentary on the Galatians," "so old that it was ready to fall piece from piece if I did but turn it over." As he read, to his amazement and thankfulness, he found his own spiritual experience described. "It was as if his book had been written out ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... She had thrown a piece of white lace round her head, in place of the more elaborate preparation for the world's gaze that she was wont to make. Her dress—a study in purples—had been a marvel, but was now old, and even tattered; the ruffles at her wrist were tumbled; and the pencilling under her still fine eyes had been neglected. George, between his wife's dumb anger and his mother's folly, had passed through disagreeable times already since Lady ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the tamarisks—the parrots fly together— As the sun is sinking slowly over home; And his last ray seems to mock us, shackled in a lifelong tether That drags us back, howe'er so far we roam. Hard her service, poor her payment—she in ancient, tattered raiment— India, she the grim stepmother of our kind. If a year of life be lent her, if her temple's shrine we enter, The door is shut—we ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... his sister's account of how the corn came into the country, that that very evening he dragged out a tattered old atlas which he had rescued from the Museum waste, and began to look for the places named by the Corn Woman. They found the old Chihuahua Trail sagging south across the Rio Grande, which, on the atlas map, carried its ancient name of River ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... summon his servant at any time. The floor was bare of carpet, and the chamber of decoration. But Mr. Fogo hated decoration, and, after slinging his hammock and pushing the window open for air, gazed around on the blistered ceiling and tattered wall-paper, rubbed his hands, and announced that he should ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was far below current rates for cutting metal, but Nickie was not penurious and grasping. He threw off his tattered coat, and, draped in fragments of a shirt, in a pair of trousers, half of which fluttered in the breeze, and boots that looked like a collection of fragments, he ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... Odysseus with her magic wand. At once he shrank and withered into a wrinkled, shabby, old beggar. Then she gave him a staff and a tattered sack and sent him to his loyal swineherd while she ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... after him. He rode headlong back to the Residency, and with the impulse of a wounded creature seeking concealment, made straight for his own quarters in the inner courtyard. On the verandah he paused abruptly, for Charteris was sitting there reading a tattered number of Bell's Life. He tried to speak, but no words would come, and Charteris looked up and ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... American tourists in panamas wandered through the throng searching for their numbered chairs; vendors of seats shouted reduced prices; bareheaded women with brown babies in their arms offered programmes of the week's processions; tattered boys shrieked the daily papers, and coloured post-cards; while from the balconies of private houses ladies in black mantillas, children in white, and foreigners in gay colours looked ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... development she was about to make. A decrepit old woman, resting with bent form upon a staff, which was planted firmly before her, seemed wrapped in the general interest pervading the court. The woman was huge of frame and rough of make; her face was large and swollen, and the tattered cap and bonnet, the coarse and soiled materials which she wore, indicated one of the humblest caste in the country. Her appearance attracted no attention, and she was unmarked by all around; few having eyes for anything but the exciting ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... sunlit street still roaring with laughter, a thin, ragged, tattered figure, with the shadow of ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendancy. In every mutiny against the discipline of the college he was the ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities and acquirements. He ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... and lonely years at Charlock House, Lady Channice had, at first tentatively, then with a growing assurance in her limited sphere of action, moved away all the ugliest, most trivial things: tattered brocade and gilt footstools, faded antimacassars, dismal groups of birds and butterflies under glass cases. When she sat alone in the evening, after Augustine, as child or boy, had gone to bed, the ghostly glimmer of ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a travelling ballad-singer, and sang under the window in hopes of a small alms. When the king heard of it, he said that he must come in. And so the ballad-singer entered in his dirty tattered garments, and sang before the king and his daughter; when he had done, he asked for a small reward. ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... not shut the door. There was something in the unresentful, sad face, pale cheeks, and large eyes, that fascinated her; something about the tattered clothes, thin, wet locks of flaxen hair, and ravelled straw hat-brim, fantastic and pitiful. And as he walked wearily away, and she saw the night closing in black and dark, and felt the cold dash ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... object huddled in the sand. Together they turned it over and tugged it into semblance of human shape, for the thing had been shrouded in what proved to be a ragged cavalry blanket. Senseless, yet feebly breathing and moaning, half-clad in tattered skirt and a coarsely made camisa such as was worn by peon women of the humblest class, with blood-stained bandages concealing much of the face and head, a young Indian woman was lifted toward the light. A soldier started on the ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King |
