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More "Threadbare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... picture. If that picture was lacking in individual poetic conception; if those studies were often intolerably silly and wrong-headed from the intellectual point of view; if the old themes were not only worn threadbare, but actually maltreated, what wonder? The themes were there, thank Heaven! no one need bother about them; and no one did. Moreover, as I have already pointed out, no one could have added anything, save in the personal sentiment of the heads, the hands, the tilt of the figure, or ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Irving from his far home in the Orkneys, married him to Sarah Sanders, and made him the father of Washington Irving. The Irvings—a branch of the well-known Scotch Irvines—had been for generations the leading family on the Island of Shapinsha. Finally they had gone threadbare, and with a fortune to seek, William Irving chose the natural ordeal for an islander, the trial by sea. Toward the close of the French War he had become petty officer on an armed English packet. In New York he met Mistress ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... take White Heather into your house for six months to instruct you in the agreeable sport of amateur detectives. Your charming naivete quite moves our envy. So you actually imagined a man of my brains would condescend to anything so flat and stale as the silly and threadbare Old Master deception! And this in the so-called nineteenth century! O sancta simplicitas! When again shall such infantile transparency be mine? When, ah, when? But never mind, dear friend. Though you didn't catch me, we shall meet before long at ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... Should pay—if possible—their bribes and fee. Search—as thou canst—the old and modern store Of Rome and ours, in all the witty score Thou shalt not find a rich one; take each clime, And run o'er all the pilgrimage of time, Thou'lt meet them poor, and ev'rywhere descry A threadbare, goldless genealogy. Nature—it seems—when she meant us for earth Spent so much of her treasure in the birth As ever after niggards her, and she, Thus stor'd within, beggars us outwardly. Woful profusion! at how dear a rate Are we made up! all hope of thrift and state Lost for a verse. When I ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... of the poorest sort, frayed and worn, and she shivered under a threadbare shawl drawn close around her shoulders. Yet, in spite of poverty and sickness, and despair and middle age, the woman was beautiful still, with a dark and haggard and wild sort of beauty that would have haunted one to one's ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... but placed securely in his pocket; no doubt to be brought out a little later, and divided with the others. I glanced at the blind man's clothing. Clean it certainly was; in this respect corresponding with everything I saw in the house; but oh, so sadly darned, and threadbare. Still, he seemed like a gentleman, and I fancied he shrank painfully within himself as if one's presence made him ill at ease. I resolved to say very little to him on this first visit, but later on try to find the key to his heart. I contented myself with the ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... plots, and meal tubs, and exclusion bills, and passive obedience, and addresses of lives and fortunes, and prerogative, and property and liberty of conscience, and letters to a friend: from an understanding and a conscience, threadbare and ragged with perpetual turning; from a head broken in a hundred places by the malignants of the opposite factions; and from a body spent with poxes ill cured, by trusting to bawds and surgeons, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... civilian's suit: in proof of which, my old undress-frock, with its yellow spread-eagle buttons, clung to my shoulders like a second shirt of Nessus. The vanity of wearing a uniform, that may have once been felt, was long ago threadbare as the coat itself; and yet I was not wanting in friends, who fancied that it might still exist! How little understood they the real state of the case, and how much did they ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... taken up by writers and speakers, repeated, and again taken up by others, and thus their use enlarges in ever-widening circles until the expressions become threadbare. Drop them before they have reached that state. Function, environment, trend, the masses, to be in touch with, to voice the sentiments of— these are enough to illustrate the kind ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... regulation three volumes, but appears as if it had wished to be in two, and would have been had not large type insisted upon the addition of a third tome. The love of a lady is transferred, during the course of the story, from an artist, who appears in the last chapter "in threadbare clothes, with broken, patched boots on his feet" (not on his Hands, bien entendu), to a "well-tailored" novelist. As the lady to whom "the love" originally belonged was "a popular illustrator," it was only natural that the question of appearances should play an important part ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... somber scenes of battlefields, he seemed to have plunged into a very whirlwind of gaiety, and his eyes sparkled with appreciation. He did not notice then that his captain's uniform was stained and threadbare enough to make him a most disreputable figure in a drawing-room, however gallant he might appear at the head ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I might judge from their having each a babe in their arms and two or three other babes at their heels. They were not actually in tatters, but anything more intensely threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined; they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to the right nor to the left, but stared straight on and pressed straight on rather rapidly, with such desperate tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble terror which the old-fashioned critics ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... consternation. At first the planters foreboded universal ruin; but soon they resolved that the act should recoil on England, and began to be proud of frugality; articles of luxury of English manufacture were banished, and threadbare coats were most in fashion. A large and embarrassing provincial debt enforced the policy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... rusty black, or rather grey cure's frock, which fell from his shoulders down to his heels, and was fastened round his body with a black belt—this garment was much the worse for wear, for Father Jerome had now been deprived of his income for some twelve months; but he was no whit ashamed of his threadbare coat, he rather gloried in it, and could not be induced by the liberal offers of his more wealthy ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... I only desire to live by my goods; and I hope you will be pleased to allow some difference between a neat fresh piece, piping hot out of the classicks, and old threadbare worn-out stuff that has past through every pedant's mouth and been as common at the universities as ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... fallen away, and patches of the key pattern bordering the panels beneath it had broken off, though he decided that a clever cabinet-maker could have repaired the damage in a day. There were one or two choice rugs on the floor, but they were threadbare; the heavy hangings about the inner doors were dingy and moth-eaten; and, though all this was in harmony with the drowsy quietness and the faint smell of decay, ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... exercises; they represent nothing more than so many experiments in versification. The pastoral form had doubtless been used in earlier hands to embody true poetic feeling; but in Pope's time it had become hopelessly threadbare. The fine gentlemen in wigs and laced coats amused themselves by writing about nymphs and "conscious swains," by way of asserting their claims to elegance of taste. Pope, as a boy, took the matter ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... without a word turned his back on me, exhibiting as he did so the extremely threadbare hindpart of his livery with a solitary reddish heraldic button on it; he put the plate down on the floor, ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... to understand. I was keenly alive to the exceptional study of human nature presented by this fine specimen of an old rustic priest, who was not the less to be respected because he took a great deal of snuff, hated shaving, wore hob-nailed shoes of the roughest make, and a threadbare, soup-spotted soutane with frayed edges. He was not a bit ascetic, and although he had lived so many years by himself, his good-humour and gaiety continually overflowed. It may be that a housekeeper tends to sour a priest's temper more than anything else, and this one knew it. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the old man, carrying a basket in one hand and a spade in the other, was trudging steadily by. His blue overalls and jumper were threadbare under the soft brown they had achieved through his strenuous kneeling and the general intimacy of weeds and sod. He had a curious neutrality of expression—perhaps an indifference to what his blue eyes fell upon, save when they looked out from under ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... altogether disappear, even while my eyes were fixed full upon his figure. He was certainly the wretchedest old ghost in the world, with his crazy hat, the dingy handkerchief about his throat, his suit of threadbare gray, and especially that patch over his right eye, behind which he always seemed to be hiding himself. There was one method, however, of bringing him out into somewhat stronger relief. A glass of brandy would effect it. Perhaps the gentler influence of a bottle of claret might do the same. Nor ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to me, "Thou judgest every priest proud that will not go arrayed as thou dost! By God! I deem him to be more meek that goeth every day in a scarlet gown, than thou, in that threadbare blue gown! Whereby knowest thou a ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... earnest request, to take riding lessons, and before long had a charming horse of my own, and was able to afford the delight of giving my father one, the use of which I hoped would help to invigorate and refresh him. The faded, threadbare, turned, and dyed frocks which were my habitual wear were exchanged for fashionably made dresses of fresh colors and fine texture, in which I appeared to myself transfigured. Our door was besieged with visitors, our evenings bespoken by innumerable invitations; social ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... bitterness and resentment against a secretiveness which is interpreted to mean failure. The patience of the people is worn threadbare. Their temper has grown ragged. They are sick of ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... states of the laity, and tell me whether some duchesses, countesses, barons' or knights' wives, do not fully so often offend in the like as they? For Eve will be Eve, though Adam would say nay. Not a few also find fault with our threadbare gowns, as if not our patrons but our wives were causes of our woe. But if it were known to all that I know to have been performed of late in Essex, where a minister taking a benefice (of less than twenty pounds in the Queen's books, ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Coat can't be very old, however long I may have worn it. I'll rub on in it still; and your Mother and you will have the more Money for copper-coloured Clokes. But don't, at any Time, let your Father get shabby, Children. I would never be threadbare nor unclean. Let my Habitt be neat and spotless, my Bands well washed and uncrumpled, as becometh a Gentleman. As for my Sword in the Corner, your Mother may send that after my Medal as soon as she will. The Cid parted with his Tizona in his Life-time; soe a peaceable Man, whose Eyes, like ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... had been made over and over again, until it became threadbare; but a cavalry officer thought it a feather in his cap to report his defeat or repulse by, "We met their infantry." We made a junction with Early near Brown's Gap, on the 26th, and camped at night with orders to be prepared to march at daylight. The troops of Early's ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... exists in two States; in one of them some four or five hundred persons cannot forget that their forefathers got to shore before somebody else; and in the other a few families still dispute over the threadbare question of whose great-great-grandmother cost the most pounds of tobacco. Now, candidly—is this sufficient to justify a reproach from Europe that we are striving to claim or to ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... tufts of hair like pigeon plumes rose at its sides. A slender queue, thin as a quill, tossed about on the back of his sallow neck, which was thick, as far as it could be seen above the turned down collar of a threadbare coat. This couple assumed the stately tread of an ambassador; and the husband, who was at least seventy, stopped complaisantly every time the terrier began to gambol. I hastened to pass this living impersonation of my Meditation, and was surprised to the last degree to recognize ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... Threadbare and very dusty were his clothes, his feet swollen and sore, but his chin was pressed well forward, and the light in his eyes was that of a conqueror, when at last, tramp, tramp, tramp, his tired feet came pattering up the stones of the steep old bridge that spans ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... the pine table,—there the old flag-bottomed chair on which he sat, and at which he scribbled, during his agonies of inspiration! There is the old chest of drawers in which he kept what shirts a poor author may be supposed to have possessed! There is the closet in which was reposited his threadbare suit of black! There is the worn-out shoe-brush with which this polished writer polished his boots. There is—" but I believe, this will be pretty much all, so here I close the catalogue. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... true, that the humble follower of the gay young men had the threadbare appearance of a worn-out litigant, and I could not but smile at the conceit, though anxious to conceal my mirth from the object ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seen only once. There was a painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place of all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large, sombre apartment. It was said to attract a frequently ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... more. The long head, bald on top, covered behind with iron-gray hair, and in front with a short tangled growth that curled and kinked in every direction, was surmounted by an old-fashioned stove-pipe hat, worn and stained, but eminently impressive. An old-fashioned Henry Clay cloth coat, stained and threadbare, divided itself impartially over the donkey's back and dangled on his sides. This was all that remained of the elder's wedding suit of forty years ago. Only constant care, and use of late years limited to extra occasions, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... one rather than to the other of these structures. So, again, it may be remarked that, considered simply in their physical juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a gentleman's hat or of a patent-leather shoe has no more of intrinsic beauty than a similarly high gloss on a threadbare sleeve; and yet there is no question but that all well-bred people (in the Occidental civilized communities) instinctively and unaffectedly cleave to the one as a phenomenon of great beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to every sense to which it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... consequences. They have set out, in good faith, as they believe, to seek for life, liberty and happiness. They do not yet realize that, along the road that they are now traveling, the journey will not be ended until they have worn themselves threadbare in their efforts to ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... living and thinking and speaking of him as 'a deep ocean of learning and wisdom.' Even in travelling he carries nothing with him but his staff, that he might the quicker flee, or put to flight, the vulgar curious. He puts on a few extra robes, when he is going on a journey, and in time, becoming threadbare, sheds them off as the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... my past behind me, like a robe Worn threadbare in the seams, and out of date. I have outgrown it. Wherefore should I weep And dwell upon its beauty, and its dyes Of Oriental splendor, or complain That I must needs discard it? I can weave Upon the shuttles of the future years A fabric far more durable. Subdued, It may be, in the blending ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... he said he should take another opportunity. He was a strange-looking gentleman, and his clothes were threadbare." ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... above a cracked and ancient mirror, were two rusty broad-swords, and in the mirror I saw a large, oaken table reflected. Seated at it, clothed in a threadbare coat of very ancient fashion, was an old man with long, snow-white hair and a white, forked beard. He was busily transferring a stack of gold-pieces from his right to his left side; and then he began scribbling on a sheet of paper. He paid me not ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... apprentice, and by every father to his son. Ned was not only considered as a thriving trader, but as a man of elegance and politeness, for he was remarkably neat in his dress, and would wear his coat threadbare without spotting it; his hat was always brushed, his shoes glossy, his wig nicely curled, and his stockings without a wrinkle. With such qualifications it was not very difficult for him to gain the heart of Miss Comfit, the only daughter of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... don't, ain't it?" returned Mrs. Maxwell. "The house ain't been altered any, an' the furniture's jest the same. Thomas, he wouldn't have a thing altered; the carpet in his bedroom is wore threadbare, but he wouldn't get a new one nohow. Mis' Jay, she wanted him to get a new cookin'-stove, but he wouldn't hear to it; much as ever he'd let her have a new broom. And it wa'n't because he was stingy; it was jest because he was kind of set, an' had got into the way of thinkin' nothin' ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... church, and I knelt there for a while, so struck down with joy that I couldn't stand on my feet, all those wild bursts of excitement, and incredulity and happiness, that kept surging up and drenching me . . . I had a queer feeling, that awfully threadbare feeling of having been there before, or felt that before; that it was familiar, although it was so new. Then it came to me, 'Why, I have it, what I used to pray for. Now at last I am the urn too full!' And it was true, I could feel, just as I dreamed, the upsurging of the feeling, brimming over, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... was the same bare, poverty-stricken look in this room as in every other part of the manor house. The bed was a tall melancholy four-poster, with scantiest draperies of faded drab damask. Save for one little islet of threadbare Brussels beside the bed, the room was carpetless. There was an ancient wainscot wardrobe with brass handles. There was a modern deal dressing-table skimpily draped with muslin, and surmounted by the smallest of looking-glasses. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... I would rather have bitten out my tongue. His jet-black, curly hair had turned iron-gray; he was scrupulously neat as ever, but frightfully threadbare. His shiny boots were worn down at heel. But he forgave me, and we drove off together in a hansom to dine on board my ship. He went over her conscientiously, praised her heartily, congratulated me on my command with absolute ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of another night—and Keith raised his haggard face from Conniston's bedside with a woman's sob on his lips. The Englishman had died as he knew that he would die, game to the last threadbare breath that came out of his body. For with this last breath he whispered the words which he had repeated a dozen times before, "Remember, old chap, you win or lose the moment McDowell first sets his eyes on you!" And then, with a strange kind of sob in his chest, ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... lad is ashamed of his country brother. The plain, threadbare clothes, hard hands, tawny face, and awkward manner of the country boy make sorry contrast with the genteel appearance of the other. The poor boy bemoans his hard lot, regrets that he has "no chance in life," and envies the city ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... which ordinary sinners like ourselves will never swallow. We are rather inclined to admire the gentleman who, until lately, officiated as his curate—the Rev. E. Lee,—and who, after preaching his last sermon, was next day made the recipient of that most fashionable and threadbare of all things, a presentation. Originally he indulged in odd pranks, said strange things, was laughably eccentric, and did for a period appear to be, in an ecclesiastical sense, what the kangaroo of Artemus Ward was in a zoological one—"the most amoozin ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... call his carriage, they say in an agreeable guttural baritone: 'By your leave, by your leave allow General Hvalinsky to pass,' or 'Call for General Hvalinsky's carriage.' ... Hvalinsky's carriage is, it must be admitted, of a rather queer design, and the footmen's liveries are rather threadbare (that they are grey, with red facings, it is hardly necessary to remark); his horses too have seen a good deal of hard service in their time; but Vyatcheslav Ilarionovitch has no pretensions to splendour, and goes so far as to think it beneath his rank to make an ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... valley, seemed to indicate their belief in her superior attributes. It is true, that two clowns, who drove before them a herd of cattle—one or two village wenches, who seemed bound for some merry-making—a strolling soldier, in a rusted morion, and a wandering student, as his threadbare black cloak and his satchel of books proclaimed him—passed our travellers without observation, or with a look of contempt; and, moreover, that two or three children, attracted by the appearance ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... pilgrims. They had seen too much of the world, and had been too long mixing among all kinds of pilgrims, young and old, true and false, to be easily imposed upon. Besides, as one could see from their weather-beaten faces, and their threadbare garments, they had found the upward way so dreadfully difficult that they both felt a real apprehension as to the future of this light-hearted and light-headed youth. "You may find some difficulty ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... at this time, would bear to hear an advocate introducing himself with a tedious preface about the infirmities of his constitution? Yet that is the threadbare exordium of Corvinus. We have five books against Verres [a]. Who can endure that vast redundance? Who can listen to those endless arguments upon points of form, and cavilling exceptions [b], which we find in the orations of the same celebrated advocate for Marcus Tullius [c] and Aulus Caecina? ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... and in came little Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter, exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... had needed no urging. He had cut down the month's journey to the Theton River to something like twenty days. He had foundered six teams of horses and worn his two men and his scouts well-nigh threadbare with night and day travel. But the doctor had proved invincible, as had the Yellow-Knife scout on his skewbald pony, which, for all its meanness of shape and size, had stood ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... labour was debt instead of pelf. I sung through the burst window-panes and the yawning clefts in the walls. I blew into the chests of drawers belonging to the daughters, wherein lay the clothes that had become faded and threadbare from being worn over and over again. That was not the song that had been sung at the children's cradle. The lordly life had changed to a life of penury. I was the only one who rejoiced aloud in that ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... She would pass out of his life definitely. He perfectly recognized the fact that he admired her above all other women he knew; but it was also apparent that to see her day by day, year by year, his partner in the commonplaces as well as in the heights, romance would become threadbare quickly enough. "Who is he?" ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... often lose all the bright feathers and silky plumes which once so beautifully adorned their bodies, and assume a smooth and almost black appearance; just as the hat of the thievish loafer, acquires a "seedy" aspect, and his garments, a shining and threadbare look. Dzierzon is of opinion that the black bees which Huber describes, as being so bitterly persecuted by the rest, are nothing more than these thieving bees. I call them old convicts, dressed in prison garments, and incurably given up ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... flake of that tumultuous fire which the Italian sunset sheds. Who shall adequately compare the two pictures? Which shall we prefer—the Close of Salisbury, with its sleepy bells and cushioned ease of immemorial Deans—or this poor threadbare passion of Perugia, where every stone is stained with blood, and where genius in painters and scholars and prophets and ecstatic lovers has throbbed itself away to nothingness? It would be foolish to seek an answer to this question, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... The green threadbare sofa, the old, old smoke stains on the whitewashed ceiling, the five rickety chairs that reminded her of so many decrepit old men, the mirror with the gilded angel of stucco at the top—all these things were so ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... obscene picture but also in general to depict whatever is cheap, ugly, and unwelcome. Hence those epigrams cannot be regarded as beautiful and polished whose subject is a toothless hag, a poetaster with a threadbare cloak, a rank old goat, a filthy nose, or a glutton vomiting on the table—all of which are a fertile ground of jokes for actors—since ugliness of that sort can never be redeemed ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... In consequence of that reverence in which the dervish character is held, they did not think of his profligacy and admitted him into their society. The outward character of the holy is a patched cloak; this much is sufficient, that it has a threadbare hood. Be industrious in thy calling, and wear whatever dress thou choosest. Put a diadem on thy head, and bear a standard on thy shoulder. Holiness does not consist in a coarse frock. Let a zahid, or holy man, be truly pious, and ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... a mocking attitude of studied grace, and twitched the wrinkles out of his threadbare waistcoat. Then, suddenly dropping his voice to a low pitch of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... amusements which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys' there was always whist, and the card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly impatient of the music. Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in—a handsome, broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty, whose black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray eyes. He came like a pleasant change in the light, arresting little Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being led out of the room by Miss Morgan, greeting everybody with some special word, and seeming to condense more ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... fish-woman, one of the poorest and hardest-working followers of that soul-killing trade. She was up now every morning shortly after midnight, waiting on the shore with her feet in the puddles, drawing a frayed and threadbare shawl about her shivering body, when the storms blew. All the way to Valencia she would go on foot carrying that back-breaking load of fish, and it would be dark again by the time she got home, faint ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... boy, that your clothes, though clean and neat, are threadbare and patched?—that your mother is a poor widow, whom nobody knows?—that no "servant man" ever brought your satchel to school for you?—that you have positively been seen carrying a loaf of bread home from the grocer's?—and ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... would come to him. His imperial regalia had been discarded, for the stick and cap had never gone down into the depths with him, and the paper stars had of course been dissolved by the water. He sat there now in his old threadbare coat with two empty hands. But there was no longer anything pretentious or ludicrous about him; now he ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... time that Phillida got her flowers Mrs. Beswick sat mending her husband's threadbare overcoat. His vigorous thumbs, in frequent fastening and loosening, had worn the cloth quite through in the neighborhood of the buttons. To repair this, his wife had cut little bits of the fabric off the overplus of cloth at the seams, and worked these little pieces through ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... on a baggage truck and eyed the private car reflectively. He wore a rough gray suit, baggy and threadbare, a flannel shirt with an old black tie carelessly knotted at the collar, a brown felt hat with several holes in the crown, and coarse cowhide shoes that had arrived at the last stages of usefulness. You would judge him to be from twenty-five to thirty years of age; you would note that his face ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... of the deserted home oppressed me, as though I had wronged it; the sad little house seemed to be watching me out of its humble windows, like a patient dog awaiting another blow. Beacraft's worn coat and threadbare vest, limp and musty as the garments of a dead man, hung on a peg behind the door. I searched the pockets with repugnance and found a few papers, which smelled like the covers of ancient books, memoranda of miserable little transactions—threepence paid for soling shoes, twopence here, ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... he whose life is holy Charity, Setting his footprints on the way of life Like sunshine rippling o'er the summer sea. Some wear their little merit on their sleeve, Which 'neath the friction of Time's troublous waves, Grows threadbare as the coat of beggary. Some under rugged lineaments enclose Treasures of truth and goodness, that like gems Shine through the fissures of the strong Time-quake, Showing more perfect as affliction works, And ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... buying him expensive things which, as it were, she took off her own back. I have, for instance, spoken of Edward's leather cases. Well, they were not Edward's at all; they were Leonora's manifestations. He liked to be clean, but he preferred, as it were, to be threadbare. She never understood that, and all that pigskin was her idea of a reward to him for putting her up to a little speculation by which she made eleven hundred pounds. She did, herself, the threadbare business. When they went up to a place called Simla, where, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... and government, are perpetually objected against them both in and out of season, by our common enemy, the present conformists: We do declare in the defence of our said brethren, that the reproach aforesaid is an old worn-out threadbare cant, which they always disdained to answer: And I very well remember, that, having once told a certain conformist, how much I wondered to hear him and his tribe, dwelling perpetually on so beaten a subject; he was ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... he walked down the creaking stairway, with its threadbare carpet, and out onto the street to post ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... French, some in Latin, and they went on, one after the other, for three days consecutively. On the third day, when the royal patience must have been wellnigh exhausted, and the chancellor's talents at reply worn tolerably threadbare, the king would rise, and mounting on horseback, would proceed to the cathedral church of Notre Dame, down the Rue St Denis. One of the best recorded of these royal entries is that of Louis XI. On this occasion, the king, setting out from a suburban residence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... exhibitions in China. One would not like to be forestalled. Do you find in all this stuff I have written anything like those feelings which one should send my old adventuring friend, that is gone to wander among Tartars and may never come again? I don't—but your going away, and all about you, is a threadbare topic. I have worn it out with thinking—it has come to me when I have been dull with anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it than to have introduced it. I want you, you don't ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... society of her mother's lodgings any but the freest and most rational ideas; yet she herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolving for herself all the threadbare platitudes of ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... affection for a lie—more especially if it served himself, or injured his enemy; finding a mode of reconciling all this to his spirituality that is somewhat peculiar to fanaticism as it begins to grow threadbare. On the present occasion, he was ready to say whatever he thought would most conform to his shipmate's wishes, and luckily he construed the expression of the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... later a respectable-looking man presented himself at Savoy Court, inquiring of the attendant near the elevator for the apartments of "his excellency," followed by an unintelligible word which presumably represented "Ormuz Khan." The visitor wore a well-brushed but threadbare tweed suit, although his soft collar was by no means clean. He had a short, reddish-brown beard, and very thick, curling hair of the same hue protruded from beneath a bowler hat which had ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... mortgaged place and moved to the Pacific Coast. She had invested the few hundreds left her in some river-bottom lots at Verden and had later discovered that an unscrupulous real estate dealer had unloaded upon her worthless property. The patched and threadbare clothes of the boy told him that from a worldly point of view the affairs of the Farnums ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... composer is less diffusible than that of the poet. He requires various mechanical means and appliances for his full success. His works must be performed in order to be felt. He cannot be read, like the poet, in the closet, or in the cottage, or on the street-stall, where the threadbare student steals from day to day, as he lingers at the spot, new draughts of delicious refreshment. Few can sit down and peruse a musical composition even for its melody; and very few, indeed, can gather from the silent notes the full effect of its splendid combinations. Yet even here the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... not going to risk the danger of wearying the reader with a long account of the voyage to Constantinople, already worn threadbare by book-making tourists. It was a very interesting one, and, as I am a good sailor, I had not even the temporary horrors of sea-sickness to mar it. The weather, although cold, was fine, and the sea good-humouredly calm, and I enjoyed the voyage ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... deny it's a guid carpet; but if it's been turned once it's been turned half a dozen times, so it's far frae new. Ay, an' forby, it was rale threadbare aneath the table, so ye may be sure they've been cuttin't an' puttin' the worn pairt whaur ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... heart is filled; His shrunken self goes starved away. Let him wear brand-new garments still, Who has a threadbare soul, I say. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... the Holy Ghost does not know when. There is a horrid thing called the malaria, that comes to Rome every summer, and kills one, and I did not care for being killed so far from Christian burial. We have been jolted to death; my servants let us come without springs to the chaise, and we are wore threadbare: to add to our disasters, I have sprained my ancle, and have brought it along, laid upon a little box of baubles that I have bought for presents in England. Perhaps I may pick you out some little trifle there, but don't depend ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... novelty. The audiences were cold but respectful and, as a rule, she was treated decently by the county papers. Occasionally a smart editor would get off the joke about her relationship to Mark Antony, which even then had become threadbare, and invariably the articles would begin, "While we do not agree with the theories which the lady advocates." Most of them, however, paid high tribute to her ability as a speaker and to the clearness, logic and force of her arguments. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... nobleman, the fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He wore big shoes with stout soles to them. I put the shoes first advisedly, for they made an even deeper impression upon me than a seedy black coat, a pair of threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat, or a crumpled shirt collar. There was a touch of the magistrate in the man, a good deal more of the Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of the arrondissement, the local ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... pourfendeur I had conjured up in my fancy from old Aunt Roselaer's accounts, I perceived a little, thin, grey-headed old man, the traits of whose face showed him to be a person of superior breeding, wrapped in a very threadbare damask dressing-gown. His nose was long and straight, his lips thin and pale, his eyes of a soft blue, with an expression of lethargy or fatigue. His white, dry hands had very prominent veins; and he wore a large signet-ring, with which ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... it. I must do the next best thing. I can at least get warm clothing to protect me from the rain and snow." He looked down at his worn, thin clothing, his trousers, his shirt, his jacket; they had become so thin and worn that they were threadbare. ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe - for American Boys and Girls • Samuel. B. Allison
... far from the anachronistic and clandestine Eudo's lair, we used to hear the coughing parrot. That old bird, worn threadbare, and of a faded green hue, never ceased to imitate the fits of coughing which two years before had torn Adolphe Piot's lungs, who died in the midst of his family under such sad circumstances. Those days we would return with our ears ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... on the contrary, the humblest of the band; an athletic, reddish fellow, with wide and low forehead, with good eyes of resignation, soft as those of beasts of burden; without father or mother, possessing nothing in the world except a threadbare costume and three pink cotton shirts; unique lover of a little fifteen year old orphan, as poor as he ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... bushy eyebrows and deep blue-grey eyes, his aquiline nose and flowing beard, gave an Olympian cast to his noble head. Withal, I could not help noticing that his countenance was lined with care, his black coat seamed and threadbare, his hands rough and horny, like those of a workman. If he appeared a god, it was a god in exile or disgrace; a Saturn rather ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... present presentment, is a medium sized man, attired in garments that have once been elegant, but are now frayed, threadbare, travel worn; his feet are encased in boots that have once been jaunty; his hat is as rakish as it is battered; his face wears that dull reddish hue, common to fair complexions that have been long exposed to sun and wind; his hair and beard, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... homily or a gazette. That is, we are left quite in the dark as to the feelings of pleasure or pain to be derived from the genius of the performance or the manner in which it appeals to the imagination: we know to a nicety how it squares with the threadbare rules of composition, not in the least how it affects the principles of taste. We know everything about the work, and nothing of it. The critic takes good care not to baulk the reader's fancy by anticipating the effect which the author has aimed at producing. To be sure, the works so handled ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... understand thee; and if then, perchance, Genoa should be freed, Sacco will be hailed his country's savior. Let no one trick out to me the threadbare tale of honesty, if the fate of empires hang on the bankruptcy of a prodigal and the lust of a debauchee. By heaven, Sacco, I admire the wise design of Providence, that in us would heal the corruptions in the heart of the state by the vile ulcers on its limbs. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... they have improved the public finances, while the Opposition as blatantly tries to drown them by bellowing that the retiring government has damned the country, and that the Opposition has the only recipe of satisfactory reconstruction, but in spite of this threadbare election scare the Commonwealth remained the freest and one of the wealthiest ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the world, and base things of the world, yea, and things that are not," may provide matter for good talk, if only the right people are engaged in the enterprise. I know a man who can make a description of the weather as entertaining as a tune on the violin; and even on the threadbare theme of the waywardness of domestic servants, I have heard a discreet woman play the ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... a threadbare saying that the environment moulds the man. Yet, much more than the philosophers have contended, there are chameleon tendencies in the strongest character, and one finely determining to coerce his surroundings is quite likely to end by realizing that the ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... together trumpets seemed to sound in advance of them; they seized upon Paris and quietly dropped it into their pockets. There was no longer the slightest doubt about their victory; they freely displayed their threadbare coats and old shoes, like destined conquerors of to-morrow who disdained bagatelles, and had only to take the trouble to become the masters of all the luxury surrounding them. And all this was attended by huge contempt for everything ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... had failed to marry a solicitor's daughter. He himself was inclined to attribute his want of success to the latter cause. But he had not wasted his time, though he was more than metaphorically threadbare, and his waist would have made a sensation at a staymaker's. He had watched and pondered on many curious cases for years; and one day, when a 'high-class' criminal had baffled the police and had well-nigh ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... judges: "You know," said they, "Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, who is the admiration of all Greece. In what a condition do you think his family is in at his house, when you see him appear in public in such a threadbare cloak? Is it not probable that one who, out of doors, goes thus exposed to the cold, must want food and other necessaries at home? Callias, the wealthiest of the Athenians, does nothing to relieve either him or his wife and children ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... a necessity owing to his having to address at three o'clock precisely a committee of ladies who were meeting in Portman Square to discuss the dreadful condition of the London streets, he laid a fatherly arm on the Missioner's threadbare cassock. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... days when Florence and Venice were little more than villages. Last of all walked the Archbishop, an aged tottering figure, weighed down by his cope of cloth of gold and seemingly crushed beneath his immense jewelled mitre. Two lackeys, almost as infirm as their venerable master, and clad in threadbare liveries edged with armorial braid, were in close attendance, whilst behind the Archbishop, beneath a gorgeous canopy of state upheld by six white-robed assistants, was borne the great silver bust of St Andrew. The appearance of the Image of "Il Divo," upon which the sunbeams were playing ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... she went on, "because I thought it was a little less threadbare than the others—though, Dick, it's no good your pretending to know Jane by heart, considering that she always sends you ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... you, O, you men of the time, who are bent upon pleasure, who attend the balls and the opera and who upon retiring this night will seek slumber with the aid of some threadbare blasphemy of old Voltaire, some sensible badinage of Paul Louis Courier, some essay on economics, you who dally with the cold substance of that monstrous water-lily that Reason has planted in the hearts of our cities; I beg of you, if by some chance this ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... against whom every kind of cheat is pardonable, and then you lay by farthing by farthing, refusing yourselves not only all the enjoyments of life, but even the most necessary comforts.... You brag of your threadbare clothes; but surely this extreme parsimony is a thousand times more blamable than the opposite prodigality of those of your comrades who spend their time among gipsies, and their money in feasting. You boast of your ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... publishers having, unfortunately, passed into a management different from their own, I had no right any longer to rely upon secrecy in that quarter; and thus my mask, like my Aunt Dinah's in "Tristram Shandy," having begun to wax a little threadbare about the chin, it became time to lay it aside with a good grace, unless I desired it should fall in pieces from my face, which ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... how he tapped his left breast with a proud gesture when he had done with a lot of customers and was about to march again at the head of his horse. That restored him from trade to his soldiership—he had saluted his Waterloo medal! There beneath his threadbare old blue coat it lay, always felt by the heart of ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... of hair thrown, as it were, on his head, a dull glimmer only in his one eye, and his whole features of a crafty, selfish character—such he was; clad in a long, threadbare, snuff-coloured great-coat, reaching almost to his heels, and which served to hide the trowsers, the frayed ends of which explained their condition; on his bare feet he wore a pair of trodden-down slippers, with upper leathers gaping in front with open mouths; a despicable rascal ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Girl's admiring eyes had taken in all the dainty details of gloves, tiny chatelaine watch, and neat school satchel out of which protruded green and brown books. With a fierce little gesture the Other Girl had slid her own hands under her threadbare jacket. They were reddened ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... together with a Prolog and an Epilog of the Emperor. "The reading also consumed two entire hours, but with an incredible aversion, weariness, and disgust on the part of some of the more sensible hearers, who complained that they were almost driven out by this utterly cold, threadbare songlet (cantilena), being extremely chagrined that the ears of the Emperor should be molested with such a lengthy array of worthless things masquerading under the name of Catholic doctrines." (St. L. 21a, 1539.) August 4 Brenz wrote to Isemann: "The Emperor ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... I thangs mag to you, sir," she cried respectfully, for there was something in this wanderer which commanded deference, although he did wear a threadbare suit and mountain brogans. ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... Lydia, breathless and rosy and threadbare, came into his little private office. She closed the door and stood with her back ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Peyster did not move, and Olivetta's gaze wandered about the large, luxurious sitting-room. Her mind roamed afar to the desolate realm which she inhabited, and she thought of her own sitting-room, dark and stingily furnished, and rather threadbare, in which she was expecting to spend the summer, save for a few weeks at a ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... only a picturesque way of putting the most threadbare, bald, commonplace of religious teaching. The word faith, when it has any meaning at all in people's minds when they hear it from the pulpit, is extremely apt, I fear, to create a kind of, if not disgust, at least a revulsion of feeling, as if people said, 'Ah, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... girls do buy titles, but they did not invent that idea; it had been worn threadbare several hundred centuries before America was discovered. European girls still exploit it as briskly as ever; and, when a title is not to be had for the money in hand, they buy the husband without it. They must put up the "dot," or there is no trade. The commercialization ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Fish-Friday! Merciful Heaven! to what are we coming?" she gasped between breaths, clasping her hands and glancing heavenward. "Do such dresses grow upon bushes that they are so easily obtained? Doubtless," she concluded with withering sarcasm, "when they are worn threadbare as they soon will be owing to such constant usage, you will purchase others with those golden pesos which ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... remember to offer it, and the enforced conversation of some good-hearted guest, who, in the absence of any subject in common, can think of no more suggestive topic than inquiries into her daily walks, with threadbare remarks on the scenery. If she is lively, and strikes out into fresh fields and pastures new, "she is forward, and a flirt." If otherwise, she mounts the stereotyped smile, and gushes about the singing in church and picturesqueness of the neighbourhood, which, probably, by ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... I've been shooed into the parlor. Some parlor it is, too. I don't know when I've seen a room that came so near whinin' about better days gone by. Every piece of furniture, from the threadbare sofa to the rickety center table, seems kind ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... to my mind, men who believe, rightly or wrongly (in the ideas of '93), and cling to their faith through thirteen years of the hulks and of Cayenne, who get their chance at last, fight, work, and then when all is over know how to die—as Delescluze, with that gray head bared and the old threadbare coat thrown open, walked quietly and without a word up to the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... down from a peg an ancient plum-colored coat of London make and with relics of embroidery on its seams, cuffs, pocket-flaps, and buttonholes, but lamentably worn and faded, patched at the elbows, tattered at the skirts, and threadbare all over. On the left breast was a round hole whence either a star of nobility had been rent away or else the hot heart of some former wearer had scorched it through and through. The neighbors said that this rich ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... deep in the study of thorough-bass and human nature; and had some extracts to admire, and some new observations of threadbare morality to listen to. Catherine and Lydia had information for them of a different sort. Much had been done and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... He was far older than I had supposed, and he had less bravery of costume and gesture. He seemed the quiet, poor, patient artist he had proclaimed himself, and the fact that he had never sold a picture was more obvious than glorious. His velvet coat was threadbare, and his short slouched hat, of an antique pattern, revealed a rustiness which marked it an "original," and not one of the picturesque reproductions which brethren of his craft affect. His eye ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... lived in want and misery, and just kept himself from starvation by making and selling maps. To the common people he seemed a madman, and as he passed through the streets in his worn and threadbare garments children jeered and pointed fingers ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... thou between—thy coming's all unnoised. Heaven hath her high, as Earth her baser, wars. Heir to these tumults, this affright, that fray (By Adam's, fathers', own, sin bound alway); Peer up, draw out thy horoscope and say Which planet mends thy threadbare fate, or mars. ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... and university there is a hall of fame, where the heroes of the past are idolized by the younger generations. Trophies, portraits, old flags and banners hang there. Threadbare though they may be, they are rich in memories. These are, however, only the material things—"the trappings and the suits" of fame—but in the hearts of university men the memory of the heroes of the past is firmly and reverently enshrined. ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... worshipful class of magistrates, she deemed that such trading ill-beseemed her dignity; and she at all times wore a great fur hat as large round as a cart-wheel of fair size, and all the other array of a well-to-do housewife, though in truth somewhat threadbare. Then she would offer her honey as a gift to the mothers of children for their dear little ones; nor could she ever be moved to name a price for her gift, inasmuch as it was not fitting that a bee-master's widow should do so, while it was all to her honor when a little bounty ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and in came little Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter, exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him, and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... one be shocked. The small-clothes desiderated would have been of black satin, probably embroidered; and fit, though somewhat threadbare, for the thigh of a magistrate and gentleman of Spain. But he would not have gone on ordinary days in a sansculottic state. He would have worn that most comfortable of loose nether garments, which may be seen on sailors in prints of the great war, and which came in again a while among the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... his pipe, to soothe his humour. But he forgot that the clergy of Plymouth do not as a rule smoke clay pipes in the public streets, and the attention he excited puzzled and angered him yet further. He set it down to his threadbare coat and rustic boots. It was in no sweet mood that he strode up Hoe Terrace, eyeing the numbers above the doors, and halted at length to knock out his pipe before a house with an unpainted area-railing, to which a small boy in ragged knickerbockers was engaged in attaching with a string ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had felt all this very deeply could be so sensitive to the new spirit—if the word were not threadbare one would call it religious—which is shaking the foundations of the world's social pyramid, perhaps only another example of the failure of nerve, perhaps the triumphant expression of a new ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... coarse, threadbare blanket over her shoulders and went forth, while the boy bent his way along the riverbank in search of dry twigs and branches with which to replenish their wasted stock of fuel. And he thought, as he picked up here and there the scanty sticks and laid them in ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... of the poet. He requires various mechanical means and appliances for his full success. His works must be performed in order to be felt. He cannot be read, like the poet, in the closet, or in the cottage, or on the street-stall, where the threadbare student steals from day to day, as he lingers at the spot, new draughts of delicious refreshment. Few can sit down and peruse a musical composition even for its melody; and very few, indeed, can gather from the silent notes the full effect of its splendid combinations. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... somewhat apart, was a broad-shouldered man, a rough-looking customer in threadbare clothes, whose dusty boots spoke of travel. He was an elderly man, for the hair, beneath the battered hat, was gray, and he leaned wearily upon a short stick. Very still he stood, and Barnabas noticed that he kept his gaze bent ever upon the horse; ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... surmounting of this obstacle comes simplicity of diction; to present the thought without superfluous words; to avoid the threadbare phrases and to put the idea in a new way and yet in plain speech. How far the verse maker will go in clearness and simplicity depends largely on his natural good taste and discrimination. The better he is able to appreciate the work of others the better his own will become, and ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... holiday feeling that is in the very air around us at Christmas time. Jean did her part well, restraining their boisterous shouts, making peace in their small quarrels, proposing new entertainments when the old ones had been worn threadbare, and, in the afternoon, calling them all into a corner of the dining-room and telling them marvellous old-time stories, to keep them quiet while their father took his nap in the next room. Not much of a Christmas ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... noted by the receivers. A square iron-bound chest stood by their side, into which the money was thrown, and we noted as we passed that it was half full of gold pieces. We could not but mark that many of the givers were men whose threadbare doublets and pinched faces showed that the wealth which they were dashing down so readily must have been hoarded up for such a purpose, at the cost of scanty fare and hard living. Most of them accompanied their gift by a few words of prayer, or by some ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his arms full of blue-prints, was in Mr. Dell's office. But the English engineer hesitated; he was very busy; he had numerous obligations. Mitchell gazed over the threadbare rooms and hastily estimated how much of the nine hundred and twenty dollars would be left after he had paid his hotel bill. What there was to do must be done before ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... he thought to return to his native country, and during the siege of Anvers I saw, one day, come into my room, a sort of elderly schoolmaster, very threadbare; it was Foucart, I recognised him. He told me that he did not have a brass farthing! While I offered him some assistance, I could not help reflecting on the bizarre workings of fate. Here was a man who in 1802 was already a battalion ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... that, however cringing he might be, he despised the person he addressed. Moreover, in spite of all his efforts to control it, there was something sarcastic in his speech. His doublet and hose, both of which had endured some service, and were well-nigh threadbare, were tawny-coloured; and he wore a short yellow cloak, a great ruff of the same colour, and carried a brown steeple-crowned hat ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... did it graduate with a courtly ease The whole long scale of social differences, Yet so gave each his measure running o'er, None thought his own was less, his neighbor's more; The squire was flattered, and the pauper knew Old times acknowledged 'neath the threadbare blue! Dropped at the corner of the embowered lane, Whistling I wade the knee-deep leaves again, While eager Argus, who has missed all day The sharer of his condescending play, Comes leaping onward with a bark elate And boisterous ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... clad in a somewhat threadbare riding suit, was a small man with beady black eyes that turned from side to side as he swayed in his saddle. He seemed to be afraid of his mount and to be looking for help. But it was remarkable that apparently so poor a rider held his seat and actually managed ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... in spite of her wondering protests, Hyacinth walked into the dining-room and asked that Marion should be sent to him. The room was empty, as he expected. He stood and waited for her, deriving faint comfort and courage from the threadbare carpet, patched tablecloth, and poor crazy chairs. They were strange properties for a scene with possibilities of deep romance in it, but they made his confession of ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... whose wide, lean frame was but ill-covered by a threadbare coat and ragged breeches, and with soleless shoes on his feet, was told off to direct the citoyen to citizen Heron's rooms. The man walked slowly along with bent knees and arched spine, and shuffled his ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... reasoning at your table, than I have encountered in their books. The wits they describe, are the fops we banish: For blasphemy and atheism, if they were neither sin nor ill manners, are subjects so very common, and worn so threadbare, that people, who have sense, avoid them, for fear of being suspected to have none. It calls the good name of their wit in question as it does the credit of a citizen when his shop is filled with trumperies and painted titles, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... the Lords, And called the malt-tax sinful, Jack heeded not their angry words, But smiled and drank his skinful. And when men wasted health and life, In search of rank and riches, Jack marched aloof the paltry strife, And wore his threadbare breeches. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... she had not noticed the approach of a little old man, in a faded, threadbare suit, and with a care-worn, wrinkled countenance. He stopped short when he saw that she was weeping, and in an abrupt, yet not ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... of breeches, which Mr. David Bridges, tailor in ordinary to this northern potentate,—himself a wit, a virtuoso, and the croupier on that day in lieu of Rigdum,—had been instructed to bring with him, and display before the threadbare rivals. But I had these pictures from John Ballantyne, and I dare say they might be overcharged. That Constable was a most bountiful and generous patron to the ragged tenants of Grub Street, there ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... part as Gilbert Featherstone, the villain, in Lost in London, or old Baptista, in The Taming of the Shrew. The playgoer who never saw Charles Fisher as Triplet can scarcely claim that he ever saw the part at all. The quaint figure, the well-saved but threadbare dress, the forlorn air of poverty and suffering commingled with a certain jauntiness and pluck, the profound feeling, the unconscious sweetness and humour, the spirit of mind, gentility, and refinement struggling through the confirmed wretchedness of the almost ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... coarse straw full of dust and vermin, with the stems of boughs sticking up therethrough, for the cattle had eaten all the straw that was placed at the head and the foot. And upon it was stretched an old russet-coloured rug, threadbare and ragged; and a coarse sheet, full of slits was upon the rug, and an ill-stuffed pillow, and a worn-out cover upon the sheet. And after much suffering from the vermin, and from the discomfort of their couch, a heavy sleep fell ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... eyes had taken in all the dainty details of gloves, tiny chatelaine watch, and neat school satchel out of which protruded green and brown books. With a fierce little gesture the Other Girl had slid her own hands under her threadbare jacket. They were ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... restaurant Have their shilling's worth, their penny's pennyworth even: Neither man's aristocracy this, nor God's, God knoweth! Yet they are fairly descended, they give you to know, well connected; Doubtless somewhere in some neighbourhood have, and are careful to keep, some Threadbare-genteel relations, who in their turn are enchanted Grandly among county people to introduce at assemblies To the unpennied cadets our cousins with excellent fortunes. Neither man's aristocracy this, ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... the pages filled rapidly. When the appointed hour arrived, a bulky epistle, in a strong linen envelope, sealed with five wax seals, was waiting on my table. Precisely at six there was an announcement: the door opened, and a little outside, in the shadow, I saw an old woman, in a threadbare dress ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... Villabuena was now introduced, was one of those appropriated to the reception of guests and visitors to the convent. The apartment was plainly furnished with a table and a few wooden chairs; and in a recess hung a large ebony crucifix, before which was placed a hassock, its cloth envelope worn threadbare by the knees of the devout. But if the room of itself offered little worthy of note, the case was far different with the person who now ushered Don Baltasar into it. This was a woman about forty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... certain type of nobleman, the fairest ornaments of the provinces of our day. He wore big shoes with stout soles to them. I put the shoes first advisedly, for they made an even deeper impression upon me than a seedy black coat, a pair of threadbare trousers, a flabby cravat, or a crumpled shirt collar. There was a touch of the magistrate in the man, a good deal more of the Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of the arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... a person worth three or four hundred thousand dollars condescends to indulge a joke, it is not to be passed over like that of a poor relation. "Yes, yes," muttered the old man, as he stooped and picked up a pin, adding it to a row of similarly acquired pins which gave the left lapel of his threadbare coat the appearance of a miniature harp, "I shall ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... uncoif[obs3]; dismantle; put off, take off, cast off; doff; peel, pare, decorticate, excoriate, skin, scalp, flay; expose, lay open; exfoliate, molt, mew; cast the skin. Adj. divested &c. v.; bare, naked, nude; undressed, undraped; denuded; exposed; in dishabille; bald, threadbare, ragged, callow, roofless. in a state of nature, in nature's garb, in the buff, in native buff, in birthday suit; in puris naturalibus[Lat]; with nothing on, stark naked, stark raving naked [joc.]; bald as a coot, bare as the back of one's hand; out at elbows; barefoot; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... reticent, he had come, by reason of advancing years, or mayhap that which had left the terrible scar on his face, to be garrulous. When, once in a while, employment sought him (for he never sought employment), whatever remuneration he received went its way for something that left him dingy and threadbare. He now made a lively acquaintance with his landlord, as, indeed, with every soul in the neighborhood, and told all his adventures in Mexican prisons and Cuban cities; including full details of the hardships and perils experienced jointly with the "long gentleman" ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... means be permitted; and the Ambassador of the Republic was ready with his threadbare argument of ingratitude, with much other reasoning of which ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Women can't always earn enough to live decently and men can't always earn enough to marry on; and when well-to-do men get married they seem to get worse instead of better, generally. So upon the hungry, the weary, the hopeless, girls who have to patch their own boots and go threadbare and shabby while others have pretty things, and who are despised for their shabbiness by the very hypocrites who cant about love of dress, and who have folks at home whom they love, and who are penniless as well and in that abject misery which comes when there isn't any money to buy the little ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... there looked out an old roman, who was fervently praying on her knees. She was dressed in a much-worn high cap, and in a short veil, poor, but white as new-fallen snow; her silver hair streamed over a threadbare mantle: it was easy to guess that this was no common woman. Her features were very regular, in her dim eyes was expressed intellect, and a kind of stern greatness of soul. She looked proudly and steadily ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... wishes might have been the death of your hopes. If my reasoning is correct, the ardency of your passion might have closed with the pursuit. An every day suit, however rich and costly the texture, is soon worn threadbare. On your part, indifference would consequently succeed: on the part of your partner, disappointment, jealousy, and disgust. What might follow is needless for me to name;—your soul must shudder at the idea of ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... all unnoised. Heaven hath her high, as Earth her baser, wars. Heir to these tumults, this affright, that fray (By Adam's, fathers', own, sin bound alway); Peer up, draw out thy horoscope and say Which planet mends thy threadbare fate, ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... in haste abandon them. Be slow in choosing an associate, and slower to change him; slight no man for poverty, nor esteem any one for his wealth. Good friends should not be easily forgotten, nor used as suits of apparel, which, when we have worn them threadbare, we cast them off, and call for new. When once you profess yourself a friend, endeavor to be always such. He can never have any true friends that will be ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... these works of art was in all respects, shabbiness excepted, unlike the former personage. His whole appearance and manner denoted briskness. Though threadbare, he expressed to the crowd that poverty had not subdued his spirit, or tinged with any sense of shame this honest effort to turn his talents to some account. The writing which formed a part of his composition was conceived in a similarly cheerful ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... do you mean? In time for what? Pauline, tell me"—advancing a step—"tell me, in God's Name, what are you doing in this place?" He glanced significantly round the shabby room with its threadbare carpet ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... up before him, a slight, not at all heroic figure in his well worn, almost threadbare garments, smiled ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... joyous event. Their plaudits would resound in my ears, and peals of laughter ring again in my deserted chamber; then would succeed stillness, broken only by the beatings of my agonized heart, which felt that the gloss of respectability had worn off and exposed my threadbare condition. To drown these reflections, I would drink, not from love of the taste of the liquor, but to become so stupefied by its fumes as to steep my sorrows in a half oblivion; and from this miserable stupor I would wake to a fuller consciousness of my situation, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... and made him the father of Washington Irving. The Irvings—a branch of the well-known Scotch Irvines—had been for generations the leading family on the Island of Shapinsha. Finally they had gone threadbare, and with a fortune to seek, William Irving chose the natural ordeal for an islander, the trial by sea. Toward the close of the French War he had become petty officer on an armed English packet. In New York he met Mistress Sanders, who was also English-born, ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... to bed, the assembled peasantry were in the full tide of merriment, but without excess. The only person somewhat the worse of the bottle was the threadbare priest with ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... would wait; and sat down patiently enough in the faded, shabby drawing room, where, now that the summer chintzes were removed, the old chairs and sofas revealed all their threadbare deficiencies. He longed to send for the children; to have them there beside him, their supple bodies against his knees; to hear Jolly's: "Hallo, Gran!" and see his rush; and feel Holly's soft little hand stealing up against his cheek. But he would not. There was solemnity in what ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... statistical information in small installments. He wore the same decently melancholy aspect as a few months before; a few months more or less of brushing could make little difference in the antique lustre of his coat and hat. But the poor old man's spirit was a trifle more threadbare; it seemed to have received some hard rubs during the summer. Newman inquired with interest about Mademoiselle Noemie; and M. Nioche, at first, for answer, simply looked at ...
— The American • Henry James
... sat a gigantic young man of a slightly threadbare appearance, who was copying some screed out of a bulky tome before him. I regarded him in a reminiscent sort of way for a few minutes, and presently found that my scrutiny was being returned fourfold. Next came an enormous hand that ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... denuded, unveiled, exposed, undraped, in puris naturalibus; unadorned, bald, meager, unembellished, uncolored, unvarnished; empty, destitute, unfurnished; threadbare, pileworn, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... manuscripts, in prose and verse, They take for better and for worse; Their minds enlighten with the best, And pipes and candles with the rest; Provided that from them they cull My college exercises dull, On threadbare theme, with mind unwilling, Strained out through fear of fine one shilling, To teachers paid t' avert an evil, Like Indian worship to the Devil. The above-named manuscripts, I say. To club aforesaid I convey, Provided that said themes, so given, Full proofs that genius won't be driven, To our ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... seen so many beggars. It was insufferable. For this evening, at least, every one was giving—except Livingstone. Want was stretching out its withered hand even to Poverty and found it filled. But Livingstone took no part in it. The chilly and threadbare street-venders of shoe-strings, pencils and cheap flowers, who to-night were offering in their place tin toys, mistletoe and holly-boughs, he pushed roughly out of his way; he snapped angrily at beggars who had the temerity ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... state were the clothes he had now to wear! The green cloth of the coat was so shabby that in parts it was positively threadbare; dark patches had been put in near the arm-holes, and the once red facings were quite faded. He examined them dejectedly and shook his head; he had expected something very different, and certainly he would not cut much of a figure in this get-up. He pulled a stool up ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... picturesque way of putting the most threadbare, bald, commonplace of religious teaching. The word faith, when it has any meaning at all in people's minds when they hear it from the pulpit, is extremely apt, I fear, to create a kind of, if not disgust, at ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... howl on Oonalaska's shore' is not in it with that of mine," said George Henry—for since his coat had become threadbare his language had deteriorated, and he too frequently used slang—"but I'm thankful that I alone hear my own. How different the case from what it is when one's dog barks o' nights! Then the owner is the only one who sleeps within a radius ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... who are jealous of maintaining the dignity required by this color ought to devote themselves to constant and minute care of their person; but our dear M. Popinot was incapable of forcing himself to the puritanical cleanliness which black demands. His trousers, always threadbare, looked like camlet—the stuff of which attorneys' gowns are made; and his habitual stoop set them, in time, in such innumerable creases, that in places they were traced with lines, whitish, rusty, or shiny, betraying either sordid avarice, or the ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... Replied he, "O Kings of the Age, the strangest thing that happened to me was that one day, two-and-twenty years ago, I snatched a girl who belonged to the Holy City; she was gifted with beauty and comeliness, despite that she was but a servant and was clad in threadbare clothes, with a piece of camlet-cloth on her head. So I entrapped her by guile as she came out of the caravanserai; and at that very hour mounting her on a camel, made off with her, thinking to carry her to my own people in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... traditionary pursuits and transferred to what some economists call the productive section of society. The experiment has failed, and the cause of the failure is not difficult to find. One has merely to look at these men of gaunt visage and shambling gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black, threadbare coats reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are not in their proper sphere. Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition, and their villages remind one of the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet. A great part of their ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... was very hot and uncomfortable. The young man looked about on the familiar scene. There were the same straight-backed chairs, the same homemade carpet, more faded and threadbare than ever, the same ugly enlarged photographs within their massive frames which the enterprising agent had sold to Mrs. Duke. There was the same lack of books or music or anything pretty or refined; and as Dorian stood and looked about, there came to him more ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, The lightning ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... answer sharply when something in the man's face seemed vaguely familiar. He was about sixty. His clothes were threadbare and green with age, his shoes down at the heels, his moustache and shaggy beard a ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... room for him on the sidewalk, so he took up his position beyond the curbstone. The light from the large arc-lamp overhead, exposed the old man's thin white hair, withered face and threadbare clothes. His sightless eyes were turned toward the passing throng, and his head was slightly bent in an expectant attitude. But the hand that drew the wheezy bow across the strings of the violin often faltered, and the ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... were vacant, a frown dividing his white brows, the thin hand on the table closing and relaxing. He was not talking to his daughter, but to his conscience. It was the old threadbare, tattered tale—spawn of the Goddess fortune; a thing of misbegotten ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... his cheeks were burning with his shame. He went for his hat and looked it over carefully. It was faded, and there was a little rent in the crown. His boots were tapped and mended, his trousers threadbare at the knee, and there were ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... "That good old Niseron! there's not a more honest man." Often taken as umpire in certain kinds of disputes, he embodied the meaning of that archaic term,—the village elder. Always extremely clean, though threadbare, he wore breeches, coarse woollen stockings, hob-nailed shoes, the distinctively French coat with large buttons and the broad-brimmed felt hat to which all old peasants cling; but for daily wear he kept a blue jacket so ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... him with a rhythmic regularity of movement—and yet in glancing back he could place his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me happiness—and this—and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap and threadbare—woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions—and he felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life, that he had been deluded into a childish ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... the tables trying to read sat one day a man about fifty, his clothes worn and threadbare, but wearing a collar, and that's a good sign. I beckoned him to come over to me and I pointed to a chair, telling him to sit down. If that chair could only speak, what a tale it could tell of the men who have sat there and ...
— Dave Ranney • Dave Ranney
... straggling wisps of hair thrown, as it were, on his head, a dull glimmer only in his one eye, and his whole features of a crafty, selfish character—such he was; clad in a long, threadbare, snuff-coloured great-coat, reaching almost to his heels, and which served to hide the trowsers, the frayed ends of which explained their condition; on his bare feet he wore a pair of trodden-down slippers, with upper leathers gaping in front with open mouths; a despicable ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Birmingham, Wolverhampton, and Walsall, and what he will witness in the course of the short ramble will "change the spirit of his dream." In Darlaston, as a sample of what he would see, there are hundreds of men and women whose clothes, made of the coarsest materials, are patched, and threadbare, and valueless; hundreds of houses without anything in them deserving the name of furniture; hundreds of beds without clothing, and hundreds of children whose excuses for clothes are barely sufficient, with every contrivance ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... a short silence. The woman found it hard to know what to say. Somewhere down along the white, dusty road a man was grinding the music of a threadbare waltz from an ancient barrel-organ. ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... solemnly filed into the executive office. They looked around in evident amazement at its bare poverty-stricken appearance. They had been shocked at the threadbare appearance of the White House grounds as they entered. This room was a greater shock—this throbbing nerve centre of the Nation. In the middle stood the long, plain table around which the storm-racked Cabinet were wont ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... have looked the stable-door;" every body can see that, but nobody offers to buy the loser a new nag. "What a pity he went so far on the ice!" That's very true, but that won't save the poor fellow from drowning. When a man's coat is threadbare, it is an easy thing to pick a hole in it. Good advice is poor food ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... de Courval, and Mademoiselle de Courval generally pecked at her bouquet when she answered Monsieur Goupille. On the other side of this young lady sat a fine-looking fair man—M. Sovolofski, a Pole, buttoned up to the chin, and rather threadbare, though uncommonly neat. He was flanked by a little fat lady, who had been very pretty, and who kept a boarding-house, or pension, for the English, she herself being English, though long established in Paris. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Advice with Candid Readiness Taking Care to Cut His Expressions Close Thought of Their Mind—articulated in His Tongue Too Silly to Require Any Sort of Notice Uncommon Power of Clear and Compact Statement Voice Shrill and Piercing Wear the Sweetest Idea Threadbare Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy They First Make Mad Widow v.s. Gen. Adams You Work and Toil and Earn Bread and ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger
... this uncouth proceeding. But heyho! man is a selfish animal. You take me, sir, my affection for yonder venerable lady does not keep me awake o' nights; yet is a rich marriage the only method to amend my threadbare fortunes, so that I cheerfully avail myself of her credulity. By God!" cried he, with a quick raising of the voice, "to-morrow I had been a landed gentleman but for you, you blundering omadhaun! And is a shabby merry-andrew from the devil ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... girl as poor as himself. "We came together," he says, "as poor as might be, having not so much household stuff as a dish or spoon between us both." The only dowry which the girl brought to her new home was two old, threadbare books, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, and The Practice of Piety[168] Bunyan read these books, which instantly gave fire to his imagination. He saw new visions and dreamed terrible new dreams of lost souls; his attendance ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... It is a threadbare saying that the environment moulds the man. Yet, much more than the philosophers have contended, there are chameleon tendencies in the strongest character, and one finely determining to coerce his surroundings is quite likely to end ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... must at any rate correspond to solid substantial matter-of-fact motives, intelligible to the ordinary Briton of the time. In the last period, the old literary conventions, though retaining their old literary prestige, are becoming threadbare while preserving the old forms. Even the Johnsonian conservatism implies hatred for cant, for mere foppery and sham sentimentalism; and though it uses them, insists with Crabbe upon keeping in contact with fact. We must be 'realistic,' though we can retain the old literary ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... at the hem of Barstein's coat, and kissing it reverently. He was a gaunt, melancholy figure, elongated to over six feet, and still further exaggerated by a rusty top-hat of the tallest possible chimneypot, and a threadbare frockcoat of the longest possible tails. At his advent his wife, vastly relieved, shepherded her flock into the kitchen and closed the door, leaving Barstein alone with the long man, who seemed, as he stood gazing at his visitor, positively ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... gather around the great wood fire in the sitting-room, and talk and tell stories by the hour together. I tell the most of the stories; for, though I am only a plain farmer, going about in a slouched hat, a rusty coat, and a pair of pantaloons so old and threadbare that you would not wear them if you were in the ash business, I have mingled with men, seen a great many places, and been almost all over ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... as if I had never been;—and yet how I have loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!" And so singing, their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and, still singing, they drop it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Hogan obeyed him and slipped from the room, he turned to the lad, who had been a silent spectator of what had passed. From the pocket of his threadbare doublet he drew a pack of ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... I wandered into the place I speak of, took a seat and called for my clay pipe and pot of beer. I was paying little attention to the performance on the stage, for it was worn threadbare with me; but was studying the faces of the crowd around me, when suddenly I was attracted by the sound of the sweetest voice I ever heard. I turned to the stage, and there stood a young girl, but little more than a child, holding her piece of music in her hand, and singing, to the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... seems that this malady of their heels operates on the sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures, very much as the cork leg in the comic song did on its owner, which, when he once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems to be too strikingly in point to be omitted. A witty Irish soldier who was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who invariably retreated ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... call us cheats for being right in {94} advance of their slow aid, by guesswork or by hook or crook, what shall we say of them? Were all of Clifford's works, except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in future treatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance of the miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer his gold to all the goods he might ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... indicating a man seven feet high, and the armor seems to bear the marks of much wear; but this may be owing to great scrubbing, throughout the centuries since John of Gaunt died. There, too, we saw the cloak in which Wolfe fell, on the Plains of Abraham,—a coarse, faded, threadbare, light-colored garment, folded up under a glass case. Many other things we might have seen, worthy of being attended to, had there been time ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... muttered that if he came not your worship would bolt out what were better kept in; and so he took his old flat cap, and threadbare blue cloak, and, as I said before, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... hushed so long before. Yet the poet was as much honoured by those humble friends, Lambeth artizans and a few poor working-women, who threw sprays of laurel before the hearse—by that desolate, starving, woe-weary gentleman, shivering in his threadbare clothes, who seemed transfixed with a heart-wrung though silent emotion, ere he hurriedly drew from his sleeve a large white chrysanthemum, and throwing it beneath the coffin as it was lifted inward, disappeared in the crowd, which closed ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... could pass through monsieur's mind the fifth floor would be reached. The boy followed, climbing and ever climbing, until the meagre hand-rail appeared to lengthen into dream-like coils, and the threadbare, drab-hued carpet, with its vivid red border, to assume the proportions of some ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... because in such a struggle many a lonely claim is pitilessly set aside. In the daily shifts of bare life, the tender words that bring tender acts are forgotten. Gaunt looks, threadbare clothes, hard day-labor, sharp endurance of their children's wants, made Sandy and Sallie Morrison often very hard to those to whom ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... northern latitude, where summer is at best but a flighty visitor, chill out the heart, though but for a few minutes at a time, of the warmest afternoon. He had fits of the gloom of other people—their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals—which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times outward things also would seem to concur unkindly in deepening ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... zone of light upon the table, and left the remainder of the room in darkness. When, however, my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I discerned that the place was dusty and somewhat disordered. The sofa was, I saw, a folding iron bedstead with greasy old cushions, while the carpet was threadbare and full of holes. When I drew the old rep curtains to look out of the window, I found that the shutters were closed, which I thought unusual for a room so high up as ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... speak, just as we went in one of the speakers was telling his experience, and what a terrible struggle he had to overcome the power of appetite. Now when he felt the fearful craving coming over him he would walk the carpet till he had actually worn it threadbare; but that he had been converted and found grace to help him in time of need, and how he had gone out and tried to reform others and had seen the work prosper in his hand. I watched Joe's face, it seemed lit up with earnestness and hope, as if that ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... time longer, but by degrees we both, at the same time, observed, that an alteration began to take place. My master attributed this to his altered fortunes, and I placed it to the score of my decayed appearance—the threadbare cloth and tarnished button came in, I was sure, for their full share of neglect, and he at last fell into the same opinion. To describe all the variety of treatment that we experienced would be a tedious and unpleasant task,—but I was the more convinced that I had at least as much ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... honourable title) descend the stairs from the Greek class, with his Lexicon under his arm, his long misshapen legs sprawling abroad, and keeping awkward time to the play of his immense shoulder-blades, as they raised and depressed the loose and threadbare black coat which was his constant and only wear. When he spoke, the efforts of the professor (professor of divinity, though he was) were totally inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of the students, and sometimes even to repress his own. The ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... Scotch interloper," said Picton, after our visitor had retired, "what business had he to impose upon our good nature, with his threadbare 'aibstract preencepels?' Confound him and his beggarly high cheek-bones, and his Caledonian pock-pits. I am sorry that I ever came to this part of the world; it has ruined a taste which I had acquired, with much labor, for Scottish ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... of the key-words of the New Testament—'grace,' 'saved,' 'faith.' Once these terms were strange and new; now they are old and threadbare. Once they were like lava, glowing and cast up from the central depths; but it is a long while since the eruption, and the blocks have got cold, and the corners have been rubbed off them. I am afraid that some people, when they read such a text, will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... those sturdy Bohemians who stopped living when Sala died. If you frequent the Strand or Fleet Street or Oxford Street you probably know him by sight. He is short. He wears a frock-coat, buttoned at the waist and soup-splashed at the lapels. His boots are battered, his trousers threadbare. He carries jaunty eye-glasses, a jaunty silk hat, and shaves once a week. He walks with both hands in trousers pockets and feet out-splayed. The poor laddie is sadly outmoded, but he doesn't know it. He still lunches on a glass of stout and biscuit-and-cheese at "The Bun Shop" in ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... "what's the use of discussing such an old and threadbare theme? Things are not always what they seem, as the man with a squint said when he thought he saw two sovereigns where there was but one. The point before us is the ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... been prepared since that. The boys' clothing had been supplemented by the goods taken from the wagon top, and while heavy garments were not required, it was noticed that the articles first made from the ramie were growing threadbare. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... bird, sat meditating upon the rocky shore of the flat and hazel- covered isle which fills the widest part of the Lough Gill. A russet- faced boy of seventeen years sat by his side, watching the swallows dipping for flies in the still water. The old man was dressed in threadbare blue velvet, and the boy wore a frieze coat and a blue cap, and had about his neck a rosary of blue beads. Behind the two, and half hidden by trees, was a little monastery. It had been burned down a long while before by sacrilegious men of the Queen's party, but had been roofed anew with ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... a man called Archibiades, nicknamed the Lacedaemonian, who used to go about with a huge overgrown beard, wearing an old threadbare cloak, and affecting a very stern countenance. Phocion once, when attacked in council by the rest, appealed to this man for his support and testimony. And when he got up and began to speak on the popular side, putting his hand to his beard, "O Archibiades," said he, "it is time you should shave." ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... talk out and explain everything was a display of the threadbare Newbolt dignity, people said, an exhibition of which they had not seen since old Peter's death. But it looked ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... downstairs again, clean-shaven and wearing his Sunday suit of threadbare sea-cloth, he found the Penhaligon children seated at the board, already plying their spoons in bowls of bread-and-milk. As a rule, like other healthy children, they ate first and talked afterwards. But to-day, with War in the air, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... messages and speeches from the throne, in order to dazzle the eyes of the populace, even while they insulted the understanding of those who were capable of exercising their own reason. This pretext was worn so threadbare, that, among the sensible part of mankind, it could no longer be used without incurring contempt and ridicule. In order to persuade mankind that the protestant religion was in danger, it would have been necessary to specify the designs that were ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... old man with a long beard and a threadbare cloak (the garb affected by the pagan philosophers) standing ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... shocked. The small-clothes desiderated would have been of black satin, probably embroidered; and fit, though somewhat threadbare, for the thigh of a magistrate and gentleman of Spain. But he would not have gone on ordinary days in a sansculottic state. He would have worn that most comfortable of loose nether garments, which may be seen on sailors in prints of the great war, and which ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of the royal family during a period of about four months, varied by the capricious mercy or cruelty of the different persons who were placed as guards over them. Their clothes became soiled, threadbare, and tattered; and they were deprived of all means of repairing their garments, lest they should convert needles and scissors into instruments of suicide. The king was not allowed the use of a razor to remove his beard; and the luxury of a barber to perform that essential part of his toilet was ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... mile of the western journey was a step into Wonderland; novel sights, novel ideas confronted him on every hand and viewed through the medium of his enthusiasm things that had become threadbare to Van became, as if by magic, suddenly new. The greatness of the country was a marvel of which Bob had never before had any adequate conception. Then there were the cities, alive with varying industries, and teeming with their strangely mixed American population. Above all was the amazing natural ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... combinations of crude colors upon their persons, their husbands availed themselves of the artist's privilege and dressed as they pleased, and curious it was to see the provincial dowdiness of the pair. In their threadbare clothes they looked like the supernumeraries that represent rank and fashion at stage weddings ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... them. And this was a very passionate man, as was evidenced by the looks of fury he cast from side to side upon his captors as they dragged him this way and that to make a show of their power, but not ill-looking. In his struggles he had lost his hat, and his threadbare coat and shirt were torn open, laying bare his neck and showing a very fair white skin and a good beard of light curling hair. There was nought mean or vile in his face, but rather it seemed to me a noble countenance, ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... hogs! When they get cloyed on corn, then you change their feed, and so keep them growing, even if it does cost twice as much to make the change; and yet, the chances are that when your boy is tired to death of the old, old stories in his reader, tales worn threadbare, as they are drawled over and over in his hearing by the dullards of his class, till his soul is sick of them, even then you force him to go again and again over the hated pages, till he will resort to rank rebellion to be rid ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... gazed at the benefactress in a sudden understanding and intimacy; and Lilla thought, "You, too, perhaps in some region far removed from your pots and pans, have had such a moment as this!" And she would have liked to let her face fall forward upon the bosom of that threadbare working dress, feel those toil-worn arms close round her, and utter the plea, "Tell me how to bear such things, to survive, to emerge into that strange ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Owen will tell you, with eyes full of scorn, Threadbare is my coat, and my hosen are torn: Scoff on, my rich Owen, for faint is thy glee When the maid of Llanwellyn smiles ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... suit, which you made to hang upon you, till your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare—and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent-garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... herself upstairs with a sticky hand on the banister, "Well, I don't know where you'd begin, Miss Vail. Everything's threadbare...." ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... And as he spoke he saw a young man coming round the corner of the house between two dragoons. He had a long thin neck, and his head, that had been half shaved, was again covered by short hair. This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue cloth coat lined with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty hempen convict trousers, over which were pulled his thin, dirty, trodden-down boots. On his thin, weak legs were heavy chains which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... miles. Being very cold, he asked permission to enter and warm himself. Assent was given very grudgingly, and both went into the kitchen. The wife looked daggers at this untimely intrusion, for the stranger had on cowhide boots, an old hat, and a threadbare, but neatly patched coat. At length she gave him a chair beside the Dutch oven which was baking nice cakes for the presiding elder, who was momentarily expected, as he was to preach the next day at the church a mile or ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... half-minute, until at last Mr. Jeremiah Mulcahy strode into the kitchen: a tall, ill-contrived figure, that had once been well fitted out, but that now wore its old skin, like its old clothes, very loosely; and those old clothes were a discolored, threadbare, half-polished kerseymere pair of trousers, and aged superfine black coat, the last relics of his former Sunday finery,—to which had recently and incongruously been added a calfskin vest, a pair of coarse sky-blue peasant's stockings, and a pair of brogues. His hanging cheeks and lips ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... half could hide How threadbare his patched jacket hung; They used to be his Mother's pride; She praised them with a tender tongue, And stroked them with a loving finger That smoothed and stroked ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... man, who muttering, it might be, a benediction, stepped into the hall, and displayed long silver tresses, just as the storm had blown them, ascetic and eager features, and a pair of large light eyes that wandered wildly. He was dressed in threadbare black; a pair of long leather gaiters, buckled high above his knee, protecting his thin shanks through moss and pool; and the singularity of his appearance was heightened by a wide-leafed felt ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... better be dead, than continuing his career of villainy and crime," quoth the emir sternly, and then passing his eyes over the person of Mr. Middleton, he remarked the somewhat threadbare and glossy garments of that excellent young man. "If you would accept a suit of raiment from me," continued the emir with a hesitation that betrayed the delicacy which was one of the most marked of the many estimable traits that made his character so admirable, "I would be overjoyed ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... hall, the dean of studies was in the act of escaping from the student with whom he had been conversing. He stood at the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step, his threadbare soutane gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care, nodding ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... had long since come and gone, with their magic faces and their souls of perfume. Gone were the banners of blossom from the great trees. The locust and the chestnut, those spendthrifts of the woods, that went the pace so gorgeously in June, are now sober-coated enough, and growing even threadbare. All the hum and the honey and breathless bosom-beat of things is over. The birds sing no more, but only chatter about time-tables. The bee keeps to his hive, and the bewildered butterfly, in tattered ball-dress, wonders what has become of his flowery partners. The great cricket factory has shut ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... eight week's layer of dust on chairs and table, the threadbare rooms were little changed. A loaf of bread, green and furred with mold, lay beside an empty marmalade pot from which a cloud of flies emerged with angry buzzing; a breakfast cup without a handle completed the furniture of the table, and in the rickety armchair ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... die down. For a solid fortnight they did little else than write letters and postal cards to anxious applicants, and by the end of the two weeks Jimaboy was starting up in his bed of nights to rave out the threadbare formula of explanation: "Dear Madam: The ad. you saw in the Sunday Times was not an ad.; it was a joke. There is no Post-Graduate School of W. B. in all the world. Please don't waste your time and ours by writing any ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... can hope to equal. It is hard—for a British critic at any rate—to see any perennial interest in the long series of highly exaggerated drawings and jests referring to the gutter children of New York, a series in which the same threadbare motifs are constantly recurring under the thinnest of disguises. And occasionally—very occasionally—there is a touch of coarseness in the drawings of Life which suggests the worst features of its German prototype rather than anything it has ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... sixty years of age, short, rotund, corpulent. His head was bullet-shaped and set well down on his shoulders. His clothes were baggy and threadbare, his linen soiled and shabby. He had blue eyes, harsh red hair, and a florid complexion. When he arrived, he brought three valises. Everybody wondered what he ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... beyond precedent—nothing he ever said deserves contempt, though it may merit anger. If we would escape his conclusion, we must not altogether disregard his premises. Bankruptcy and death are the final heirs of imposture and make-believes. The old faiths and forms are worn too threadbare by a thousand disputations to bear the burden of the new democracy, which, if it is not merely to win the battle but to hold the country, must be ready with new faiths and forms of her own. They are within her reach if she but knew it; they lie to her hand: surely they will not escape ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... his nose so aquiline as nearly to meet his projecting chin, and his small gray eyes, red and bleary, peered beneath his well-worn cap with a glance of mingled fear and suspicion. His dress was a suit of the rustiest black, threadbare, and patched in several places, while a pair of large brown leather slippers, far too big for his feet, imparted a sliding motion to his walk that added an air of indescribable meanness to his appearance; a gown that had been ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Sassy's career of prolificacy, the little girl remembered that her best thick dress was so threadbare that she would need a brand-new one for the next winter. She found, too, that if she was to have one she must devise a way to swell the small amount in the tin savings-bank; for the big brothers declared ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... these illusions he entered a cold bare room, furnished with two desks on rollers, some shabby armchairs, a threadbare carpet, and curtains that were much neglected. This cabinet was to that of the elder brother like a kitchen to a dining-room, or a work-room to a shop. Here were turned inside out all matters touching the bank and ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... a shabby little room with a threadbare carpet, yet it wore an air of adventure somehow. The lamp shade had a daring tilt to it; the blind had been run up askew; and the red table cover had been pushed back to make room for a mound of books. Harry's bed looked as ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... the young man in the threadbare coat became like a live wire! His hair, which already was en brosse, seemed to rise still higher on his head, his thin lips quivered, and his hands worked in a complete language of their own. He put up an immediate barrier with his palms held rigidly outward. All the table stopped ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... of the Goal is to travel the distance over and over in your mind and dwell on how awfully far off it is. We have so little mind —doing business on such a small capital of intellect—that to wear it threadbare looking for a far-off thing is to get hopelessly stranded in Siegel, Cooper ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... full understanding and appreciation as they were won. Many of them most desired might never be attained; many more might be touched and withdrawn in the mockery that fate practices so heartlessly upon men. Reid could convey her at once over the rough summits which men and women wear their hearts threadbare to attain. With Reid the journey would begin where, with the best hoping, it must in his ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... stiff and uncompromising. When a piece needed repairing, and with Nan about, many a piece needed repairing often, it was stowed out of sight in the trunk-room, or the cellar, and the carpets, which had been rich and fashionable in their day, were allowed to lie now long after they had become threadbare and faded. Delia kept the handsome paintings veiled in tarlatan winter and summer, and she never removed the slip-covers from the parlor sofas and chairs, whatever the season might be. Nan did not care, because she knew nothing different, and there was no loving, artful hand to make the ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... Mr. Abbey decided to offer the operatic loaf, such as it was, but to cut it, not at the house with which Patti's name had been intimately associated, but at the Metropolitan Opera House. He was conjuring with the legend (then new, but afterward worn threadbare), "Patti's Farewell." I am writing in July, 1908, and have just been reading the same legend again in the London newspapers—twenty-one years after it served Mr. Abbey a turn. In April, then, Mr. Abbey ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... were so! It would be no more than a thin threadbare cloak over a woman's shivering shoulders. It is not much against the cold; but it would be very cruel to take that little from her." She looked at him with her eyes flooded with tears, but she could only shake her head in sign that ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... which were all fastened on with a certain liquid so firmly to the skin that it was necessary to apply vinegar in which the ashes of vine-twigs had been steeped, when they instantly fell off. My Basque was at length dressed in a torn, threadbare cassock, masked by his false beard, with an old hat upon his head, a breviary under his arm, and a tolerably thick stick in his hand, and received an order to post himself near the little gate of the Luxembourg stables. The Cardinal then desired ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... coarsely built old man, dressed in threadbare black. The tones of his voice were broad, and quite unlike the local dialect. He was speaking as Jan came up, but to no companion that Jan could see, though his hand was outstretched in sympathy with his words. He was looking upwards, too, as Jan was wont to look himself, into that azure sky ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... philosophizes it is not in old threadbare proverbs or Orphic generalities, but always specifically and ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... described above, to put on my morning-gown and slippers, and light my pipe, then sallying forth, have strolled from Fuller's to the Capitol; and climbing its bold hill, have looked down along the sleeping city, speculating upon its possible destinies until my fancies waxed threadbare, and then quietly returned, making a distance of nearly three miles, without encountering an individual or hearing the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
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