"Sweepings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did find him—a very harmful kind of mischief, it appeared to me. Merton was little over fifteen, and he and two or three other lads were smoking cigarettes which, to judge by their odor, must certainly have been made from the sweepings of the ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... here," with a wave of the hand towards the man in brown, "had a lot picked out for me to choose from. I have six negroes and three of those blackguards from Newgate—mighty poor policy to shoulder ourselves with such gaol sweepings. I doubt we'll repent it some day. The blacks come by way of Boston, which means that they will have to be cockered up considerably before they are fit for work. Is that you, Woodson? How have ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... sweepings shall be subject to duty either as molasses or sugar, as the case may be, according ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... the hollow of his stall, "Dake him to the shustish of the beace!" The lion himself; in his dark state, tried to roar as his hapless champion, after a desperate struggle, rolled on the ground among the spilt pence and the sweepings. ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... of saddle-bags whereof he hath robbed me, he cometh now with his story of the boothose, which I have had in my house this many a day. An you believe me not, I can bring you to witness my next-door neighbor Trecca and Grassa the tripewoman and one who goeth gathering the sweepings from Santa Masia at Verjaza, who saw him when he ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... sinks and gutters in hard weather, where they pick up crumbs and other sweepings, and in mild weather they procure worms, which are stirring every month in the year, as any one may see that will only be at the trouble of taking a candle to a grass-plot on any mild winter's night. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... locality of the school, I was fain to make some inquiries about it. These were very jocosely received in general; but everybody knew where it was, and gave the right direction to it. The prevailing idea among the loungers (the greater part of them the very sweepings of the streets and station houses) seemed to be, that the teachers were quixotic, and the school upon the whole "a lark". But there was certainly a kind of rough respect for the intention, and (as I have said) ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... a cyclone, or a tornado, or something big and booming, of popular indignation; everybody will unanimously elect the right men, who will justly earn the enormous salaries that are at present being paid to inadequate aliens for road sweepings, and all will be well. At the same time the lawlessness ingrained by governors among the governed during the last thirty, forty, or it may be fifty years; the brutal levity of the public conscience in regard to public ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... to stay there. The children took a stick and dug up the earth round about, so it looked like a plowed field. Then they threw the shoe and the sweepings a little way off, because they thought to make the place ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Moliere among the sweepings of attorneys' offices. As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect Moliere's works to gossip about Moliere's great-grand-mother's second-best bed—I sometimes wish ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... the air, slowly produce saltpetre, and before the theory of the action was understood, artificial imitation of natural conditions enabled us to manufacture saltpetre. Animal remains, stratified with porous earth or the sweepings of cities, and disposed in long heaps or walls, protected from rain, but exposed to the prevailing winds, soon form nitrous salts, and a large space covered with these deposits carefully tended forms a saltpetre plantation. France, Prussia, Sweden, Switzerland, and other countries, have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... her life in some close city-nook and pasturing on strange food. I have seen, once or twice, a donkey coming into one of these streets with panniers full of vegetables, and departing with a return cargo of what looked like rubbish and street-sweepings. No other commerce seemed to exist, except, possibly, a girl might offer you a pair of stockings or a worked collar, or a man whisper something mysterious about wonderfully cheap cigars. And yet I remember seeing female ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Noll. There's about two hundred town-sweepings, not worth powder and shot, who want tying on their horses, and hardly know butt from bayonet, and there's another two hundred better men, got together coming along, or in the country around Lichfield. Sneyd, a rattling good fellow, and I have tossed for stations, ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... hemp, bits of cord, threads of silk and linen, the tip of an ermine's tail, small shreds of gauze, of muslin and other light stuffs, the feathers of domestic birds, charcoal,—in short, whatever they can find in the sweepings of towns."—Buffon. ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... desolating civil wars, the free middle classes of Italy had almost wholly disappeared. Above the position which they had occupied, an oligarchy of wealth had reared itself: beneath that position a degraded mass of poverty and misery was fermenting. Slaves, the chance sweepings of every conquered country, shoals of Africans, Sardinians, Asiatics, Illyrians, and others, made up the bulk of the population of the Italian peninsula. The foulest profligacy of manners was general ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... greatest slattern, I assert, 150 Is she and if unsewn her skirt Not a stitch will it get from her, And though she covered be with dirt Yet will she never comb her hair, And at the merest word will she 155 Be vanquished of laughter utterly. She sweeps and lets the sweepings lie, She eats and will never wash the dishes, Her uncle beats her hourly, So laxly doth she flout his wishes. 160 Madanela's the apple of my eye. And there is no more to be said But tell Meigengra presently To ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... date. This is to-morrow morning, and we are at Walter's Ferry. It seems a week since we left Bisuka. We started yesterday on the flank of a dust-storm, and soon were with the main column, the wind pursuing us and hurling the sweepings of the road into the backs of our necks. The double-sides raised us out of the worst of the dust, else I think we should have been smothered. It was a test of our young lady's traveling manners. She kept ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... good plentiful store of dirt and poison in your breast; and, though I would by no means lesson or disparage your genuine stock of either, yet I doubt you are somewhat obliged, for an increase of both, to a little foreign assistance. Your inherent portion of dirt does not fall of acquisitions, by sweepings exhaled from below; and one insect furnishes you with a share of poison to destroy another. So that, in short, the question comes all to this: whether is the nobler being of the two, that which, by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... himself command and threaten; at the note of the drum wild instincts triumphed. And now it might beat upon these ruins, and who should assemble? The houses are down, the people dead, their lineage extinct; and the sweepings and fugitives of distant bays and islands encamp upon their graves. The decline of the dance Stanislao especially laments. 'Chaque pays a ses coutumes,' said he; but in the report of any gendarme, perhaps corruptly eager to increase ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... out of touch. The slow moving South Saxon cocked a shrewd sceptical eye at him, sized him up and down and sucked in its cheek refusing to be impressed. While by untoward accident, his misfortune rather than his fault, the earliest of his moral sweepings brought him into collision with the most reactionary element in the community, namely the inhabitants of the black cottages ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... debris and dirt until, when it reaches the desert, through which it flows as a lazy dragon, reddish-yellow, tawny, it is the dirtiest stream in the world. For not only does it carry the sand of its own grinding, as it passes through the hundred miles of canyon of its waterway, but it accepts the sweepings of vast areas made by its tributaries. Some of these extend through barren and desolate areas,—great stretches of the most forsaken desert lands, where the rains occasionally pour down with deluge-like ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... that the things I knew (that is, which the Hollands had put into my head) were but the commonest chamber-sweepings of my master's learning, which I had picked up as I rode at his elbow. And this bred a mighty wondering what manner of man he might be who was so wise. And I think, if I had gone on, Dessauer and I might both have found ourselves in the Bishop's prison, ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... him the next morning. And so she did, and had time to shear six lambs before the Sun had left his couch beneath the ocean. And after this she swept up the floor of the stable with a birch broom, and collecting the sweepings on a copper shovel, she carried them to the meadow near the seashore. There she heard the sound of some one weeping, and hastening back she told her ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... never searched on leaving, though the value of hundreds of thousands of dollars is daily passing through their hands in every shape. The water in which the workmen wash their hands runs into a tank below, and from this water, value to the amount of from 60l. to 80l. is extracted annually. The sweepings, &c., after the most careful sifting, are packed in casks and sold—chiefly, I believe, to European Jews—for 4000l. annually. The only peculiarity in the Philadelphian Mint is a frame-work for counting the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... going to have Crambo this evening, Kate. After these dishes are washed, I mean to try my hand at it. They were laughing about one Mrs. Scherman made last time; they couldn't quite remember it. I've got it. I picked it up among the sweepings. I shall take it in to her ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... but few symptoms exhibited by the horse that will lead one to suspect the presence of gastric calculi, and possibly none by which we can unmistakably assert their presence. They have been found most frequently in millers' horses fed sweepings from the mills. A depraved and capricious appetite is common in horses that have a stone forming in the stomachs. There is a disposition to eat the woodwork of the stable, earth, and, in fact, almost any substance within their reach. This symptom must not, however, be considered ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... first and foremost, just the off-scourings of creation, the very dust and sweepings of the shop," answered Bludger, who had somehow regained his confidence. To have a fellow-sufferer, and to see the pallor which, doubtless, overspread my features, was a source of comfort to this hardened man. At the same time I confess that, if William Bludger alone had been destined ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... citizen of the town of Chickaloosa, down in the Southwest, where there stood a State penitentiary, and where, during the period of which I am speaking, the Federal authorities sent for confinement and punishment the criminal sweepings of half a score of States and Territories. This was before the government put up prisons of its own, and while still it parcelled out its human liabilities among State-owned institutions, paying so much apiece for ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest. His look, as we mentioned, is probably the gravest ever seen: yet it is not of that cast-iron gravity frequent enough among ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... at once, and no rotted sod is to be had, use good garden loam, preferably from some spot which was under clover-sod the year before. If it is difficult to obtain well-rotted manure, street sweepings may be used as a substitute, and old chip-dirt from under the wood pile, or the bottom of the woodshed if it has a dirt floor, will do in place of leaf-mould. Peat, or thoroughly dried and sweetened muck are also good substitutes for leaf-mould. Finely ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... of miscellaneous rabble—flunkies long out of place, and unable to live on their liveries—felons acquitted, or that have dreed their punishment—picked men from the shilling galleries of playhouses—and the elite of the refuse and sweepings of the jails. Look how all the rogues and reprobates march like one man! Alas! was it of such materials that our conquering army was made?—were such the heroes of Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... sample of this curious product was shown by the East India Company in 1851. It is formed of the refuse tea-leaves and sweepings of the granaries, damped and pressed into a mould, generally with a little bullock's blood. The finer sorts are friable masses, and are packed in papers; the coarser sewn up in sheep's skin. In this form it is an ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... but questions unanswered played in and out of it as well—the question, for instance, of why such promptitude of harmony SHOULD have been important. Ah, when she began to recover, piece by piece, the process became lively; she might have been picking small shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She bent, in this pursuit, over her dust-bin; she challenged to the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy. Then it was that the dismissed vision of Amerigo, that evening, in arrest at ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... slept, clothing had been provided for him, rough but adequate; heavy woollen underwear and socks, a sweater, a dungaree coat, trousers of the same stuff, all vilely damp, and a friendless pair of oil-sodden shoes: the sweepings of a dozen lockers, but as welcome ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Mercoeur and other heroes of the League, having effected their reconciliation with the Bearnese, and for a handsome price paid down on the nail having acknowledged him to be their legitimate and Catholic sovereign, now turned their temporary attention to the Turk. The sweepings of the League—Frenchmen, Walloons, Germans, Italians, Spaniards—were tossed into Hungary, because for a season the war had become languid in Flanders. And the warriors grown grey in the religious wars ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... is all overcast. Low down it is armored in steely blue by great clouds. Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is crossed by enormous sweepings of wet mist. The weather is worsening, and more rain on the way. The end of the tempest and the long trouble ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... had felt this scenery and the nature of these people, by virtue of his Norwegian birth and his gift of entering into other people's thought; Bjoernson had given unforgettable expression to the feeling of imprisoned longing. But for the man who had been breathing street dust and street sweepings for four months, it was good to breathe the strong, pure air, and at last see once more the clouds floating about and beating against the mountain sides, leaning, exhausted, against a declivity and ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... English comic playwright, contemporary with Ben Jonson, and a rival; originally his servant; his plays are numerous, and were characterised by his enemies as the sweepings ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this and then proceeded. "I am an American and I am proud of it. Not because of the great power and wealth of my country, nor of its hundred and odd millions of people made up of the nations of the earth, the sweepings of Europe, the overflow of Asia, and the bag of the slave-hunter of Africa, which centuries will amalgamate into a cafe au lait conglomerate, but because I am proud of that small group of Anglo-Saxons who, under the influence of the ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... come! And they found on top of the snow a pile of dusty sweepings from the hay-mow, with grass-seeds in it and some cracked corn and crumbs. And there were squash-seeds, and sunflower-seeds, and seedy apple-cores that had been broken up in the grinder used to crunch bones for the chickens; and there were prune-pits ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... to look after this! Her, that's kicked up her heels for a living! It's—no, she's no good. She's common. She's come, and she can go. I ain't having sweepings from the streets living here as if ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... making a soft bed with few materials besides boards; in mixing the various compounds of burgoo, lobscouse, and dough, (which he affectedly pronounced duff); in fattening pigs on beef-bones, and ducks on the sweepings of the deck; in looking at molasses without licking his lips; and in various other similar accomplishments, which he maintained were as familiar to the children of Stunin'tun, as their singing-books and the ten commandments. ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... lives upon the sweepings of the barton; ha, ha!' And the speaker's regular white teeth showed themselves like snow in a Dutch cabbage. 'Well, well, the profession of arms makes a man proof against all that. I take things as ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... summer solstice. At the winter solstice the chosen fire-maker collects a faggot of cedar-wood from every house in the village, and each person, as he hands the wood to the fire-maker, prays that the crops may be good in the coming year. For several days before the new fire is kindled, no ashes or sweepings may be removed from the houses and no artificial light may appear outside of them, not even a burning cigarette or the flash of firearms. The Indians believe that no rain will fall on the fields of the man outside whose house a light has been seen at this season. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... with. My old schoolmaster ought to have a juiced HIDING. He's a thief. He pretended to undertake to make a man of me, and be's stole twenty-three years of my life, filled me up with scraps and sweepings. Here I am! I don't KNOW anything, and I can't DO anything, and all the learning ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... which touched the steps of an open porch. These steps were sagging and decayed, and the porch was swept by the gentle eddyings of leaves of past summers that had sought refuge there and had been undisturbed by the ruthless sweepings of winds or brooms. There was a haunting odour of pine and something else that was damp and old and weary and forgotten, and a shrivelled wisteria vine that clung with withered fingers to a trellis at the house corner began to whisper at their approach. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... inveighs bitterly against these speculators and their endeavours to depreciate every English work in order to enhance the value of their imported shiploads of Dead Christs, Holy Families and Madonnas: the sweepings of the continental art-markets. Auction-rooms were opened in all parts of London for the exhibition and sale of choice objects of every kind, and became the resort and rendezvous of all pretending to wealth and fashion. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... fifteenth the temple was ceremonially cleaned and the sweepings and the ashes collected from the sacred fire for the year past were solemnly carried in a stately procession to a prescribed spot on the slope of the Capitol where a great pit was closed by a heavy maple-wood door. In this pit the ashes were ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... George rode over with two pairs of boxing-gloves dangling from his saddle. After lessons he and Taffy had a try with them, in a clearing behind the shrubberies where the gardener had heaped his sweepings of dry leaves to rot ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... but he did not yet fly upward to heaven. It was night and quite silent. They remained in the great city; they floated about there in a small street, where lay whole heaps of straw, ashes, and sweepings, for it had been removal-day. There lay fragments of plates, bits of plaster, rags, and old hats, and all this did not look well. And the angel pointed amid all this confusion to a few fragments of a flower-pot, and to a lump of earth which had fallen out, ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... in my house all day, with that ever-present sense of privacy and novelty which had thrilled me when I first shut the street door behind me. At evening I sallied out and bought a loaf of bread, half a pound of tea ("sweepings," they call it, and it cost eightpence), a tin kettle (fivepence), a pound of sugar, a tin of Swiss milk, and a tin of American potted meat. I had often heard my mother groan over the expenses of housekeeping, and now I began to understand what she meant. Two and ninepence ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... admire. But there is a back side to this structure of civilization; there are outbuildings, slums, and alleys not visible from the front. These back on the Orient, and the rear view of the structure of European civilization, seen from the Orient, is not imposing at all. The sweepings and refuse of Western civilization and Western morality are dumped out upon the Orient, where they do ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... fellows attend to yon scum," he told his squire. "The camp marshal will have fruit for his gallows. The sweepings of all Europe have drifted with us to England, and it is our business to make bonfire of them before they breed a plague.... See to the wounded man, likewise. He may be one of the stout house-carles who fought with Harold at Stamford, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... oddity, and yet well respected, for I'm clever with cures and language. Well, I used to poke about among a lot of scum that has no respect for any cloth whatever—no, nor for life itself; and all the time I felt in me bones I'd surely find what I wanted among a crew that's just the sweepings of creation! ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... at him curiously. "Oh, you'll find out fast enough, padre," he said. "Wonder what you'll make of it. Rum place just now, France, I can tell you. There's the sweepings of half the world over there, and everything's turned upside down. Fellows are out for a spree, of course, and you can't be hard on a chap down from the line if he goes on the bust a bit. It's human nature, and you must allow for it; don't ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... he cried in a tone of mockery. "I have more pistols!" And then with a sudden change to ferocity, "You dogs!" he went on. "You scum of a filthy city, sweepings of the Halles! Do you think to beard me? Do you think to frighten me or murder me? I am Tavannes, and this is my house, and were there a score of Huguenots in it, you should not touch one, nor harm a hair of his head! Begone, ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... began to roll before him a heap of grayish sweepings, as if he had done nothing else all his life. Then, he gave bark the broom to the notary, who ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the gratification of the audience, is frequently occupied by Mrs. Hogg, whose infirmities impede those exertions which we are inclined to believe she is willing to make: and Mr. Simpson, who, in some characters, is not a bad performer, is often supplanted by the very sweepings of the green-room. How often do we see that second Proteus, the little prompter with his parenthetical legs, rolled on in five or six different parts on the same evening. Gentleman, jailor, footman, king, and beggar are to him equally indifferent; and next ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... but to which people of taste and fashion paid little attention, as inelegant and barbarous, till Mr. Irving, with his cast-iron features and sledge-hammer blows, puffing like a grim Vulcan, set to work to forge more classic thunderbolts, and kindle the expiring flames anew with the very sweepings of sceptical and infidel libraries, so as to excite a pleasing horror in the female part of his congregation. In short, our popular declaimer has, contrary to the Scripture-caution, put new wine into old bottles, or new cloth on old garments. He has, with an unlimited and ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... thereafter, a solitary voice upraised in oaths and curses. Barnabas sprang to his feet, and hurrying out into the yard, beheld a powerful black horse that reared and plunged in the grip of two struggling grooms; in an adjacent corner was the late rider, who sat upon a pile of stable-sweepings and swore, while, near by, perched precariously upon an upturned bucket, his slim legs stretched out before him, was a young exquisite—a Corinthian from top to toe—who rocked with laughter, yet was ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... I was when grandmother gave me half a dollar and told me to go over to the mill and buy a bag of grain sweepings for my 'boarders'; how angry I was with the miller when he said, 'Those Quails'll be good eatin' when they're fat'; and how he laughed when I shouted, 'It's only cannibals that ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... with information that led to the pressing of some sixty persons concerned in the tumult, but as these consisted mainly of "vagrants, gipsies, parish charges, maimed, halt and idiots," the magisterial resentment caused greater rejoicings at Lynn than it did at Spithead, where the sweepings of the borough were eventually deposited. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 920 —Admiral Sir ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... mentions his having seen a MS. copy of this play, found by Lord Bolingbroke among the sweepings of Pope's study, in which there occur several indecent passages, not to be found in the printed copy. These, doubtless, constituted the castrations, which, in obedience to the public voice, our author expunged from his play, after its condemnation. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... end of the year my master Ulivieri had occasion to go to Florence, in order to sell certain gold and silver sweepings which he had; [1] and inasmuch as the bad air of Pisa had given me a touch of fever, I went with the fever hanging still about me, in my master's company, back to Florence. There my father received him most affectionately, and lovingly prayed him, unknown ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... throw away that wretched piece of thread. I will not let you wear it." The queen did as she was bid, and, pulling off the thread bracelet, threw it on the floor. Next morning the maids and the slave-girls began to sweep the palace, and among the sweepings one of them noticed the queen's thread bracelet. She picked it up and showed it to Wonderways, and he grew very wroth with Queen Patmadhavrani. He took the thread and at once went with it to the palace of the unloved Queen ...
— Deccan Nursery Tales - or, Fairy Tales from the South • Charles Augustus Kincaid
... his valet de chambre was worse than all. Ah! if masters had any suspicion of how much servants know, of all the stories that are told in the servants' hall, if they could see their names dragged among the sweepings of the house and the refuse of the kitchen, they would never again dare to say even "shut the door" or "harness the horses." Why, for instance, take Dr. Jenkins, with the most valuable practice in Paris, ten years of life in ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... shipped thither; and though it be true that many deboshed younger brothers of what are called good families may have sought refuge in Virginia, it is equally certain that a great part of the early deportations thither were the sweepings of the London streets and the leavings of the London stews. On what the heralds call the spindle side, some, at least, of the oldest Virginian families are descended from matrons who were exported and sold for so many hogsheads of tobacco the head. So notorious was this, that it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... the box was brought up. It was a soap box almost full. "Are these only the sweepings of today?" I asked. The janitor spoke up. "I emptied all the others yesterday, sir," he declared. With this assurance, I plunged my hands into the pile and began a minute and careful search of it, ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... the fountain, screened by the hackney-cab stand, till he reached the Rue Froid-Manteau, a dirty, poky, disreputable street—a sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified purlieus of the Palais-Royal, as an Italian major-domo allows a careless servant to leave the sweepings of the rooms in a ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... "Compiled from the Memoirs of One Perkin Althorpe, Esq., Sometime Field-Coronet in His Majesty's Troop of Horse," and was sown thick with objurgation—"Ods-wounds!" "Body o' me!" "A murrain on thee!" "By my halidom!" and all the rest of the sweepings and tailings of Scott ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... that she had done all she could and that poor Lord Dorimont, who had really been worried to death, was extremely sorry. I couldn't have the matter out with Mrs. Wimbush, for I didn't want to be taunted by her with desiring to aggrandise myself by a public connexion with Mr. Paraday's sweepings. She had signified her willingness to meet the expense of all advertising, as indeed she was always ready to do. The last night of the horrible series, the night before he died, I put my ear closer ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... "Did He establish a colony in New South Wales for the advancement of His glory and the salvation of the heathen nations in those distant parts of the globe by men of character and principle? On the contrary, He takes men from the dregs of society, the sweepings of gaols, hulks, and prisons. Men who had forfeited their lives to the laws of their country, He gives them their lives for a prey, and sends them forth to make a way for His chosen, for them that should bring glad tidings of good things. How unsearchable are His ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... Port Gower, the lower slopes of the hills are covered by a labyrinth of stone fences, minute patches of corn, and endless cottages. It would seem as if for twenty miles the long withdrawing valley had been swept of its inhabitants, and the accumulated sweepings left at its mouth, just as we see the sweepings of a room sometimes left at the door. And such generally is the present state of Sutherland. The interior is a solitude occupied by a few sheep-farmers and their hinds; while a more numerous population ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... are dangerous during the fly season. However, the danger may be greatly reduced by covering the excreta with earth or by a thorough daily burning of the entire area of the trench. Combustible sweepings or straw, saturated with oil, may be used ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... was keenly alive and deeply interested in all that was passing around her. She noted that the hours of study were very much shortened now, and that the girls were continually together in the house, and from their bedroom sweepings and stray threads clinging to their dresses, and the snipping sound of scissors, she judged that they were busy with their preparations. Fan had gone back to her ancient but happily not lost art of dressmaking, and was making Constance a dress from ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... I thought it enviably grand. The way in which a rich skirt that would not wash, and would undoubtedly be worn again, trailed through dust and orange-peel, and greengrocers' refuse, and general shop-sweepings, was offensive ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... more at the mill and gave the miller his answer, and by-and-by he told the three sisters not to throw out all their sweepings in ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... the giant star of which it was a planet loomed enormous. Then, at Morey's direction, they swung, and before them loomed a planet. Large as Thett, near a half million miles in diameter, its mass was very closely equal to that of our sun. Yet it was but the burned-out sweepings of the outermost photospheric layers of this giant sun, and the radioactive atoms that made a sun active were not here; it was a cold planet. But its density was far, far higher than that of our sun, for our sun is but slightly denser than ordinary sea ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... to the herbs we made use of, in the nature and quality of which we fancied ourselves mistaken; but a little farther enquiry let us into the real occasion of it, which was no other than this: the biscuit-dust was the sweepings of the bread-room, but the bag in which they were put had been a tobacco-bag, the contents of which not being entirely taken out, what remained mixed with the biscuit- dust, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... Hibiscus which produces an edible seed and also a fine fibre, are sown in exact oblongs or squares resembling the plots in allotment-grounds in England. Near the villages are large heaps of manure, collected from the cattle zareebas. These are mixed with the sweepings of the stations, and the ashes from the cattle-fires, and are divided when required among the proprietors of ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... Central China Tea Company's selected growth of Early Green Leaf Spring Pickings;" i.e., "A damaged cargo and last year's rotten sweepings, mingled with chipped broom, dried cabbage, and other equally suitable and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew upon his head; but now, should this, our broomstick, pretend to enter the scene, proud of those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with dust, though the sweepings of the finest lady's chamber, we should be apt to ridicule and despise its vanity. Partial judges that we are of our own excellencies, and ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... mirthful, erect—bright, slender, and graceful,—of eastern figure and foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew from out the heavens, yet every thing had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was a man of severe truth, and he was so much the more disposed to listen to his suggestion. While our young mate was getting the boat ready, therefore, Bob collected his tools, provided himself with a bucket, passed the half-barrel, into which Mark had thrown the sweepings of the decks, into the dingui, and descended himself and took the sculls. The two then proceeded to Bob's rock, where, amid the screams of a thousand sea-birds, the honest fellow filled his bucket with as good guano as was ever found ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... coolest, and doth best agree with the nature of this hot sand. Next to the dung of beasts, is the dung of Horses if it be old also, otherwise it is somewhat of the hottest, the rubbish of old houses, or the sweepings of flowres, or the scowrings of old Fish-ponds, or other standing waters where beasts and horses are vsed to drinke, or be washt, or wherevnto the water and moisture of dunghills haue recourse are all good Manures for this redde-sand: ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... market, either to buy or sell, and name the thing you desire to part with or to get, as it is, and the market is closed against you. Middling oats are the sweepings of the granaries. A useful horse is a jade gone at every point. Good sound port is sloe juice. No assurance short of A 1 betokens even a pretence to merit. And yet in real life we are content with oats that are really middling, are very glad to have a useful ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... bottom, dust and brush them inside and out; use a soft brush or a dust mop to take the dust from the floor. Use a carpet sweeper for the rugs unless you have electricity and can use a vacuum cleaner; collect the sweepings and burn them. ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... otherwise). Flues should have a smooth parging or lining, or they will be apt to draw with difficulty. Gas pipes of insufficient diameter cause the flames to burn with unsteady, dim light. Made ground is seldom fit for immediate building; and never for other than isolated structures. Ashes, street-sweepings, garbage, rotten vegetation, and house refuse are unfit filling for low ground on which it is intended to build. Cobble pavements are admirably adapted to soaking-up and afterwards emitting unwholesome matters. Asphalt ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... thirteen hundred children—boys and girls—in bright, light, smart dresses, who clustered on the orchestra and around the great organ, like flowers in June. Looking at their clean, wholesome faces, neat attire, and orderly demeanour, I thought, "Is it possible that these are the sweepings of the streets?" The question was tellingly answered later on; but here it may be stated that this beautiful band of 1300 was only a slice—a sample—of the Doctor's large family, which at present numbers nearly 3500. (It now, in ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... again seed-time, took a more effectual way of crippling the tenant than before. He seized on the farm implements and stock, of which the dunghill was in his eyes the most important. He had it, without a legal sale, carried away to his own farm-yard, even to the very rakings and sweepings of the road and the yard near which it lay. This he did that Ring might have no manure for his potato ground, knowing that crops so planted would not easily afford the rent; and that, when no rent was forthcoming, an ejectment would soon follow. Other things—a plough, and a horse, and some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... a four-page paper; and as it is set in long primer leaded and has a page of advertisements, there is no room for the crimes, disasters, and general sweepings of the outside world—thanks be! Today I find only a single ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... stationed. There is no disgrace in serving his Majesty in any capacity. I tell you candidly, that although I would not have impressed you myself, I am very glad that I have you on board; I wish I had fifty more of the same sort, instead of the sweepings of the gaols, which I am obliged to mix ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... "Ye street-sweepings!" exclaimed Adsalis passionately, "what evil spirit has entered into you that ye would thus compel the Sultana Asseki to give way before ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... I confess, troubling me seriously. I look forward with very much greater dread to the prospect of having to smoke dried leaves and the sweepings of tobacco warehouses, than I do to the eating of rats. I have been making inquiries of all sorts as to the state of the stock of tobacco, and I intend this evening to invest five pounds in laying in a store; and mean to take up a plank and hide ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... Harper. And not any too soon were these precautions taken, for Constantine lets light in on the kind of people who began to head for the diggings when he says in his graphic way, "A considerable number of people coming in from the Sound cities appear to be the sweepings of the slums and the result of a general jail delivery. Heretofore goods could be cached on the side of the trails and they would be perfectly safe, now a man has to sit on his cache with a shotgun to ensure the safety of his goods. Cabins in out-of-the-way places ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... contains a population of some 600 souls, mostly fishermen. Not a tree grows on the island; but at the south end, where a low village crouches down against the continual sweepings of the stormy winds, are a few fields, fragrant with clover, and gleaming with buttercups; and, in one of these fields, scarce a stone's throw from the beating surf, stand the ruins of Lindisfarn Abbey, one of the earliest seats ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... had risen. When this task the maid had ended, Then she scrubbed the birchen tables, Sweeps the ground-floor of the stable, With a broom of leaves and branches From the birches of the Northland, Scrapes the sweepings well together On a shovel made of copper, Carries them beyond the stable, From the doorway to the meadow, To the meadow's distant border, Near the surges of the great-sea, Listens there and looks about her, Hears a wailing ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... p. 74, where there are two maidens, one of whom had saved the toad when the other desired to kill it. They stand sponsors for the fairy child, and are rewarded with sweepings which turn to gold; also Bartsch, vol. i. p. 50, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... metal, torn paper, charred ends of matches: an indescribable mess. Duncan surveyed it ruefully, but with the will to do strong in him, took off his coat, turned up his trousers, and fell to. The disposition of the sweepings troubled him far less than the dust he raised; obviously the only place to put it ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... realized that the gold must occur in very small quantities. Otherwise somebody beside small boys would be at it. As a matter of fact, though we did not find it out until very much later, the soil of San Francisco is not auriferous at all. The boys were engaged in working the morning's sweepings from the bars and gambling houses which the lavish and reckless handling of gold had liberally impregnated. In some of the mining towns nearer the source of supply I have known of from one hundred to three hundred dollars a month ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... she washed the tables, Swept the wide-extended flooring, 150 With the broom of twigs all leafless, Then with broom of leafy branches. Then the sweepings she collected In the dustpan made of copper; Out of doors she took the rubbish, To the field beyond the farmyard, To the field's extremest limit, Where the lowest fence has opening. There she stood upon the ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... swept. Though the return takes place, nevertheless, along the original track, this may be due to the uneven work of the broom, which has left certain particles of the scented dust in position. The Ants who went round the cleared portion may have been guided by the sweepings removed to either side. Before, therefore, pronouncing judgment for or against the sense of smell, it were well to renew the experiment under better conditions and to remove everything ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... anchor and be off," answered Hartog. "But we have work to do ashore in attending to the ship's repairs before we may hope to leave this place where, I make no doubt, we shall be imposed upon and robbed by the sweepings of Europe who inhabit this island. It is fortunate we have the word of the Spanish captain that he himself will be responsible for all ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... must be boys" and "He's paid for lookin' arter things" were the arguments whereby the antagonists testified their mutual respect, in both of which the parents concurred; and his severity did not cost the old man a penny when he made his Easter rounds to collect the "sweepings." It may, perhaps, be well to explain that the "sweepings" consisted of an annual sum of threepence which every householder contributed towards the cleaning of the church, and which represented a large part of ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... who wished to contract for the sweepings of Steinway Hall when he heard that NILSSON showered throughout the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2., No. 32, November 5, 1870 • Various
... certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... corridor was strewn with rubbish, for no one had the will or wish to keep it neat. Anna Andreevna rummaged by the stove of Sergius Andreevich, Lina's husband, looking among the papers and sweepings. She peered into the stove and discovered that Leontyevna, the maid—a one-eyed Cyclop—had filled it with birch-wood, whereas it had been agreed that the rotting timber from the summer-house should be used as ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... done. In order to produce large and well-grown crops it is often necessary to fertilize before each planting. Very good prepared fertilizers can be bought at seed stores, but horse or cow manure is much better, as it lightens the soil in addition to supplying plant food. Use street sweepings ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... Tip, bestowed as if endowing Princeton, and the Quartet representing the Flower of America's Young Womanhood was once more out in the Ozone, marching abreast with shining Faces and pushing white-haired Business Men off into the Sweepings. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... and apple trees, 3 to 6 years old, that are very thrifty but grow only wood. The soil was poor when planting, and I have put on plenty of sweepings from the chicken-yards. I suppose that is the cause of ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... chances which still remain to the devourer of books, if, after having consumed all the solid volumes within his reach, he should be reduced to shreds and patches of literature,—like a ship's crew having resort to shoe-leather and the sweepings of the locker. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... She had got beyond repartee. The immediate past was a nightmare, filled with terrible journeying, close proximity with the sweepings of the gutter, and sights that at times almost froze the blood within her. And yet the worst had not arrived! Twice she had tried to escape from this enforced pilgrimage, but had failed utterly. Jim had brought her back by brute force. She became aware of the difficulties that faced her. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... amount of waste products in human and social economy. The products of combustion, such as ashes, cinders, etc.; the products of street sweepings and waste from houses, as dust, rubbish, paper, etc.; the waste from various trades; the waste from kitchens, e. g., scraps of food, etc.; the waste water from the cleansing processes of individuals, domestic animals, clothing, etc.; and, finally, the excreta—urine ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... it was found that the whole contents were covered with a thin layer of sweepings. The Khansama (the servant who serves at the table) looked at Mr. Anderson and Mr. Anderson at the Khansama "with a wild surmise"; the cover was replaced and the dish taken away. Nothing was ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... with the exception of one or two organized emigrations of poor, but honest, girls, were the sweepings of the streets of Paris and London. They were sometimes deported with as little ceremony as the engags, and sometimes collected by the Government, especially of France, for the deliberate purpose of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... thing that can crumble in drought, and mildew of every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp: ashes and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged with out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, bones, and ordure, indescribable; and, variously kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... could do that, and the town carts could carry it away and burn it. The town would give us the street sweepings all spring and summer and some of the people who have stables would contribute fertilizer. Once that was turned under with the spade and topped off by some commercial fertilizer with a dash of lime to sweeten matters, the ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... regarded us without cordiality, while by no means ceasing his endeavours to cover our shoes with his sweepings. ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... ease of body their night's effort demanded. Picks and shovels were the order of the day, and all the shortcomings of the defences, discovered during battle, were made good. The golden "pay dirt" which had drawn the sweepings of Leaping Horse into the service of John Kars was the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum |
