"Vagabond" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spirit of the mother and the son are brought into immediate collision, he yields before her; the warrior who stemmed alone the whole city of Corioli, who was ready to face "the steep Tarpeian death, or at wild horses' heels,—vagabond exile—flaying," rather than abate one jot of his proud will—shrinks at her rebuke. The haughty, fiery, overbearing temperament of Coriolanus, is drawn in such forcible and striking colors, that nothing can more impress us with the real grandeur ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... have been accustomed to consider the Gypsy as a wandering outcast, incapable of appreciating the blessings of a settled and civilised life, or - if abandoning vagabond propensities, and becoming stationary - as one who never ascends higher than the condition of a low trafficker, will be surprised to learn, that amongst the Gypsies of Moscow there are not a few ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... extremely beautiful and picturesque. On the most conspicuous of these heights stood a monument, erected by the provincial legislature in memory of General Brock, who was slain in a battle with the American forces, after having won the victory. Some vagabond, supposed to be a fellow of the name of Lett, who is now, or who lately was, in prison as a felon, blew up this monument two years ago; and it is now a melancholy ruin, with a long fragment of iron railing ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... born vagabond, contrabandista, spy in armed camps, sutler at the tail of the Grande Armee (escaped, God only knows how, from the snows of Russia), beggar, guerrillero, bandit, sceptically murderous, draping ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... dreadful an affliction. But the young Princess Hebe, whom she was accustomed to look on as her greatest blessing, now became to her an object of pity and concern; for, from being heiress to a throne, the poor infant, not yet five years old, was, with her wretched mother, become a vagabond, and knew not whither ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... on which I set out, abandoning without regret, my preceptors, studies, and hopes, with the almost certain attainment of a fortune, to lead the life of a real vagabond. Farewell to the capital; adieu to the court, ambition, love, the fair, and all the great adventures into which hope had led me during the preceding year! I departed with my fountain and my friend Bacle, a purse lightly furnished, but a heart over-flowing with ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... every country in the world, during which time I experienced enough adventures to fill many books if put into print, but as they have no bearing upon this narrative I must pass them by without mention. And so at the age of twenty-two, being then a worthless vagabond, I was aboard a three-masted schooner working my way from Australia to England as a common sailor. That was during the ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... for taking thee prisoner,—thee and thee kinswoman. His hirelings were vagabonds of all the neighbouring tribes, Shawnees, Wyandots, Delawares, and Piankeshaws, as I noted well when I crept among them; and old Wenonga is the greatest vagabond of all, having long since been degraded by his tribe for bad luck, drunkenness, and other follies, natural to an Injun. My own idea is, that that white man thirsted for thee blood, having given thee up to the Piankeshaws, who, thee says, had lost ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... whole hour alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one another and not intimate. They live under careless observation and subject to a vagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the unconscious loss which is ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... throaty voice began to infect the air with reminiscences of O Sole Mio! Nearer and nearer it came until it floated into the piazza and a drunken vagabond reeled past us and out of sight. It was a disturbance and we rose to go. I paid sevenpence for my supper, i.e. fourpence for the pesce stocco and bread, a penny for the wine, a penny for my share of the tocco wine and a penny for the ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... you, Spring Bank, Kentucky—crazy old rat trap as it is, has done wonders for me in the way of getting me noticed. If I had any soul, big enough to find with a microscope, I believe I should hate the North for cringing so to anything from Dixie. Let the veriest vagabond in all the South, so ignorant that he can scarcely spell baker correctly, to say nothing of biscuit, let him, I say, come to any one of the New York hotels, and with something of a swell write himself from Charleston, or any other Southern city, and bless ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... themselves, are to be found in greater perfection, more beautiful, and more splendid, set in the immensity of Heaven! In the telescopic field, we may watch the progress of armies of majestic and powerful suns, from whose attacks there is naught to fear. And these vagabond comets and shooting stars and stellar nebulae, do they not make up a prodigious panorama? What are our romances in comparison with the History of Nature? Soaring toward the Infinite, we purify our souls from all the baseness of this world, we strive to ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... and stable lots were undergoing a scraping eminently required for the comfort of decent beasts, who gave their lives in labor to exacting man. The room usually appropriated to the Bench and Bar was a great vagabond-hall, denominated the ball-room, and for this purpose appropriated once or twice a year. Along the bare walls of this mighty dormitory were arranged beds, each usually occupied by a couple of the limbs of the law, and sometimes appropriated to three. If there was not a spare apartment, a bed ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... that you publish these banns no more, and if you dare, I will recommend it to your master, the rector, to discard you from his service," says my lady. "The fellow Andrews is a vagabond, and shall not settle here and bring a nest of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... prejudice. The whaling ship was careless of appearances, it is true, and had the air of an ocean vagabond; but there were other duties more important than holystoning decks, scraping spars, and trimming the yards to a hair. On a voyage of two or three years, moreover, there was always plenty of time ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... she Voids all her offal out-cast progeny; From our fifth Henry's time the strolling bands, Of banish'd fugitives from neighb'ring lands, Have here a certain sanctuary found: The eternal refuge of the vagabond, Where in but half a common age of time, Borrowing new blood and manners from the clime, Proudly they learn all mankind to contemn, And all ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... enough, knowing me to be Irish, and I examined him as well as I was able in the darkness. He was what I expected, a bedraggled vagabond with tear-stains on his dirty cheeks and a vast shock of hair which I well knew would look, in daylight, like a burning haycock. And as I examined him he just as carefully examined me. I could see his ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... prevented from this, not only by the memory of the conflagrations of 1859 at Martinique, and of the state of siege which it became necessary to proclaim there, but, above all, by the circumstance that the liberty of our former slaves has been too often restrained by means of the vagabond regulations, that labor has continued to be imposed on them to a certain point; that the parcelling out of property has been trammelled by fiscal measures; that, moreover, it is less the labor of our former slaves than ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... was going to expose himself to inconceivable miseries and hardships, which would shortly cause him to rue the step he had taken; that he would be only welcome in foreign countries so long as he had money to spend, and when he had none, he would be repulsed as a vagabond, and would perhaps be allowed to perish of hunger. He replied that he had a considerable sum of money with him, no less than a hundred dollars, which would last him a long time, and that when it was spent he should perhaps be able to obtain more. "Your hundred dollars," said I, "will scarcely ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... in the name they had of being gossips and mischief-makers, fond of playing practical jokes, and bold and free in their manners. They wrote anonymous letters to grave personages; they gave nicknames to every living being in Orbajosa, from the bishop down to the lowest vagabond; they threw pebbles at the passers-by; they hissed behind the window bars, in order to amuse themselves with the perplexity and annoyance of the startled passer-by; they found out every thing that occurred in the neighborhood; to which end they made constant use of every window and aperture ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... ultimate triumph; The Sire de Maletroit's Door, a vivid picture of the cruelty and the autocratic power of a great French noble of the fifteenth century, and A Lodging for the Night, a remarkable defense of his life by the vagabond poet, Villon. Other short stories by Stevenson are worth careful study, but if you like these I have mentioned you will need no guide to ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Mr William Whalley, "the little vagabond promised the first sight of it to old father. He'll be in a precious stew when he finds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... had he ever heard that there was any other aim in life than personal enjoyment. It was plain to Nekhludoff that these two were richly endowed by nature, and were only neglected and mutilated as plants are sometimes neglected and mutilated. He also came across a vagabond, and a woman, whose stupidity and apparent cruelty were repulsive, but he failed to find in them that criminal type spoken of by the Italian school. He only saw in them people who were disagreeable to him personally, like some he had met in dress-coats, ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... hangs about me like a fog. M— is wonderfully better, and her husband has taken a house for them at Norwood. If I could be rejoiced at anything, I should be at that; but it seems to me as if since that awful journey when I first left England, "the springs was broke," as that vagabond tout ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... the author's eager interest and genial sympathy of the Judge." But alas! neither jurist nor novelist was a botanist, and the triumphantly expected melon vines basely proved after a few more days of tender nursing to be the leaves of "that vagabond weed, the wild-cucumber vine." Here too he gathered material for future books, and did much writing. Evening twilight often found him pacing the large hall, his hands behind him, his head doing active duty in decisive nods of yea ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... (expecting Lady Janet's visit) was, of course, discovered in a touching domestic position! She had a foundling baby asleep on her lap; and she was teaching the alphabet to an ugly little vagabond girl whose acquaintance she had first made in the street. Just the sort of artful tableau vivant to impose on ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... of two kinds: one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... muttered over his knife blades, "and I stand it not. I be not so mean-spirited as to labor, nor to do the bidding of other men who should do mine." So saying, he stole from the kitchen and the house into the streets, where he became a vagabond, and so remained, along with thousands ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... all shedding their last yellow leaves, and the air was full of those faded memories of better days, whirling in wild companies across the road, rushing upward on the breast of some vagabond gust, drifting, spinning, shuddering along the roadside, to lie there at last, quiet, among a host of brothers, with little passing tremors, as if (said Valeria) they were silently sobbing because of their banishment from ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... know I never took a pin that didn't belong to me, none of me children or people neither; and as for Jim Clay, he wouldn't think of touchin' a thing—he was too much the other way to get on in the world. An' it ain't any fault of my rarin' that me grandson is hounded down a vagabond," said the old lady in ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... character. I was very young when I first commenced to take stock to the fair to exhibit for premiums. I always went on the first day, and always remained until the fair came to a close, staying on the grounds night and day. There was a vagabond element in my nature which harmonized perfectly with this sort of life. The men with whom I associated were, in general, of that class who like liquor alone or in company, and each had his jug of favorite whisky, which ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... burst on us from a neighboring mango-tope, in which they had been hidden: in an instant three of my men's saddles were empty, and I was left with but seven more to make head against at least thirty of these vagabond black horsemen. I never saw in my life a nobler figure than the leader of the troop—mounted on a splendid black Arab: he was as tall, very nearly, as myself; he wore a steel cap and a shirt of mail, and carried a beautiful French carbine, which had already done ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a great wrong, he gave the letter into the hands of the officials, and now whenever he secures a position the road that employs him is forced to let him go again or have a strike. He is an outcast—a vagabond, so far as the union is concerned. Ah, the scars of that conflict are deep in the souls of men. The blight of it has shadowed hundreds of happy homes, and ruined ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... child grows up without any lessons in self-control and self-improvement, or any intelligent appreciation of the cardinal principles of morality. If the child is a boy, he leaves his parents almost as soon as he can earn his own support and only too often leads for years the life of a vagabond. All the worst impulses of his nature are further encouraged by this wandering and irresponsible existence. Is it strange that, under the operation of this influence alone, the number of black criminals in the Southern states is increased ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... exaggerated, 'the priests of an old religion.'" More recently, while advocating the Children's Bill in the House of Commons (March 24th, 1908), Mr. Shaw said that "George Borrow never did a worse service to humanity than by writing 'Lavengro,' with its glorification of vagabond life." Though one cannot acquit Borrow of inconsistency, we must remember that "The Gypsies of Spain" was written in 1840, and that he sent a notice of it to Mr. Brandram of the Bible Society in March of ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... hotly moved Huguette to anger, for she raged up to Villon, challenging the meaning of his speech. Villon gently cooled her impatience. "Hush, hush, my girl! There are many kinds of love, as you ought to know well enough. I am a rogue and a vagabond, no less, and so sometimes I love you and other such Athanasian wenches; ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... way, too, but it led downhill, you understand. I spent three winters in Venice. Then my father died, and I came into a small fortune, which I squandered. My mother helped me; then she died. My brothers cut me, condemning me as a Bohemian and a vagabond. I confess that I did take a malicious pleasure in rubbing their sleek fur the wrong way. Then I crossed the Atlantic as the guest of an American millionaire. He took me on in his own car to California. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Frankfort, oh, the wretched feeling of hopelessness that had made him cast himself down under a lime-tree in a passion of tears! Why had he resumed hope, why had he struggled on his way to Berlin, since this fate awaited him, this reception was to be meted him? To be refused admission as a rogue and a vagabond, to be rejected of his fellow-Jews, to be hustled out of his dream-city by the overseer of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... He was by nature slothful, and much of a vagabond, and yet he kept by the house, and not only waited upon my wants, but laboured every day in the garden or small farm to the south of the residencia. Here he would be joined by the peasant whom I had seen on the night of my arrival, and who dwelt at the far end of the enclosure, about ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was made by the same arrogant lords, prohibiting any of their vassals from aiding or harboring his Aragonese followers. "A sad spectacle, indeed," exclaims the loyal Martyr, "to behold a monarch, yesterday almost omnipotent, thus wandering a vagabond in his own kingdom, refused even the sight of his own ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... tone of this order, but when he thought of the wretched appearance which he and George presented he was not surprised at the coolness of their reception. For not only were their clothes remarkable to look upon, but they were without hats. Even Waggie seemed a bedraggled little vagabond. ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... sun. He saw them at deadly strife one with another—tribe with tribe, and kindred with kindred. He marked how they were falling away from the sober lives and pure faith of their fathers, and losing their wild independence in the slothful and corrupting habits of vagabond existence. He beheld his native wilderness gradually waning as from before a slow-approaching, far-extended fire. In terror at the sight, the animals of the chase, so needful to man in the savage state, went flitting ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... greatest vagabond ever came into Ireland; Tumaus Hanrahan they call him; but it's Hanrahan the rogue he ought to have been christened by right. Aurah, wasn't there the misfortune on me, him to come in to us ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... he! Death and damnation! (Goes up and down with agitated steps.) Is it for this that I have sacrificed my nights—that I have mowed down mountains and filled up chasms? For this that I have turned rebel against all the instincts of humanity? To have this vagabond outcast blunder in at last, and destroy all my cunningly devised fabric. But gently! gently! What remains to be done is but child's play. Have I not already waded up to my very ears in mortal sin? Seeing how far the shore lies behind me, it would be madness to attempt ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the scene of piratical exploit during the rebellion, and bravely did the militia beat off the soi-disant general and his sympathizing vagabond patriots; but this is a page of Canadian history for hereafter, and need not be repeated here. The sufferers have had a monument erected to their memory in these ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... duty: her holiday would be at its end. It was all the greater reason why this evening should be memorable. He should think of her afterward as he saw her to-night, and it pleased her that in the irresponsibility of the maskers she should appear to him in the garb of vagabond liberty, since in fact ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... fellow was really a most worthless character, whose death even would have been a benefit to the tribe. Thus it seemed that they had two purposes in view—the one to propitiate me and get good terms, the other to rid themselves of a vagabond ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... waiting in the rain for?" said Schwartz, as he walked in, throwing his umbrella in Gluck's face. "Ay! what for, indeed, you little vagabond?" said Hans, administering an educational box on the ear, as he followed his brother into ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... out of the carpet factory even as Spenser released Keats it would be a mistake to suppose (as many do) that the Ledbury boy was an uncouth vagabond, who, without reading, without education, and without training, suddenly became a poet. He had a good school education before going to sea; and from earliest childhood he longed to write. Even as a little boy he felt the impulse to put his dreams on paper; ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... engaged in business, forsook his vagabond habits, and in course of time married. No doubt it was always in his mind to have another try at the treasure, but time slipped away without his doing so. His happy marriage fettered him. Before he realized it, he was an old man. The ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... of information was imparted to us by a most extraordinary individual, a genuine South-Sea vagabond, who came alongside of us in a whale-boat as soon as we entered the bay, and, by the aid of some benevolent persons at the gangway, was assisted on board, for our visitor was in that interesting stage of intoxication when a man is amiable and ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... the first, turned his eyes towards the distant land of the Hurons,—a field of labor full of peril, but rich in hope and promise. Le Jeune's duties as Superior restrained him from wanderings so remote. His apostleship must be limited, for a time, to the vagabond hordes of Algonquins, who roamed the forests of the lower St. Lawrence, and of whose language he had been so sedulous a student. His difficulties had of late been increased by the absence of Pierre, who had run off as Lent drew near, standing in dread of that ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... their barges, made a cache of their remaining furs and property in trees on the bank, and, packing on his back what each man could carry, had commenced, the day before we encountered them, their journey on foot to St. Louis. We laughed then at their forlorn and vagabond appearance, and, in our turn, a month or two afterwards, furnished the same occasion for merriment to others. Even their stock of tobacco, that sine qua non of a voyageur, without which the night fire is gloomy, was entirely exhausted. ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... dollars paid to him. The defendant's counsel had some difficulty in proving the execution of the release, and was compelled to introduce as a witness, the constable who had been employed to find the vagabond husband and obtain his signature. His testimony disclosed the facts that he found the husband in the forest in one of our north-eastern counties, engaged in making shingles, (presumably stealing timber from the public lands and converting it into the means of indulging his habits of drunkenness,) ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and restless habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time, don't be uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... should find him all that was good; but the colonel had, for many years, not only given up all hope of ever finding his son, but almost every desire to do so. He had thought that, if still alive, he must be a gipsy vagabond—a poacher, a liar, a thief—like those among whom he would have been brought up. From such a discovery, no happiness could be looked for; only annoyance, humiliation, and trouble. To find his son, then, all that he could wish for—a gentleman, a most promising young officer, the man, indeed, ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... Cato will fly before the sword of Caesar? Reduced, like Hannibal, to seek relief From court to court, and wander up and down A vagabond in Afric? ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities. A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine! Perhaps the piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run. A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... manners of the dead, when we foully neglect or barbarously spoil their homes, their castles, their temples, their colleges, their courts, their graves? He who tramples on the past does not create for the future. The same ignorant and vagabond spirit which made him a destructive prohibits ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... to a pretty pass there, and you'll hear of it soon enough. Do you think I should have left house and grandchildren at my age,—going on for eighty,—like any Greek or Phoenician vagabond, and come out among these godless foreigners (the gods blast and destroy them!), if I could possibly have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been maintained that the Gypsies are Egyptians, and even that they are the followers of Pharaoh, perhaps not yet gotten home from that Red Sea journey. Otherwise that they are the descendants of the vagabond votaries of Isis, who were in Rome just what the Gypsies are in modern Europe. It has been argued that they were Grecian heretics; that they were persecuted Jews; that they were Tartars; that they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... night and hear the wind blowing; hear it knock at every man's door and shout down every man's chimney. Feel how it takes liberties with everything, having taken primary liberty for itself; feel that the wind is always a vagabond and sometimes almost a housebreaker. But remember that in the days when free men had charters, they held that the wind itself was wild by authority; and was only free because it had ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... hand, which it cut dreadfully. The parson flew into a great rage, more particularly as everybody laughed at him, and, being a magistrate, ordered his clerk, who was likewise constable, to conduct me to prison as a rogue and a vagabond, telling my comrades that if they did not take themselves off, he would serve them in the same manner. So Ned hopped off, and Giles ran after him, without making any gathering, and I was led to Bridewell, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... this vigilant functionary was most perturbed; for, amidst the flocks that gathered from the little hamlets round to the voice of the Pastor, there were always some stray sheep, or rather climbing desultory vagabond goats, who struck off in all perverse directions, as if for the special purpose of distracting the energetic watchfulness of Mr. Stirn. As soon as church was over, if the day were fine, the whole park became a scene animated ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Jewish parents, in a village of Minsk; came to Berlin, where he studied, lived an eccentric, vagabond life, dependent mostly on his friends; made the acquaintance of Kant and Goethe, and attempted and published an eclectic system of philosophy in 1790, being Kant's system supplemented from Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Locke, and even Hume; his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... power of seeing beauty in all things, of enjoying invisible delights, and living in a world of your own. Your Aunt Fiction will like me; but your Uncle Fact won't. He will want to know all about me; will think I'm a little vagabond; and want me to be sent away somewhere, to be made like other children. I shall keep out of his way as much as I can; ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... answering to an intelligent demand; it is indebted not only to great authors, but to all whom any special skill or taste has qualified to handle it. The good writer may be one who disclaims all literary pretension, but there he is, at work among words,—binding the vagabond or liberating the prisoner, exalting the humble or abashing the presumptuous, incessantly alert to amend their implications, break their lazy habits, and help them to refinement or scope or decision. He educates words, for he knows that they ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... but he was also a vagabond, if we are to believe Vasari. He took the King's money, built his wretched wife a mansion, and never again dared return to France, where his dishonesty made him ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... seen but little of the world if you do not know that such is the law. The vagabond who sins from circumstances may have in him the making of a saint, and his children may be saints; but with those who sin in spite of the good around them it is not so. For them and for their children ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... evening, my dear friend, and you have just arrived from Germany. They hand you my letter, the post-mark of which informs you at once that I am absent from Paris. You indulge in a gesture of annoyance, and call me a vagabond. Nevertheless, you settle down in your best arm-chair, you open my letter, and you hear that I have been for the past five days domesticated in a flour-mill in Lower Normandy. In a flour-mill! What the duse ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... of the streets from his companions. This course he followed till he was fifteen years old, without giving his mind to any useful pursuit, or the least reflection on what would become of him. In this situation, as he was one day playing with his vagabond associates, a stranger passing by stood to ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... boy—a sharp, tattling vagabond, he knew him well—was reading a printed card he had picked up from the floor, with the impress of Nutter's hob-nailed tread upon it. It was endorsed upon the back, 'For Mrs. Macnamara, with the humble duty of her obedient servant, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... will be apprehended as rogues and vagabonds, and be either publicly whipt or sent to the house of correction, and afterwards disposed of according to law, by order of the magistrates. Any person who shall apprehend any rogue or vagabond will be entitled to a reward of ten shillings.' It very often happens that we cannot see the times in which we actually live. A thing must be gone by before you can see it, just as it must be printed before it is read. This little bit of weather-stained board may serve, perhaps, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... was a slave from Pontus, or, according to other traditions, a freedman from Italy. His skill as a singer and harpist, combined with his facial resemblance to Nero, gave him some credentials for imposture. He bribed some penniless and vagabond deserters by dazzling promises to join him, and they all set out to sea. A storm drove them on to the island of Cythnus,[221] where he found some troops homeward bound on leave from the East. Some of these he enrolled, killing all who resisted, and then proceeded to plunder the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... himself a sort of wandering vagabond, without employment, motive, or means of support; the supplies he had received from Jones had ceased, and he was compelled to become a pensioner on the bounty of the American minister and a few friends. It would appear, however, from some lively letters written by him at Paris, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... run away—did you?" went on Seth, who ought to have known better than to pursue the subject; "to run away like a little dirty vagabond! You've nearly killed mother, I wish you to understand. You'll get a severe thrashing for this. I shall tell father not to ...
— Little Grandfather • Sophie May
... necessitated either to emigrate, buy food, beg it, or starve. The negro has no means to buy, and begging will not avail him anything. He will then be compelled to emigrate, which, in his case, is usually equivalent to turning vagabond, or, induced by his necessities, resort to organized banding to steal, rob, and plunder. I am at a loss to know why the government has not adopted some system for the immediate relief and protection of this oppressed and suffering people, ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... idea that, of late, had been constantly in his mind. Somehow that morning with its breath of shrewd chill seemed to mark a dividing line. Yesterday had been warm and languorous and the day before had been hot. The ironweed had not long since been topped with the dusty royalty of its vagabond purple, and the thistledown had drifted along air currents ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... of course, wholly unaware of Mr Richardson's special interest in the matter. Otherwise, they might have been even more virtuous and high-principled than they were. They looked upon him as a benevolent individual, bent on getting the half-witted vagabond out of trouble, and, as such, they knew quite enough of fishing to see that he was ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... by the writers of the English story, were a sort of vagabond soldiers of fortune, who in those ages, under several denominations, infested other parts of Europe as well as England: they were a mixed people, natives of Arragon, Navarre, Biscay, Brabant, and other ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... out for Italy, and dreaded and avoided, as if they bore a mark like the first "murderer and vagabond," they threw themselves at the feet of the Pope, and entreated to know what they should do to obtain mercy. He ordered them to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and they all went except Tracy, who, lingering behind, was seized ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Rabisson, a vagabond tinker and knife-grinder. He was the only person who knew about "the gold-mine" left to the "miller of Grenoble." Rabisson was murdered for his secret by Eusebe Noel, the schoolmaster of Bout des Monde.—E. Stirling, The Gold Mine, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... origin of the volcano of Jorullo, in the State of Michoican, and such is the pretended consequence of a curse pronounced by Capuchin monks upon one of the most beautiful estates in the country; and for generations since, the dread of incurring the displeasure of strolling vagabond monks has rested like a blight upon the common people; and yet this is but one of the thousand ways by which the Mexican priesthood play upon the credulity of the ignorant in a country where convulsions of nature are ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... but the man they sent out with it chucked his job at the end of two months, leaving the launch moored at the pontoon in Horta. Got a better screw at a sawmill up the river—blast him! And ever since it has been the same thing. Any Scotch or Yankee vagabond that likes to call himself a mechanic out here gets eighteen pounds a month, and the next you know he's cleared out, after smashing something as likely as not. I give you my word that some of the objects ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... in my nature, from my cradle Had been inclined to fierce and eager bloodshed, A coward guilt hid in a coward quaking, Would have betray'd me to ignoble flight And vagabond pursuit of dreadful safety: But look upon my steadiness and scorn not The sickness of my fortune; which since Bassanes Was husband to Penthea, had lain bed-rid. We trifle time in words: thus I show cunning In opening of a ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... The vagabond white men, who were lingering about the frontiers of civilization, inflicting innumerable and nameless outrages upon the natives, were rigorously excluded from these regions. Thus the relations existing between the Indians ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... according to Davies, he was selected by Highmore, the patentee, in order to test the status of an actor, to be the victim of legal proceedings taken under the Vagrant Act, 12 Queen Anne, and on 12 Nov. 1733 he was committed to Bridewell as a vagabond. On 20 Nov. he came before the chief justice of the Kings Bench. It was pleaded on his behalf that he paid his debts, was well esteemed by persons of condition, was a freeholder in Surrey, and a householder in Westminster. He was discharged amid ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... Prayers Flew up, nor miss'd the Way, by envious Winds Blown vagabond or frustrate: in they passd Dimensionless through heavnly Doors, then clad With Incense, where the Golden Altar fumed, By their great Intercessor, came in sight ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... street door was opened hesitatingly, as if by some one not used to the place; and when Lemuel looked up from the menus he was writing, he saw the figure of one of those tramps who from time to time presented themselves and pretended to want work. He scanned the vagabond sharply, as he stood moulding a soft hat on his hands, and trying to superinduce an air of piteous appeal upon the natural gaiety of his swarthy face. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... of fear, rage, and disgust seized the unhappy boy, and at the same moment a ragged vagabond whispered to him, "Stump it, my cove; that's ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Germon. (Aside.) "I am supposed to be a virtuous and vagabond boy. I hate to show my ankles in ragged trowsers, but ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... human nature it was when the banker and the vagabond sat together in that little drawing-room, facing each other,—one in the armchair, one on the sofa! Darvil was still employed on some cold meat, and was making wry faces at the very indifferent brandy which he had frightened the formal old servant into buying ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Byron's fragment does not count for much philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb: he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... in the gateway between the Old World and the New, where the steamers and packets landed the greater part of our wandering countrymen, and received them again when their wanderings were done, I saw that no people on earth have such vagabond habits as ourselves. The Continental races never travel at all if they can help it; nor does an Englishman ever think of stirring abroad, unless he has the money to spare, or proposes to himself some definite advantage from the journey; ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... and read them. "Oh!" he exclaimed, "a triple assassination! Oh! oh!" The glance he gave the prisoner was positively deferential. This was no common culprit, no ordinary vagabond, no vulgar thief. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... mere Rogues shall make them, And as such, who ere shall take them, Them shall into prison put; Cupids wings shall then be cut, His Bow broken, and his Arrowes Given to Boyes to shoot at Sparrowes; And this Vagabond be sent, Having had due punishment, To mount Cytheron, which first fed him, Where his wanton Mother bred him, And there, out of her protection, Dayly to receive correction. Then her Pasport shall be made, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... wager that at the bottom of it was some shady trick, for the fellow had not looked like one who earns an honest living. So he proposed to Marian that she should come to Nuremberg and help in a raid on the vagabond, in order to prevent the unblemished name he bore from being permanently disgraced before it was too late. As a contribution to her travelling expenses he enclosed ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... went on with his argument.—"Besides, there is the gratification of making yourself considered in society—which no single man is. A single man is a kind of protected or licensed vagabond—rambling to and fro without stamp or mark, as Witwould might say,—like a sheep that has been overlooked at tarring time. His home is a desert to him,—and the love of social converse, which is so natural, and so amiable at the same time keeps him eternally in a state ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... "A GERMAN ACTOR! that is to say, a beggar and a vagabond! who wanders from city to city, and from village to village, with his stage finery, who is laughed at everywhere, even as the monkeys are laughed at when they make their somersets over the camels' backs; it might answer to be a dancer, or, at ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... pair In fables old, less ancient yet than these, Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha, to restore The race of mankind drowned, before the shrine Of Themis stood devout. To Heaven their prayers Flew up, nor missed the way, by envious winds Blown vagabond or frustrate: in they passed Dimensionless through heavenly doors; then clad With incense, where the golden altar fumed, By their great intercessour, came in sight Before the Father's throne: them the glad Son Presenting, thus to intercede ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... a robber or a vagabond," replied John, "he is one of the principal landowners in the Hatszegi district. How could I have said such things! He has a castle that is like a fortress. He is like a prince, a veritable prince in his own domains. He is just like a petty sovereign. I must have been ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... for so he called it, had one good feature. It was sincere of its kind, and disinterested. He was not of the common herd, a lazy vagabond, incapable of continuous work, or of perseverance in any productive occupation, desiring only to be enriched by impoverishing others, one of the endless rank and file of Italian republicans, to whom the word "republic" ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. . . . A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... on his back and snoring frightfully. The dog was asleep on the other side the fire, and the squaw, after toiling so long in the "corn field," was preparing the mid-day meal. She was a type of her sex as found among the aborigines, as her husband, even though a monarch, was a type of the lazy vagabond ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... villages should compass you about; and light fellowships should take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way. You may see from afar off what it will come to in the end—the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it will seem well—and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem the best—to break all the network bound about your feet by birth and old companionship and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my being in this condition!—I who fluttered my wings so much more than you, I whose imagination was so vagabond! My sins have been greater than yours, and I am the more severely punished. I have bidden farewell to my dreams: I am Madame la Presidente in all my glory, and I resign myself to giving my arm for forty years to my big awkward Roulandiere, to living meanly in every way, and to ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... have forgot them that may be in want. The shanty sartinly looked open enough the last time I fetched the trail past the clearin', and though with the help of the moss and the clay in the bank she might make it comfortable, yit, ef the vagabond that be her husband has forgot his own, and desarted them, as Wild Bill said he had, I doubt ef there be vict'als enough in the shanty to keep them from starvin'. Yis, pups," said the old man, rising, "it'll be a good tramp through the snow, but we'll go in the ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... uglier, that collection of every physical and moral ugliness, that companion of beggars whom she had picked up among her former vagrant associates, that jailbird, that dealer in little girls, that vagabond covered with filth, with legs like a toad's, with a mouth like a lamprey, and a death's head, in which the nose had been ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... The Vagabond Act was too well contrived for compassing such an end, to have been an accident, and portions of it strongly suggest the hand of Norton. It was passed in May, 1661, when it was becoming evident that hanging must be abandoned, and its provisions can only be explained on ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... to, sir; you were beaten in Italy for picking a kernel out of a pomegranate; you are a vagabond, and no true traveller: you are more saucy with lords and honourable personages than the heraldry of your birth and virtue gives you commission. You are not worth another word, else I'd call ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Peter answered. "I must go home now." And everybody knew that Peter Mink had no home at all! He was the vagabond ...
— The Tale of Nimble Deer - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey |
