"Vagabond" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the setting 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
... "Hi! you young vagabond, you!" he said, and went suddenly back to his anchor, keeping his head down on his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... many were severely wounded. The horse on which the king rode was wounded, but he himself escaped unhurt. The assassin was captured, and he turned out to be a Corsican, of the name of Fieschi, who had been a noted vagabond for many years. The questions in dispute between Belgium and Holland remained in the same unsettled state in which the preceding year had left them. In Belgium the formation of Sir Robert Peel's ministry excited alarm, lest the policy of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... has run away with Mrs. Loraine's step-daughter," I heard him say, as I opened the door wide enough to permit me to catch the sound. "I tell you, governor, you must get rid of the young vagabond, or he will swamp ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... little quiet reflection and meditation would be of service to me, and I always allowed myself to be guided by prudential instincts. Eventually, seated by my window, as before stated, Melons asserted himself, though our conversation rarely went further than "Hello, Mister!" and "Ah, Melons!" a vagabond instinct we felt in common implied a communion deeper than words. In this spiritual commingling the time passed, often beguiled by gymnastics on the fence or line (always with an eye to my window) until dinner was announced and I found a more practical void required ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... do to spend your time like Mr. Micawber, in waiting for something to "turn up." To such men one of two things usually "turns up:" the poorhouse or the jail; for idleness breeds bad habits, and clothes a man in rags. The poor spendthrift vagabond says to ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... bushes as the visitors appeared; they also lighted up the tinker's cart in the background, the browsing pony close by, the implements of the tinner's trade strewn around on the grass. It was an alluring picture of vagabond life, and Neale suddenly compared it with the dull existence of folk who, like himself, were chained to a desk. He would have liked to sit down by Tinner Creasy and ask him about his doings—but the policeman had ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... had forgot Crept near and clung and stayed— A roving, ragged vagabond Half daring, half afraid, And all because young love went by And one ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... the marquis, seeming to put more meaning into his words than they naturally carried, "I am a mere vagabond ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... you shall hang for this," were Lee's first words. "Ten thousand pounds would not save you now. Dick, you're a jewel. If I had listened to you, I shouldn't have trusted my life to the murdering vagabond. I'll remember to-night, my boy, as ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the merchant; "I'll have thy old vagabond bones in the Fleet for daring so to cheat his ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... abide a vagabond spirit whose wanderlust has no purely geographical basis. I wander the wide world over, yes! Also, I wander in and out of men's lives, in and out of men's affairs. To wander—'tis my excuse for ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... for, indeed, you little vagabond?" said Hans, administering an educational box on the ear, ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... within a reasonable time, and do well and prosper, the result is agreeable enough. But no sort of provision is made for the husband's not showing himself, or, if he does, for his subsequent loss by death, or for his turning out either unfortunate or a vagabond. Even the daughter's natural gifts, often very brilliant ones, are left uncultivated. If she has a talent for music, she receives only a superficial knowledge of the piano, instead of such an education as would qualify her to teach. No one expects her to work, it is true; but why not fit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... of his craft before and since, he was a vain, meddlesome vagabond, and must needs pry into a secret which certainly ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... overheard you in the hall this morning berating him as the laziest vagabond that ever ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... to play the fool with my pen: briefly then, from antient story first:—Dost thou not think that I am as much entitled to forgiveness on Miss Harlowe's account, as Virgil's hero was on Queen Dido's? For what an ungrateful varlet was that vagabond to the hospitable princess, who had willingly conferred upon him the last favour?—Stealing away, (whence, I suppose, the ironical phrase of trusty Trojan to this day,) like a thief—pretendedly indeed at the command ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... both of considerable bulk and of considerable interest. But there would be nothing particularly startling or striking about it. Apart from the interest of public events contemporary with his long career, the monotonous variety produced by his vagabond nature, and such psychical interest as might possibly attach to stories of his mediumistic temperament, it would be rather hum-drum. Brendan, however, has had the ill luck to be selected by some unknown antient ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... hurt, mum,' says the boy. 'Oh! but you must be,' said Kitty. I offered to take him to his mother and give him half a crown. 'It's my duty to look after him,' says Kitty. And she lifted him up herself—dirty little vagabond!—and put him in the carriage. There were some laborers and grooms standing near, and one of them sang out, 'Three cheers for Lady Kitty Ashe!' Such a ridiculous ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... awaken her trust; I had felt myself to be a most presentable young man in whom she must instantly repose faith. Yet, this had not been true at all—instead I came to her with the outward bearing of a worthless vagabond, a stubble-bearded outcast. And yet she had trusted me; would trust me again. More; she could never be deceived, or fail to recognize my presence aboard if she had the freedom of the deck. Kirby might be deceived, but not Rene. Still she was a woman of quick wit; once recovered from ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... her at five o'clock, and had not gone two streets' length before the memory of the little grey vagabond, screwed back in the far corner of the dock like a baited raccoon, of his dreary, creaking voice, took possession of him again; and a kind of savagery mounted in his brain against a world where one could be so tortured without having meant harm ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... say! And what business had you to think, coming trespassing here on my ground, and breaking the hedges! I'd have you up for that, if for nothing else, you young vagabond!" ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... fear of treachery from these Chawbacons, but we had Enemies in the Chase nevertheless. Here dwelt a vagabond tribe of Bastard Verderers and Charcoal-burners, savage, ignorant, brutish Wretches, as superstitious as the Manilla Creoles. They were one-half gipsies, and one half, or perhaps a quarter, trade-fallen whippers-in and keepers that had been stripped of ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... vagabond Vulture Who said: "I don't want to insult yer, But when you intrude Where in lone solitude I'm a-preyin', ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, Goes to, and back, lackeying the varying tide To rot itself ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... scold him. He's perfectly right. I'm a trespasser and a vagabond. I have no visible means of subsistence, and, if these things are crimes, I'm an habitual criminal. If you really don't want me to draw your cottage, I'll stop. But you must say so right out. And it isn't the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... I suspect that I was not shown fair play, and that there was management at the bottom; for without vanity, I think I was a better actor than he. As I had not embarked in the vagabond line through ambition, I did not repine at lack of preferment; but I was grieved to find that a vagrant life was not without its cares and anxieties, and that jealousies, intrigues, and mad ambition were to ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... hand—the hand that created vagabond Paragot for tears and laughter, and the resourceful Aristide—has it lost its particular cunning that he should begin his romance of The Fortunate Youth (LANE) in a mood of heavy and misplaced facetiousness, and drift by way of Family ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... question, instead of genuine and active justice, you give us only an effigy of justice, and you teach us, as it were, to disregard our own unvarying conscience, and to go hunting after the fleeting vagabond opinions ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... iron money was not current among other Greeks, and had no value, being regarded as ridiculous; so that it could not be used for the purchase of foreign trumpery, and no cargo was shipped for a Laconian port, and there came into the country no sophists, no vagabond soothsayers, no panders, no goldsmiths or workers in silver plate, because there was no money to pay them with. Luxury, thus cut off from all encouragement, gradually became extinct; and the rich were on the same footing with other people, as they could find no means of display, but were ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... warm valleys and high trees and pleasant 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not make him shudder, but it had made of him what he was in the eyes of respectable people, a man careless of common decencies, something between a clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor. But not all respectable people would have had the necessary delicacy of sentiment to understand with what trouble of mind and accuracy of vision Dr. Monygham, medical officer of the San Tome mine, remembered Father Beron, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Browne necessitated. With delicate sarcasm he narrated the last weeks, the patience with which Cronshaw bore the well-meaning clumsiness of the young student who had appointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that divine vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings. Beauty from ashes, he quoted from Isaiah. It was a triumph of irony for that outcast poet to die amid the trappings of vulgar respectability; it reminded Leonard ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... men belonging to the crew; and as the ship was only a little trading schooner, these were sailors of the lowest and coarsest grade. They all seemed to take their cue from the captain, who was a drunken, blaspheming, and cruel vagabond. ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... 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 ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Jew, a cheat, a rogue, a vagabond, a liar, a coiner, an utterer of all things base ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... all the streets of the town, which struck him as romantic; down every ride of the forest, roseate with the deep and tender glow of sunset;—innumerable and alternative hiding-places, to which would fly simultaneously for refuge, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his happy, vagabond and divided heart. "We mustn't, on any account," he would warn M. de Forestelle, "run across Odette and the Verdurins. I have just heard that they are at Pierrefonds, of all places, to-day. One has plenty of time to see them in Paris; it would hardly be worth while coming down here if one couldn't ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... injury to her parent orb. But there is another inhabitant of the skies whose purposes have not been similarly free from popular suspicion. Needless to say I refer to the black sheep of the sidereal family, that "celestial vagabond" the comet. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of every country in Europe. In the reign of Edward VI. there was a law against idle workmen which shows how they were regarded. Any laboring man or servant loitering or living idly for the space of three days could be branded on the breast with the latter V (vagabond) and sentenced to be the slave of the person who arrested him for two years; and that person could "give him bread, water, or small drink, and refuse him meat, and cause him to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise." If he should run away from this treatment, he could be branded on the ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... good, so have they had the good fortune to meet with approbation from the sober and substantial part of mankind; as for the vicious and vagabond, their ill-will is ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... the great day came, the marvellous day when We-hro discovered his second self, his playmate, his loyal, unselfish, loving friend—his underbred, unwashed, hungry, vagabond dog, born white and spotless, but begrimed by contact with the world, the mud, and ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... haunted his office was an Irish vagabond who had borne more than one name and had professed more than one religion. He now called himself Taaffe. He had been a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and secretary to Adda the Papal Nuncio, but had since the Revolution ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... pilgrimages; but in part very unjustly, as Gretser (not. in Notas Molinei) demonstrates. Some set too great a value on pilgrimages, and made them an essential part of perfection: and by them even many monks and nuns exchanged their solitude into a vagabond life. These abuses St. Gregory justly reproves. What he says, that he himself received no good by visiting the holy places, must be understood to be a Miosis, or extenuation to check the monks' too ardent passion for pilgrimages, and only means, the presence of those ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Hudden met Dudden, and they were soon grumbling as usual, and all to the tune of, "If only we could get that vagabond, Donald O'Neary, out ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... la Marck found his retreat cut off, and bade his lieutenant break through if he could, and escape. "With me it is over," he added. "I am man enough now that I am brought to bay, to send some of these vagabond Scots to hell before me." About six of De la Marck's best men remained to perish with their master, and fronted the archers who were not many more ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... 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
... for his opinions but for his habits of life. He affectedly adopts the Armenian dress, with its big fur bonnet and long girdled caftan, among the Swiss peasantry. He is as full of personal eccentricities as he is of intellectual crotchets. He becomes a sort of literary vagabond, with every man's hand against him. He now writes a series of essays, called "Letters from the Mountain," full of bitterness and anti-Christian sentiments. So incensed by these writings are the country people among whom he dwells that he is ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... was a hard woman, and she had never loved her master's son, so she answered rudely, "Nay, by my troth, but thou shalt get no alms from me. Thou art little better than a vagabond; if we had a law to punish such, right gladly would I ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... Ordeyne At the Gate of Samaria A Study in Shadows Where Love Is Derelicts The Demagogue and Lady Phayre The Beloved Vagabond The White Dove The Usurper ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... go, make your inquiries. However, I should greatly prefer that our friend, the pastor, went with you; Two such excellent men are witnesses none can find fault with. O, my father! the maiden no vagabond is, I assure you, No mere adventurer, wand'ring about all over the country, And deceiving the inexperienced youths with her cunning; No! the harsh destiny link'd with this war, so destructive of all things, Which is destroying ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... brain, blistered my body, blasted my hopes, bitten my soul and broken my will. You have taken my money, destroyed my home, stolen my good name, and robbed me of every friend I ever had. You killed my mother, slew my father, sent me out into the world a worthless vagabond, until I find myself a son without parents, a man without friends, a wanderer without a home, a human being without sympathy, and a pauper without bread. Deceiver, mocker, robber, murderer—I hate you! Oh, ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... used to wander around bewildered by the port of Barcelona.... Too much noisy bustle, too much movement! Walking proudly along by the side of Ulysses, he loved to recount to him the adventures of his life as a sailor and cosmopolitan vagabond. He considered his nephew the greatest of the Ferraguts, a true man of the sea like his ancestors but with the title of captain;—an adventurous rover over all oceans, as he had been, but with a place on the bridge, invested with the absolute command that responsibility and danger confer. When Ulysses ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... their fellow citizen of Waco, I had done them no harm; yet when a strolling vagabond, wearing God's livery, and whose forte is the defamation of women, made a statement, which if true, would forever disgrace me in the eyes of the world; when he preferred this charge against me within two blocks of where my babies ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... every one, little and great, Is taught in that vagabond's tragical fate: Of him who is scheming your friend to ensnare, Unless you've a passion ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... Perhaps this somehow offended her, looking as if I expected her to stand gossiping there with me. And then I had said, "We stopped at a cottage," as if we had been equals. It was a bad mistake on my part, of course, but I had got a little out of hand after all these vagabond months. ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... in silence for a long while, he lighted again with the blossoming dawn of his sentiment. I thought of the coarse yet taking vagabond of twenty I had once chanced upon, and hunted and camped with since through the years. Decidedly he was not that boy to-day! It is not true that all of us rise through adversity, any more than that all plants need shadow. Some starve out of the ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... outskirts of the town to meet the bands of music, five of which have been engaged, as well as three orchestras. The band of Pagsanhan belonging to the escribano must not be lacking nor that of San Pedro de Tunasan, at that time famous because it was directed by the maestro Austria, the vagabond "Corporal Mariano" who, according to report, carried fame and harmony in the tip of his baton. Musicians praise his funeral march, "El Sauce," [79] and deplore his lack of musical education, since with his genius he ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... guardians, in case the father is incompetent to fulfil or grossly abuses his trust. This is proper, because society contributes to the life of the child, and has a right as well as an interest in him. Society, again, must suffer if the child is allowed to grow up a worthless vagabond or a criminal; and has a right to intervene, both in behalf of itself and of the child, in case his parents neglect to train him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, or are training him up to be a liar, a thief, a drunkard, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... a drop of vagabond blood which found comrades for her among every class and color. But there was not an atom of the tramp in her son's well-built and fashionably clothed body. He never had had a single intimate friend even when he was a boy. "He will probably find his companions among ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... foolish, inasmuch as he 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... her books then, a vagabond little collection of them. Textbooks, in many cases her initials and graduating year printed in lead pencil along the edges. Rolfe's complete edition of Shakespeare. A large illustrated edition of Omar Khayyam. Several gift volumes ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... for other men's actions if they stole goats, and he could not recognise a man as his chief whom the Sheikh, merely by a whim of his own, thought proper to appoint—was condemned to be tied up for the night with the prospect of a flogging in the morning. Seeing his fate, the cunning vagabond said, "Now I do see it was by your orders the chief was appointed, and not by a whim of Sheikh Said's; I will obey him for the future;" and these words were hardly pronounced than the three missing goats rushed like magic into camp, nobody of ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... on the relativity of things mundane. The waiting-maid no doubt wore some horror made of hemp against her skin. If Carlotta's gossamer follies had been thrown into the vagabond court of the Queen of Navarre, I wonder whether those delectable stories would ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... see the admirable aggregation of truths which has taken the place of fable. The sky is not a vault; the stars are not little lamps; the moon is not a sportive huntress, but an opaque mass of stone; the sun is not a gayly adorned and vagabond charioteer but a fixed fire; Scylla and Charybdis are not nymphs but sunken rocks; the sirens are seals; and in the order of personages, Mercury is Manzanedo; Mars is a clean-shaven old man, the Count von Moltke; Nestor may be a gentleman in an overcoat, who is called M. Thiers; ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... all Dominic said, with a terrible softness of voice. He restrained his choler for a time. "Where have you been, vagabond?" he asked menacingly. ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... We have been Europe's sink, the jakes, where 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 their race are ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... painful interest their companions struggling in the swarthy arms of the stalwart, bare-chested shearers, saddles, broad sombreros, whips, and weapons grouped in so many pendent escutcheons of the great Mexican vagabond family, the flitting coleritos, the scarfed shearers themselves, all are so many veritable "bits." But it is not only that the details are good: they compose admirably about the long aisle, with here and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... longer; now 'tis a subscription for this, now a donation for that, then sixpence for Jack such a one, or a shilling for Sal the other, till I have neither peace nor money. Come you, sir, go and turn that vagabond out directly, or I'll do it before your ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... language, and the multifarious significations of some of our words. A French gentleman, who dined in London, in company with the celebrated author of the Rambler, wishing to show him a mark of peculiar respect, drank Dr. Johnson's health in these words: "Your health, Mr. Vagabond." Assuredly no well-judging Englishman would undervalue the Frenchman's abilities, because he mistook the meaning of the words Vagabond and Rambler; he would recollect, that in old English and modern French authors, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... insisted that all they were entitled to was just enough to keep them in working order. There is slavery for you. And when at last they protested, when they were tormented by hunger, when they saw their children in tatters, they were shot down as if they had been so many vagabond dogs. ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... take this harder way which I direct—cease the line of least resistance and take the one of greatest resistance." When day dreams and "castles in Spain" attempt to lure you from your lessons, refuse to follow; shut out these vagabond thoughts and stick to your task. When intellectual inertia deadens your thought and clogs your mental stream, throw it off and court forceful effort. If wrong or impure thoughts seek entrance to your ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... The truly distressed are too bashful to mix with the herd of common Beggars; necessity, it is true, will sometimes conquer their timidity, and compel them publicity to solicit charity; but their modest appeal is unheard or unnoticed, whilst a dissolute vagabond, who exhibits an hypocritical picture of distress,—a drunken wretch, who pretends to have a numerous family and to be persecuted by misfortune,—or an impudent unfeeling women, who excites pity by the tears and cries of a poor child whom she has hired perhaps for the purpose, and tortured ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... plenty of handsome men. From amongst these choose one only, and be content to do with him whatever nature may incline you to do. At all events, I wish that in making your choice you should take particular care that he is not a vagabond, or dishonest, or disreputable person, for great dangers might arise from your acquaintance with such a person, inasmuch as he would, without doubt ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... went back to the life he had left, it seemed immensely far away, as though it were really the life of another incarnation, and old ideas that had seemed axiomatic to his boyhood stood before him in the guise of strangers: strangers tattered and vagabond. He wondered if, after all, the new gods were sapping his loyalty. At such times, he would for days keep morosely to himself, picturing the death-bed of his father, and seeming to hear a small boy's voice making a promise. Sometimes, that promise seemed monstrous, in the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... too, had been given the news, but she was sorely disappointed when she ran out with her two dirty children to welcome the returning Governor. She scolded him soundly for coming home dressed like a vagabond. But Sancho told her to put a clamp on her tongue, for he did bring her money, at any rate, he said. Then his daughter fell on his neck and kissed him, and in the next instant the whole family had dragged him inside ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... ask a blessing, "How much work have I done to-day for my dinner?" But the proper way to enforce that order on those below you, as well as on yourselves, is not to leave vagabonds and honest people to starve together, but very distinctly to discern and seize your vagabond; and shut your vagabond up out of honest people's way, and very sternly then see that, until he has worked, he does NOT eat. But the first thing is to be sure you have the food to give; and, therefore, to ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... her knees, and still beaten flat until the breath left her body. You will not be surprised that the heavy hand of these Christian fathers fell first upon the Theatre: for the actor in Rome was by legal definition an 'infamous' man, even as in England until the other day he was by legal definition a vagabond and liable to whipping. The policy of religious reformers has ever been to close the theatres, as our Puritans did in 1642; and a recent pronouncement by the Bishop of Kensington would seem to show that the instinct survives to this day. Queen Elizabeth—like her brother, King Edward VI—signalized ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... discussing the Indian bill,[107] he took high ground, showing that we had failed in our selfish policy toward the Indian—a policy by which the breeding of hatred and discontent had kept him a fugitive and a vagabond—and emphasized the necessity for the government to do something to civilize the Indian. There must be a change in the Indian policy "if they are to be civilized," said he, "in that the best elements of their natures are to be developed to the exercise of their best functions, so as to produce ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... centuries behind, creation ahead. You do not know what it is to hunger after the power of understanding and the power of expression; to see the world as divine one minute and a mechanic hell the next; to feel the convictions of the vagabond; to grudge each sunbeam that falls unseen by you on some mouldering gate in some neglected city, each face of the living wherein possible life looks out untried by you, each picture that means a new curiosity. No, for, after all, you are material souls; you need a Bradshaw and a Baedeker, ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... frenzy of a fit of insanity. Long confinement had reduced him to idiocy. To save my life Claperon substituted the senseless being for me, on the scaffold, and he was executed in my stead. He has quitted the country, and I have been a vagabond on the face of the earth ever since that time. At length I obtained, through the assistance of my sister, the situation of concierge in the Hotel Marboeuf, in the Rue Grange-Bateliere. I entered on my new place yesterday evening, and was desired to awaken the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... by his hammer. We told him why we wanted him to come into the kitchen, and he slowly laid down his hammer, wiped his brow with his arm, took another wipe at it with his apron, and came slouching out, with a curious loose vagabond bend in the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the subject a totally different appearance. I saw him, not contented with blasting my reputation, confining me for a period in jail, and reducing me to the situation of a houseless vagabond, still continuing his pursuit under these forlorn circumstances with unmitigable cruelty. Indignation and resentment seemed now for the first time to penetrate my mind. I knew his misery so well, I was so fully acquainted with its cause, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... his decisions would have been very different. Law has about the same relation to justice that grammar has to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare were put in the dock and tried by the grammarians he would be condemned as a rogue and vagabond, and, similarly, justice is not infrequently hanged by the lawyers. We must have law just as we must have grammar, but we have no love for either of them. They are dry, bloodless sciences, and we look askance at those who practice them. You may be the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... any more of them. Our cash box is better furnished than yours, therefore come over to us. Your young man is as much Frescas as I am chevalier and you baron. You picked him up on the frontier of Italy; he was then a vagabond, to-day he is an adventurer, and that's the whole truth ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... will be 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 ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... vagabonds. In the United States the tramp is almost invariably a discouraged worker. He finds tramping a softer mode of life than working. But this is not true in England. Here the powers that be do their utmost to discourage the tramp and vagabond, and he is, in all truth, a mightily discouraged creature. He knows that two shillings a day, which is only fifty cents, will buy him three fair meals, a bed at night, and leave him a couple of ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... stand, and along the whole front from the river to the sea; and, as the plan shows, this may be flooded with water at high tide, which enters through the river. As all the Sangleys had knowledge of this, and there were among them restless and vagabond people who had nothing to lose, and who on account of their crimes, evil life, and debts could not go back to China without being punished there for these things with much severity, they took this as a pretext to win over the merchants and quiet people, persuading ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... Henry VIII., where the accuracy of the account is undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies wherever they could meet them. Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices, from London,[14] who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for years the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and plundered, without ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... perceive! Oh, no doubt! Oh, my! Oh, goodness! Oh, tempora! Oh, Moses!" Why, the fellow is all O! That accounts for his reasoning in a circle, and explains why there is neither beginning nor end to him, nor to anything he says. We really do not believe the vagabond can write a word that hasn't an O in it. Wonder if this O-ing is a habit of his? By-the-by, he came away from Down-East in a great hurry. Wonder if he O's as much there as he does ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... some things, Elrigmore," he said, smiling. "Your Latin gave you no clue, did it, to the fact that she thought John M'Iver a vagabond ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... become as black as it likes, the spark is still there. However low you go there is light. Light in the vagabond, light in the mendicant, light in the thief, light in the street-walker. The deeper you go the more the miraculous light persists ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... laughing. Suddenly the instinct of my vagabond days returned like a sweet wind from the wilds, smiting me full in ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... it in as good a light as the poor place can give," he said, and dragged forth the rickety-legged chair that he might prop it against its back, for the moment looking less drunk and less a vagabond in his eagerness to do his work justice; there lurking somewhere, perhaps, in his besotted being, that love which the artist soul feels for the ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to such irritation; yet after mixing for a few moments with the departing passengers, each selfishly hurrying to some rendezvous of rest or business, he insensibly drew apart from them, with the instinct of a vagabond and outcast. Although he was conscious that he was neither, but merely an unsuccessful miner suddenly reduced to the point of soliciting work or alms of any kind, he took advantage of the first crossing to plunge into a side street, with a vague ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in almost every town in the British dominions, and perhaps in foreign dominions too—we think it very likely, but, being no great traveller, cannot distinctly say—there happened to be, in Mudfog, a merry-tempered, pleasant-faced, good-for-nothing sort of vagabond, with an invincible dislike to manual labour, and an unconquerable attachment to strong beer and spirits, whom everybody knew, and nobody, except his wife, took the trouble to quarrel with, who inherited from his ancestors the appellation ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... this here Elixir of Long Life, I might embellish it with a great many high-sounding epithets; but I disdain to follow the example of every illiterate vagabond, that, from idleness, turns quack, and advertises his nostrum in the public papers. I am neither a felonious drysalter returned from exile, an hospital stump-turner, a decayed staymaker, a bankrupt ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... professional criminal of the town,—a weak, good-natured, knock-kneed vagabond, who stole hens, and spent every winter in the House of Correction as an "idle and ...
— The Village Convict - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... the discovery; if you happen to be sitting up all night and have a light in your window, the constable will ring the bell, but if you happen to be lying dead in somebody's area, you will be left alone. In this instance as in many others the alarm was raised by some kind of vagabond; I don't mean a common tramp, or a public-house loafer, but a gentleman, whose business or pleasure, or both, made him a spectator of the London streets at five o'clock in the morning. This individual was, as he said, "going home," it did not appear whence or whither, and ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... the city he, Jason Philip, could not see. But he was willing to 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 five ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... requisite for success. They were not accustomed to labor, at least with the axe and plough. Smith earnestly wrote to the council of the company in England, to send carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen, and blacksmiths, instead of "vagabond gentlemen and goldsmiths." But he had to organize a colony with such materials as avarice or adventurous curiosity had sent to America. And, in spite of dissensions and natural indolence, he succeeded in placing ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... dilettante re-establishes for a moment the vogue of the roundel or the virelay—but quite naturally as the inevitable setting for a picture which has to include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner of the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... at 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 ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 having ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... just at the time He was reaching his prime, And all thought he'd be turning out something sublime, One unlucky day, How no one could say, Whether soft liaison induced him to stray, Or some kidnapping vagabond coaxed him away, He was lost to the view, Like the morning dew;— He had been, and was not—that's all that they knew And the Bagman storm'd, and the Bagman swore As never a Bagman had sworn before; But storming or swearing ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... duly impressed with the handsome reward offered for the apprehension of the murderers. So every time he met an old acquaintance he talked about the murder of Will Cummins. It was a simple method of procedure, and it did not prove immediately successful. As it was about as easy to be a vagabond in one locality as in another, he drifted from place to place—first to Sacramento, then to San Francisco, then over the Sierras to the mining camps of Nevada, then through Utah and Wyoming, till at last he found himself in jail ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... entrance of Hudson's Strait. The interior is inhabited by two tribes of Indians, Mountaineers and Nascopies, members of the Cree family. The coast was inhabited at one time by Esquimaux only, but the southern part is now peopled by a mongrel race of Esquimaux half-breeds, a few vagabond Esquimaux, and some English and Canadian fishermen and trappers, who are assimilated to the natives in manners and in mode of life. While the European inhabitants adopt from necessity some of the native customs, the natives have adopted so much of the European customs ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... years afterwards, namely, in July, 1846, this lawless vagabond waylaid and shot my brother James, having concealed himself ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... old, less ancient yet then these, Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha to restore The Race of Mankind drownd, before the Shrine Of Themis stood devout. To Heav'n thir prayers Flew up, nor missed the way, by envious windes Blow'n vagabond or frustrate: in they passd Dimentionless through Heav'nly dores; then clad With incense, where the Golden Altar fum'd, By thir great Intercessor, came in sight Before the Fathers Throne: Them the glad Son 20 Presenting, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Biler's life had been, since yesterday morning, rendered weary by the costume of the Charitable Grinders. The youth of the streets could not endure it. No young vagabond could be brought to bear its contemplation for a moment, without throwing himself upon the unoffending wearer, and doing him a mischief. His social existence had been more like that of an early Christian, than an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... sorry to leave a place than glad to get away," he answered lightly. "Come on, let's pike home and get things in order for the long trail, woman o' mine. I'll teach you how to be a woodland vagabond." ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... happened to be empty till I reached Nasirabad, when the big black-browed gentleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed the time of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but with an educated taste for whisky. He told tales of things he had seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into which he had penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his life ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... famous critique on the "Free Inquiry" of Soame Jenyns. Nor is it uninteresting to mark with what a purely instinctive feeling of the right some of the better poets, whose "lyre," according to Cowper, was their "heart," protested against it too. Poor Goldsmith, when sitting a homeless vagabond on the slopes of the Alps, could exclaim in a greatly truer tone than ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... anxious, for it seemed as if every man of his own party had turned his hand against him. With all his severity, Claverhouse had a just mind, and he offended Queensberry by protesting against the severity of the law; while the Duke of Perth, an unprincipled vagabond, ready to play traitor to either king or religion, hated Claverhouse because he was an honorable man. Claverhouse thought it necessary to write to the Duke of York, explaining the circumstances of his marriage and assuring him of his continued loyalty, and ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... danger, and laid down upon the steps of a public building and went to sleep. The cart came along in the night, by torchlight, and one of the men who attended it, inserting the point of his fork under the poor vagabond's belt, tossed him into the cart, bagpipes and all. The dog did all he could to defend his master, but in vain. The cart went thundering on, the men walking along by its side, examining the ways for new additions to their load. The piper, half awakened by the shock of his precipitation ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... eloquence always has been held in the greatest veneration, shall have a higher place in my regard than that of the Spartans and Athenians. It is not to be supposed that the founders of cities could have made a united people of a vagabond multitude without the charms of persuasive words, nor that law-givers, without extraordinary talent for speaking, could have forced men to bend their necks to the yoke of the laws. Even the precepts of moral life, tho engraved on our hearts by the finger of nature, are more efficacious to inspire ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 most he could do was to leave the secret ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... Who ordered him his breakfast in the kitchen without my knowledge?" she asked. "The moment I can find out the person that dared to do so, that moment they shall leave my family. Must I keep an open house for every strolling vagabond ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the ladder and told what he had seen, of course the rest of us wished to become eye witnesses to the perfidy of this vagabond of the Catholic Church. ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... autos." Whereupon he threw back his head and burst into peal after peal of such hearty laughter that, from pure contagion, I perforce joined in the chorus. In the days of Fielding and Sam Johnson, this fellow would have been dubbed "a lusty vagabond;" in the slangy parlance of today, he was a "husky hobo," equipped as such, even to the tin can of the comic journals. To him, the humor of a brother tramp refusing a ride—in an autocar, ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... and Switzerland, afford a solemn lesson to the people of this country. We have men among us now, most of them it is true, vagabond foreigners, who are attempting to propagate the same sentiments which produced such terrible consequences in France. Under various names they are scattering their pestilent doctrines through the country. As in France, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... 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
... Rascians. The emperor has several regiments of these people; but, to say the truth, they are rather plunderers than soldiers; having no pay, and being obliged to furnish their own arms and horses; they rather look like vagabond gypsies, or stout beggars, than regular troops. I cannot forbear speaking a word of this race of creatures, who are very numerous all over Hungary. They have a patriarch of their own at Grand Cairo, and are really ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... like to have them, wrote the cheque, and paid for them on the spot." "Well, I'll give him all the money any day, if he's tired of his bargain," rejoined Lawless; "but we won't keep them standing now they're warm. Here, Shrimp, my greatcoat—get off that pony this instant, you luxurious young vagabond. Never saw such a boy in my life to ride as that is—if there is anything that can by possibility carry him, not a step will he stir on foot—doesn't believe legs were meant to walk with, it's my opinion. Why, this very morning, before ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... listening with such gratitude to these noble lessons of politics and morality; where is the man, who could any longer blind himself to the admirable influence of the present revolution? Innumerable are the benefits that the Paris Commune showers upon us! As I leave the church, a little vagabond walks up to the font, and taking a pinch of tobacco,—"In the name of the...!" says he, then fills his pipe; "In the name of the ...!" proceeding to strike a lucifer, adds, "In the name of the ...!"—"Confound the blasphemous rascal!" say ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... longer roam the world as an adventurer. Any day some trivial accident might oppress him with the burden of a wife and child who looked to him for their support. Tarrant the married man, unless he were content to turn simple rogue and vagabond, must make for himself a place in the money-earning world. His indolence had no small part in his revolt against the stress of such a consideration. The climate of the Bahamas by no means tended to invigorate ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... thousand troublesome adventures, by which I was at length inured in adversity, and emboldened to undertakings far above my years. I was often inhumanly scourged for crimes I did not commit, because, having the character of a vagabond in the village, every piece of mischief, whose author lay unknown, was charged upon me. I have been found guilty of robbing orchards I never entered, of killing cats I never hunted, of stealing gingerbread I never touched, and of abusing ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... it to be "a fabrication, a story invented to conceal the palpable collusion of the witnesses." Yet, though he one moment declared that he did not believe the story, he the next inferred from it, that Forester was disposed to riot and sedition, since he was ready to fight with a vagabond in the streets for the sake of a parcel of ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... Therefore, the welcome work of Mr. Garland is much needed and appreciated. A special quarter is reserved in which the Jews must live, huddled together, the majority of them in abject poverty. Until of late no peace was given them. Their customs were interfered with in every way by vagabond Persians, and the little money they made by industrious habits was extorted from them by officials or by the enterprising Persian to whom the Jewish community ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... weaker species (Circaea alpina), found in cool, moist woods, chiefly north, has thin, shining leaves and soft, hooked hairs on its vagabond seeds. Less dependence seems to be placed on these ineffective hooks to help perpetuate the plant than on the tiny pink bulblets growing at the end of an exceedingly slender thread sent ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... An impudent vagabond was brought up before this clergyman charged with a violent and unprovoked assault on a man in a public-house. He was said to have gone into the room where the prosecutor was, and to have taken up ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... an adventurer who had wandered about the country as an idle vagabond until the war broke out, when he took to army-contracting with considerable success. It was in his capacity of contractor that he became acquainted with the boisterous black Pasha, who greatly appreciated ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... very first letter she had from Calcutta, Bunter told her he had had a fall down the poop-ladder, and cut his head, but no bones broken, thank God. That was all. Of course, she had other letters from him, but that vagabond Bunter never gave me a scratch of the pen the solid eleven months. I supposed, naturally, that everything was going on all right. Who could imagine what ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... all three, together with everything else he possessed, for the gratification of a fourth and unconfessed desire, the dearest wish of his life, woman. Ward's description of him, slightly paraphrased, fits him to a hair: "A salt-water vagabond, who is never at home but when he is at sea, and never contented but when he is ashore; never at ease until he has drawn his pay, and never satisfied until he has spent it; and when his pocket is empty he is just as much respected as a father-in-law ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... detected; but when he conspires and combines with hundreds of others, thereby a thousandfold increasing the danger and damage, it becomes a delicate matter for office-holders to handle, and so, while the leaders are free to roam the land and preach sedition and rebellion, the criminal and vagabond classes, the ignorant and vicious, and the great array of foreign-born, foreign-bred laborers, eagerly await the next opportunity. The real sufferers are the native-born or naturalized citizens, who, listening to the false promises of professional agitators, have been egged on to riot ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... first—for the space of that silence after the first kiss—pushed very close by those who have entered; but, soon after, the breath of every rushing moment blows it further and further ajar. Drab objects from the outer world drift across the threshold and obtrude their presence—vagabond tramps in a rose-garden, unpleasant, marring the surroundings, soiling the atmosphere. Cares drift in, worldly interests drift in; in drift smudgy, soiled, unpleasant objects brushing the door yet wider upon its hinges ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... waterspouts, leering down like nightmares caught in the very act of leering and congealed into stone. The spirit of the place possesses you; you conjure up a vision of the little maid Esmeralda and the squat hunchback who dwelt in the tower above; and at the precise moment a foul vagabond pounces on you and, with a wink that is in itself an insult and a smile that should earn for him a kick for every inch of its breadth, he draws from beneath his coat a set of nasty photographs—things which no decent man could look at without gagging and would ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... with Marna! That's the life for me! Wandering with the wandering wind, Vagabond and unconfined! Roving with the roving rain Its unboundaried domain! Kith and kin of wander-kind, Children ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... denied me. Mad? It were better, for your sake. Mad? I know not what I say. You are not my wife, nor Sigmund, Sigmund, nor I Sigmundskron, nor Greifenstein, nor Hilda's husband, nor anything that I wot of—save a nameless vagabond who ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... allowed to go my own way—a pleasant 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. I started a studio in San Francisco—and a life class. That ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... may think it was unkind in me to let him run the risk of losing his place, but what was I to do? I could not submit to stay at the station like a vagabond, and I could not find my way alone. So, without allowing him time to change his mind, I set out. The road was bad and the night dark; the lantern threw a circle of light around us, but all beyond was impenetrable; still, the hope of shelter at the end made the walk agreeable to me. We stumbled along ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... not to enlist any deserter from the Ministerial army, nor any stroller, negro, or vagabond, or persons suspected of being an enemy to the liberty of America, nor any under eighteen years of age. As the cause is the best that can engage men of courage and principle to take up arms, so it is expected that none but such will be ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... would not have forgiven in their wives this error—that would argue thus, You may sin, madam, against your Maker; but you shall not sin against me. Is there not a story somewhere, of a wretched vagabond at the confessional—dreadful were the crimes for which he was promised absolution; but after all his compunctions, contortions, self-cursings, breast-beatings, hand-wringings, out came the sin of sins—he had once spit by accident upon the priest's robe, though he only meant to spit upon the altar ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... Franois Villon, Master of Arts, rhymer at his best, vagabond at his worst, ne'er-do-well at all seasons, and scapegrace ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of joy, gazed at this face, irradiated and disfigured by the passion of covetousness; he felt that he himself, the thief and vagabond, freed from all restraining influence, would never become so rapacious, so vile, so lost to all decency. Never would he sink so low as that! Lost in these reflections, which brought to him the consciousness of his liberty ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... paid for before his marriage. He was a cooper by trade, and had set up in business for himself; but his dissolute habit had robbed him of his shop, and reduced him first to a journeyman and then to a vagabond. He earned hardly enough to pay for the liquor he consumed; but, somehow,—and how was the mystery which perplexed everybody who knew the Taylors,—the family always had enough to eat and good clothes to wear. Years before, he had, under the pretence ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... Some miserable, silly youth without a penny. Or perhaps some scoundrel? Without making any expressive movement he wrung his loosely-clasped hands till the joints cracked. He looked at her. She was pretty. Some low scoundrel who will cast her off. Some plausible vagabond . . . ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... him almost before the ink was dry. The reply came by return of post: "It is almost, or quite, as good as can be. Send me another." So forthwith I sent him 'God's Garrison', and it was quickly followed by 'The Three Outlaws', 'The Tall Master', 'The Flood', 'The Cipher', 'A Prairie Vagabond', and several others. At length came 'The Stone', which brought a telegram of congratulation, and finally 'The Crimson Flag'. The acknowledgment of that was a postcard containing these all too-flattering words: "Bravo, Balzac!" Henley would print what no other editor would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... vagabond fancy roamed in and out through the possibilities of the Caesar's sway, unconsciously he thought of another monster, the son of a priest of Ascalon, who had defied the Sanhedrim, won Cleopatra, murdered the woman he loved the most, conquered Judaea and found it too small for his ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... understand that I only hesitated to tell him I was his namesake, because I hesitated to damage my position—in your estimation, if not in his—by confessing that I had come among you under an assumed name. And, after all that you have just heard of my vagabond life and my low associates, you will hardly wonder at the obstinate silence I maintained about myself, at a time when I did not feel the sense of responsibility which my father's confession has ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... a "gentleman of the sword," with dash and elan, and as one, to use his own words, who has been "toujours trottant, traversant, et vagabondant le monde" (always trotting, traversing, and tramping the world). Not in the habit of a vagabond, however, for the balls, banquets, tournaments, masques, ballets, and wedding-feasts which he describes so vividly were occasions for the display of sumptuous costumes; and Messire Pierre de Bourdeille doubtless appeared as elegant as any other gallant in silken ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... touch was light; his address could be almost courtly, so that, on suddenly looking up, you would feel a vague surprise to behold in the speaker, not a polished man of the world in his dress-suit, but this beery old one-eyed vagabond in tatters. It was strange to witness his transitions. At one moment he would be holding high discourse of Goethe, and translating illustrative passages into classic French; at the next, whining about la deche, and begging ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... country; stables 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 ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Milton had been an honour to him. In Salmasius, Milton had at least been measuring his Latin against the Latin of the first classicist of the age. In Alexander Morus he wreaked august periods of Roman eloquence upon a vagabond preacher, of chance fortunes and tarnished reputation, a graeculus esuriens, who appeared against Milton by the turn of accidents, and not as the representative of the opposite principle. In crushing Morus, Milton could not beguile ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... Parliament, or even Tobacco-Parliament. For there is a Majesty's Opposition in all lands and times. "We ruin the Country," says the Honorable Member, "sending annually millions of money out of it, for a set of vagabond fellows (GENS A SAC ET A CORDE), who will never do us the least service. One sees clearly it is the hand of God," darkening some people's understanding; "otherwise it might be possible their eyes would open, one time or another!"—A stiff pipe-clayed ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... would bring home for dinner. "He always forgot to bring home the steak, but he never forgot to lug along some derelict." More than once he was robbed, often he was imposed upon. Once he met an interesting vagabond who spoke several languages, quoted the Bible with ease and accuracy, and so fired the heart of our simple man that he bought him clothes and brought him home to stay. His wife threw up her hands in ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... being procurable on the road. Butter and milk are both forthcoming here in abundance, and occasionally rice is to be got. Penetrated with the freshness of the mountain air and the freedom of our vagabond life, we came unanimously to the conclusion that we had made a wise exchange from the FAR NIENTE DOLCES of Sirinugger, and passed a vote of general confidence ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight |
