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More "Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... turn to the serious pieces, the better part of the volume. The Foster-Mother's Tale is in the best style of dramatic narrative. The Dungeon, and the Lines upon the Yew-tree Seat, are beautiful. The Tale of the Female Vagrant is written in the stanza, not the style, of Spenser. We extract a ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... thy window, Sweet, And wide the lattice swing, That vagrant zephyrs may repeat What words my lips shall sing Unto your ears anew, Up from the fragrant dew, That all your dreams may be ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... believe it, chance led them to discovering the murderer. A vagrant who had been many times convicted, notorious for his vicious life, was seen selling for drink a snuff-box and watch that had belonged to the doctor. When he was questioned he was confused, and answered with an obvious lie. A search was made, and in his bed was found ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... walls, or in high mountain meadows, and, again, down by the gray sand-dunes with a wreath of billows at their feet, or afar on some volcanic tropic isle where waterfalls descended and became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that swayed and shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind. But always, in the foreground, lords of beauty and eternally reading and sharing, lay he and Ruth, and always in the background that was beyond the background of nature, dim and hazy, were work and success and money earned ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of that animal [the ass], by whose indication they had escaped from their vagrant condition in the wilderness and quenched their thirst. They abstain from swine's flesh as a memorial of the miserable destruction which the mange brought on them. That they stole the fruits of the earth, we have a proof in their unleavened ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... radiant disarray, On heaven's broad boulevard in pageants vast. And things of earth, the hunted and outcast, Come from their haunts and hiding-places; yea, Even from the nooks and crannies of the mind Visions uncouth and vagrant fancies start, And specters of dead joy, that shun the light, And impotent regrets and terrors blind, Each one, in form grotesque, playing its part In the fantastic ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... she-priests, to Cybebe's dense woods, together haste, ye vagrant herd of the dame Dindymene, ye who inclining towards strange places as exiles, following in my footsteps, led by me, comrades, ye who have faced the ravening sea and truculent main, and have castrated your bodies in your utmost hate of Venus, make glad our mistress speedily with your ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the Danes sacked the town, and it would seem that the bridge was destroyed, for early in the twelfth century we find a reference to the ferry being definitely fixed at Cambridge, and that before that time it had been "a vagrant," passengers crossing anywhere that seemed most convenient. This fixing of the ferry, and various favours bestowed by Henry I., resulted in an immediate growth of prosperity, and the change was recognized by certain Jews who took up their quarters ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... be permanent. After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the meanwhile they do not acquire a distaste for steady labor and get vagrant habits. I would talk this over with 'Siah and ask him in serious mood if he really thinks best to spend so much money in fishing-gear, when he could buy land with it ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... baukie bird, [bat] Bedim cauld Boreas' blast; When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte, [glancing stroke] And infant frosts begin to bite, In hoary cranreuch drest; [hoar-frost] Ae night at e'en a merry core [one, gang] O' randie, gangrel bodies [rowdy, vagrant] In Poosie Nansie's held the splore, [carousal] To drink their orra duddies. [spare rags] Wi' quaffing and laughing, They ranted an' they sang; Wi' jumping an' thumping The very girdle ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... All at once she set to work to win back her self-control. It might not yet be too late to help. She gripped herself, dispelling at once all hysteria, all her vagrant thoughts. He would have been hard at work long since. His face was still warm—perhaps life had not ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... parchment-white to very old oak. There was a capatas, or overseer, and seven or eight paid peones, the others being all agregados—that is, supernumeraries without pay, or, to put it plainly, vagabonds who attach themselves like vagrant dogs to establishments of this kind, lured by the abundance of flesh, and who occasionally assist the regular peones at their work, and also do a little gambling and stealing to keep themselves in small ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... Rosamond, looking up in his face. "How heavy your eyes are, Tertius—and do push your hair back." He lifted up his large white hand to obey her, and felt thankful for this little mark of interest in him. Poor Rosamond's vagrant fancy had come back terribly scourged—meek enough to nestle under the old despised shelter. And the shelter was still there: Lydgate had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... other children have a settlement in their father's parish; but a bastard in the parish where born, for he hath no father[f]. However, in case of fraud, as if a woman be sent either by order of justices, or comes to beg as a vagrant, to a parish which she does not belong to, and drops her bastard there; the bastard shall, in the first case, be settled in the parish from whence she was illegally removed[g]; or, in the latter case, in the mother's own parish, if the mother be apprehended for her ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... pleasant arc of sky The great stone box is cruelly displayed. The street becomes more dreary from its shade, And vagrant breezes touch its walls and die. Here sullen convicts in their chains might lie, Or slaves toil dumbly at some dreary trade. How worse than folly is their labor made Who cleft the rocks that ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... world, the pomp which waits on greatness, Ill suits my humble, unambitious soul;— Then leave me here, to tread the safer path Of private life; here, where my peaceful course Shall be as silent as the shades around me; Nor shall one vagrant wish be e'er allow'd To stray beyond the ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... gasp for breath, as if frightened at her own audacity. Her manner and phrases were an evident imitation of the way in which she had heard advice bestowed upon vagrant or criminal by the benevolent judge whose memory she so tenderly cherished. It was second nature to her to act as she fancied he would have acted. Courthope composed himself to receive the judicial admonition ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... "the first time by any means that kings have chosen to live with dancers. While such conduct is not, perhaps, strictly laudable, we can disregard it if it be accompanied by a certain measure of decorum. Still, a combination of ruler-ship and dalliance with a vagrant charmer is a phenomenon that is as much out of place as is an attempt to govern a country by ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... they shut him up in jail, charging him with being a vagrant, which he undoubtedly was. But he won over all the jailers and the prisoners to his doctrine, and so the jail was emptied. Moreover, it was found that some of those who loved him most truly had come to share his power of hearing truth. The madness ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... suppose that, on cross-examination, it turns out that this witness can give no good account of his manner of earning his living or of his place of residence; that he had been arrested not long before as a vagrant, and that down to the time of the action he had no respectable clothes, and that he suddenly became possessed of some; that he deserted from the army immediately after getting his bounty-money, and so on, there can be little doubt that his credit with the jury would be much impaired, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... expected to reopen the plantations using the freedmen as hired laborers. In 1865 and 1866 they tried this, only to find that the negro had got beyond control and would not work. Supervision had become hateful to him. A vagrant life appealed to his desire for change. At best, he was unintelligent and indolent. In a few years it became clear that the old type of plantation had vanished, and that the substitute was ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... rattling toward the ferry, brought a fine specimen of the juvenile vagrant and dare-devil, seated on the step. Bog looked out of the boiler yard, and hailed him with a shrill whistle, formed by thrusting two fingers in the mouth, and blowing fiercely. The boy recognized the signal of his ragged tribe, slid off the seat, and came running ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Poor Swindle had gone mad; and I had had a narrow escape from being bitten. We lassoed him from opposite directions and dragged him outside and shot him. Swindle was a plucky little dog, and so was Crib; one day they chased a vagrant cat up on to the roof; driven to desperation, the cat made a wild leap down into the court-yard, a distance of perhaps twenty feet; without a moment's hesitation, both dogs sprang boldly after her, recking little ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... fair; a drought, a set-off to the surplusage of recent rain, was in progress; the dooryard on the high slope of the mountain, apart from its availability for the surveillance of any eccentric doings of the comet, was an acceptable lounging-place for the sake of the air, the dew, the hope of a vagrant breeze, and, more than all, the ample "elbow-room" which it offered the rest of the family while he talked with Theodosia Blakely. The rest of the family—unwelcome wights!—were not disposed to make their existence obtrusive; on the contrary, they did much to further his wishes, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... disappointed. What does a vagrant fancy amount to? I consider myself fortunate in meeting Miss Underhill. Why, suppose I had gone rambling about and missed you altogether? Have you ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... shall find his way home before sunlight, has just staggered heavily along, roaring out the burden of the drinking song of the previous night: the last houseless vagrant whom penury and police have left in the streets, has coiled up his chilly limbs in some paved comer, to dream of food and warmth. The drunken, the dissipated, and the wretched have disappeared; the more sober and orderly ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... endeavoured rapidly to evolve some means for putting an end to the dual ownership. It was unthinkable that he should continue for the space of a whole hour in the horrible position of a Rowton House for vagrant mice (already his imagination had at least doubled the numbers of the alien invasion). On the other hand, nothing less drastic than partial disrobing would ease him of his tormentor, and to undress in the presence of a lady, even for so laudable a purpose, was an idea that made his ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... dots, seems to smile upon me. Its wing, of which I count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly on my bench and wait more or ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... among us trod A man in blue, with legal baton, And scoffed the vagrant demigod, And pushed him from the step I sat on. Doubting, I mused upon the cry, "Great Pan is dead!"—and all the people Went on their ways:—and clear and high The ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... stand side by side in the open street, one is the child of a king, nicely drest and delicately clean, as would be expected from his noble birth and expectation, the other is the little hedge-side vagrant, to whose young face water or cleansing has probably been unknown. Imagine, then, ought passing these two children, which could pollute their persons, what would be their feelings? the one might even laugh at the filth or mud that bespattered him, the other would shrink ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... expose his associate fully, and in his true colours, he led him back, wards and forwards by the women more than twenty times, making him to confess both the crimes that he had done and those he had in contemplation. At length he said to him: "Assuredly I saw some strolling vagrant women on this walk, my dear friend: I wish we could find them, for there is little doubt that they are concealed here in ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... turned a hair, though he wondered how any man in the North could know her name. He glanced coolly from face to face to note any vagrant signs of the game that was being played upon him, but beyond a healthy curiosity the faces betrayed nothing. Then he turned to the gambler and ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d. in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's House (Royal Hospital) ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... seemed as if we could never be weary of admiring a sight so strange and beautiful. It was rather in form and colour than in size that these ice islets were remarkable; anything approaching to a real iceberg we neither saw, nor are we likely to see. In fact, the lofty ice mountains that wander like vagrant islands along the coast of America, seldom or never come to the eastward or northward of Cape Farewell. They consist of land ice, and are all generated among bays and straits within Baffin's Bay, and first enter the Atlantic a good deal to the southward of Iceland; whereas the Polar ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... first great impulse to the mind of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached each other by the same sympathies, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... difficult. She was without a cent, a shelter, a job, a friend, or the prospect of a meal. It was probable that there was not at that minute in New York a human being so destitute. Before nightfall she would have to find some nominal motive for living or be arrested as a vagrant. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... was soon taken; princesses came into the world to be sacrificed. The plot ran on for some time, the Queen, who was in the habit of calling Charles Albert 'that little vagrant,' giving it her indefatigable support. Victor Emmanuel was weak, and stood in considerable awe of his wife, who had obtained a great ascendancy over him in the miserable days of their residence in the island of Sardinia. His nephew, who was almost or wholly unknown to him, partook ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... frugality and integrity, and the lawyer who hoped to be successful required first of all to command the confidence of the community in his honesty. The ballot and the jury-box were regarded as sacred as the sacrament itself, and the criminal courts had usually little to do beyond the cases of vagrant offenders. Business was conducted as a rule without the formality of contracts, and those whose lives justly provoked scandal were shunned on every side. This community possessed the only real wealth the world can give—content; and the local newspaper of that day, even under the direction ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... neighbour, a retired captain of Uhlans, named Yaff, was at the root of Masha's desertion. He had taken her fancy, according to Panteley Eremyitch, simply by constantly curling his moustaches, pomading himself to excess, and sniggering significantly; but one must suppose that the vagrant gypsy blood in Masha's veins had more to do with it. However that may have been, one fine summer evening Masha tied up a few odds and ends in a small bundle, and walked ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... stage of its existence when it is for all practical purposes an individual. The theory of the 'artistic' school is that the ballads and folk-songs are the productions of skalds, minstrels, bards, troubadours, or other vagrant professional singers and reciters of various periods; it is allowed, however, that, being subject entirely to oral transmission, these ballads and songs ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... let briefly into his history by Frank Bracebridge. He was an old bachelor of a small independent income, which by careful management was sufficient for all his wants. He revolved through the family system like a vagrant comet in its orbit; sometimes visiting one branch, and sometimes another quite remote; as is often the case with gentlemen of extensive connections and small fortunes in England. He had a chirping, buoyant disposition, ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... side. It is for those who would assert the theory to bring forward positive proof of it. There is, however, one point in Mr. Darwin's view of domesticated animals which tells against his theory. The cat remains unchanged, because from its vagrant habits man has no control over its pairing [Footnote: Darwin's "Animals and Plants," vol. ii. p. 236.]. Now considering the variety of conditions under which cats exist, here is surely a great opening for natural selection. But it ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... visibly, on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight elision of the aspirate observed ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... profession was a discipline, beginning in a formal initiation, manifested in an association, and exercised in privation and pain. They were from the nature of the case proselytizing societies, for they were rising into power; nor were they local, but vagrant, restless, intrusive, and encroaching. Their pretensions to supernatural knowledge brought them into easy connection with magic and astrology, which are as attractive to the wealthy and luxurious as the more vulgar superstitions ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... flashed the gleam of some rich stained glass, spots of color that were repeated, with quite a different lustre, in the dappled haunches of rows of sturdy Percherons munching their meal in the adjacent stalls. Add to such an ensemble a vagrant multitude of rose, honeysuckle, clematis, and wistaria vines, all blooming in full rivalry of perfume and color; insert in some of the corners and beneath some of the older casements archaic bits of sculpture—strange barbaric features with beards of Assyrian correctness and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... waged between vagrant bands of the whites and the Indians, with the outrages perpetrated on either side, created great exasperation. In the year 1784 there were many indications that the Indians were again about to combine in an attack upon the settlements. These ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... found it a brief resting-place on their way to heaven. Passing it many times, I never observed that anybody glanced at this shadowy and ominous trap-door, save myself. It is well that America exists, if it were only that her vagrant children may be impressed and affected by the historical monuments of England in a degree of which the native inhabitants are evidently incapable. These matters are too familiar, too real, and too hopelessly built in amongst ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of clothes in vagrant wards and hospitals for infectious diseases, on the contrary, a continued heat is necessary, and in this case the accumulation of reserve heat, which takes place slowly in a jacketed oven, becomes of value, as the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... and turned into a noisy, restless playground the single narrow, irregular street. Then it suddenly became a mad commixture of Babel and hell. At this hour nothing living moved within range of the watcher's vision except a vagrant dog; the heat haze hung along the near-by slopes, while a little spiral of dust rose lazily from the deserted road. But Hampton had no eyes for this dreary prospect; with contracted brows he was viewing again that which he had confidently believed to ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... my work from day to day, In field or forest, at the desk or loom, In roaring market-place or tranquil room; Let me but find it in my heart to say, When vagrant wishes beckon me astray, "This is my work; my blessing, not my doom; "Of all who live, I am the one by whom "This work can best be done in the ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... organized a round-up of dangerous persons but what Magdalena was found among them,—a timorous rat whose name the papers mentioned like that of a terrible criminal. He was always included in the trail of vagrant suspects who, without being charged with any specific crime, were sent from province to province by the authorities, in the hope that they would die of hunger along the roads, and thus he had covered the whole peninsula on foot, from Cadiz to Santander, from Valencia to La Coruna. With what ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... marching from the Marienthurn to the Frauenthor, gave her vagrant thoughts a new turn. The city guard was soon followed by a troop of horse, which probably belonged ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the Jewish religion continued to enjoy protection and privileges, but Christianity was either persecuted or tolerated, as it happened; so that, even under emperors who abhorred severity and bloodshed, the faithful were at the mercy of the first vagrant who chanced to accuse them ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... a certificate, as is practised at present in the wool-combing trade; nor should any person hire a servant without a certificate or other proper security. A servant without a certificate should be deemed a vagrant; and a master or mistress ought to assign very good reasons indeed when they object against giving a servant ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... whether it be by novel, poem, sermon, or article, has done more, far more, to leaven humanity. I long to open people's eyes to that; I learnt it late myself. Before God, if I can I will make this boy enlightened, should I live to do it; or at least not at the mercy of every vagrant prophet and bawler ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... condemnation he remained reckless as the wind—unrepenting as the flint—venomous as the blind worm. With that deep and horrible cunning which is so often united to unprincipled ignorance, he had almost involved in his fate another vagrant with whom he had chanced to consort, and to whom he had disposed of some of the blood-bought spoils. The circumstantial evidence was so involved and interwoven, that the jury, after long and obvious hesitation as to the latter, found both guilty; and the terrible sentence of death, ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... a trade to live by. Further than this, and with these exceptions, the description of freedom which exists in the wanderer terrified the law. A tramp was a possible public enemy. That modern thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant, was alone understood. A suspicious appearance, that indescribable something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient reason that society should take a man by the collar. "Where do you live? How do you get your living?" And ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the readings of a literary vagrant. One book led to another, one study to another. The first was published with trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our generation ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... songs came back to greet Our ears, from other worlds of long ago, The worlds that we of earth may seldom know— And to those songs we timed our vagrant feet. ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... the far-distant open country where it had been breathing all night the quivering pines, and brown swamps, and the white and gray checkered fields that would soon be upturned by the plowshares—a vagrant wind wandered ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... facing him with that clear, disarming gaze that she knew how to achieve so perfectly. He felt a great yearning overwhelm him ... a desire to meet her halfway ... a vagrant ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... had been carved, then seated himself on the outer rim without thought of the thousand-foot sheer drop beneath his dangling legs. With a glass he was sweeping the foreground where the scattered lights of the camp were like vagrant reflections of the stars thrown back to them from the dead ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... be, some choice books, as a resource against a rainy day, he goes to some wild spot—the wilder the better—where he roves at will from point to point of interest and beauty, and spends his time in reading, sketching, and—alas, for human imperfection!—shooting. These vagrant habits first brought him into the neighborhood of Donaldson Manor, and he had for two successive summers hunted with the Colonel and sketched with the young ladies, when he was invited to join their Christmas party in 18—. Here I was ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... that bad men were out, and took the opportunity of his absence from home to plunder his stables. We were told an anecdote concerning Simon the Cyrenian, which is not bad. A man was taken up in one of the villages as a vagrant, and desired by the justice to give an account of himself—to explain why he was always wandering about, and had no employment. The man, with the greatest indignation, replied, "No employment! I am substitute Cyrenian at Coyohuacan in the Holy Week!" That is ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... inquire how many of its phenomena are common to all classes, to all degrees of wealth and poverty, to every grade of education and ignorance. Here, for example, is her Majesty Queen Victoria in her palace, this present blessed night, and here is Winking Charley, a sturdy vagrant, in one of her Majesty's jails. Her Majesty has fallen, many thousands of times, from that same Tower, which I claim a right to tumble off now and then. So has Winking Charley. Her Majesty in her sleep has opened or prorogued Parliament, or has held a Drawing Room, attired in some very scanty ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... flames, ascend the sky, My better and more Christian progeny! Unstain'd, untouch'd, and yet in maiden sheets, While all your smutty sisters walk the streets. Ye shall not beg, like gratis-given Bland, Sent with a pass and vagrant through the land; Nor sail with Ward, to Ape-and-monkey climes, Where vile Mundungus trucks for viler rhymes. Not sulphur-tipt, emblaze an ale-house fire! Not wrap up oranges, to pelt your sire! O! pass more innocent, in infant state, To ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian with equal fluency, was celebrated for his attachment to the fine arts, and wrote much and with great elegance. Such had been Philibert of Savoy, the pauper nephew of the powerful Emperor, the adventurous and vagrant cousin of the lofty Philip, a prince without a people, a duke without a dukedom; with no hope but in warfare, with no revenue but rapine; the image, in person, of a bold and manly soldier, small, but graceful and athletic, martial in bearing, "wearing his sword under his arm like a corporal," because ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Living, I seem'd his dearest, tenderest care, But now forgot, I wander in the air. Let my pale corse the rites of burial know, And give me entrance in the realms below: Till then the spirit finds no resting-place, But here and there the unbodied spectres chase The vagrant dead around the dark abode, Forbid to cross the irremeable flood. Now give thy hand; for to the farther shore When once we pass, the soul returns no more: When once the last funereal flames ascend, No more shall meet Achilles and his friend; No more our thoughts ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... light waggon, with two hardy Canadian horses, to the dwelling of his former master, to claim his daughter's hand; though, be it remembered, he had never held any communication with her since he parted from her in rags two years before. At first they did not recognise the vagrant, ragged Scotch labourer, in the well-dressed driver and possessor of the "knowing-looking" equipage. His altered circumstances removed all difficulty on the father's part—the maiden had been constant—and soon afterwards they were married. ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... less than 12 is allowed to work more than 66 hours in any one week. An able-bodied parent who does not work when he has the opportunity, unless "idle under strike orders, or lock-outs,'' and who hires out his minor children, is declared a vagrant and may be fined $500 and imprisoned or sentenced to hard labour for not more than ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... try to put an end to these tracasseries. She was mighty glorious about her sortie upon Lambton, whom she dislikes, but she is vexed at the hornets' nest she has brought round her head. All this comes of talking. The wisest man mentioned in history was the vagrant in the Tuileries Gardens some years ago, who walked about with a gag on, and when taken up by the police and questioned why he went about in that guise, he said he was imprudent, and that he might not say anything to get himself into jeopardy he had adopted this precaution. I wonder what ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... when it ended; it was all over in an instant. The two who had escaped injury leaped back aboard the Drab. Those who needed assistance were helped back. The Drab drifted away, her vagrant course unheeded at first, for it looked as though all aboard had taken part in that ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... "Thank God! the MS. of the chapter wasn't in it. Whenever I travel, and have anything of that valuable article, I always carry it in my pocket."[145] He had begun at this time to find difficulties in writing at Broadstairs, of which he told me on his return. "Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write half-an-hour ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... "The fact is, sir," he said, "I've come to ask you about something. But am I disturbing you? If so, I'll go and 'pursue vagrant pieces of leather again,' as Mr Stokes says when he wants to dismiss us ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... at full length upon his back, his arms above his head, he stared steadily up into the darkness until his brain, freed of all lesser problems, all vagrant thoughts, was concentrated upon the great ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... argentine shadowed with deepest violet. There was never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations, sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour of distant motor-cars. A night of potent witchery, a woman ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Six Articles. A curious attempt was made to deal with the problem of vagrancy, the outcome of prevalent economic conditions, which the penalties of flogging and hanging had failed to repress. The vagrant was to be brought before the magistrates, branded, and handed over to some honest person as a "slave" for two years. If he attempted to escape from servitude, he was to be branded again and made a slave for life; if still refractory he could be sentenced ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... take the first comer at random; finally, there was an utter lack of candidates. Life on a tower is uncommonly difficult, and by no means enticing to people of the South, who love idleness and the freedom of a vagrant life. That light-house keeper is almost a prisoner. He cannot leave his rocky island except on Sundays. A boat from Aspinwall brings him provisions and water once a day, and returns immediately; on the whole island, one acre in area, there is no inhabitant. The keeper lives in the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... light. With its help they explored the tiny cellar and the upper floor. There was no sign of a recent occupancy. Everything was as Bobby had found it on awakening. A vagrant wind sighed about the place. They looked at each other with startled eyes. They filed out with an ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... they are estopped by the very words of the statute just quoted, from denying that they are "persons." Now, by the Constitution every person, black as well as white, is to have justice administered to him without denial or delay. But by the law, while any unknown white vagrant may be a witness in any case whatever, no black suitor is permitted to offer a witness of his own color, however well established may be his character for intelligence and veracity, to prove his rights or his wrongs; and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... had hitherto shown me its rough side, was not such a bad place after all. I began seriously to regard the universe from the standpoint of a professional tramp to realize that there is something to be said for the philosophy of the unmitigated vagrant. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... allowed the interjection to pass, regarding it as simply a vagrant action of the engine of speech; while Mrs. Sumfit, with an interjector's consciousness of prodigious things implied which were not in any degree comprehended, left his presence in kindness, and with a shade less of the sense that he was a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she not seen me pilloried as a shameful vagrant? Had she not seen me persecuted, tormented—the byeword, the laughing-stock for the offals of Falmouth town? Had I not been pelted by refuse? Was I not made hideous by disfigurement? How could I win her love? ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... be kind," said the man, "I think it would be easier. You ought to give me up, you know, and let me go to jail. I'm no good. I'm a vagrant and a drunkard, and worse. But you won't, I know that; so now let me go. I'm not fit to stay in Arthur's room or lie on his bed. Give me a little money, my dear old friend—yes, the parrot knew ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... I seek, protecting Power," was the first hymn on this particular Sunday morning, and it usually held Patty's rather vagrant attention to the end, though it failed to do so to-day. The Baxters occupied one of the wing pews, a position always to be envied, as one could see the singers without turning around, and also observe everybody in the congregation,—their entrance, garments, behavior, and especially ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... man-devouring Abyssinian, remained deep in thought and seeking a safe place took counsel one with other to kill him. Quoth the foremost of them, "O my brethren, our father showed him the liveliest affection when he was to us naught save a vagrant and unknown, and indeed made him our ruler and our governor; and now, hearing of his victory won from the ogre and learning that the stranger is his son, will not our sire forthwith appoint this bastard his only heir and give him dominion ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... The idiot! Will you heed him? I believe he's more likely to become a vagrant and have to beg his bread, than to become a burgomaster. Dear Antonius! you mustn't pay attention to him, and you mustn't lose the affection you have for ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... the story of the baby-farmer and he listened kindly, and she thought the necessary miracle was about to happen. But he only complimented her on her pluck and got up to go. Then she understood that he did not care to listen to sad stories, and a vagrant came and ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... little sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate had been locked ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... measure, of the instincts of those creatures of the night—a people whose deeds were of darkness, and whose eyes shunned the light. Here the gipsies had pitched their tent; and though the place was often, in part, deserted by the vagrant horde, yet certain of the tribe, who had grown into years—over whom Barbara Lovel held queenly sway—made it their haunt, and were suffered by the authorities of the neighborhood to remain unmolested—a ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... power, has at last degenerated or grown up to (as you please) a trade. There are men who habitually set aside a portion of money which they are annually to apply to what are called "charitable purposes"—that is to say, so far as I understand it, to support some vagrant lecturer, whose purpose is agitation and mischief wherever he goes. This constitutes, therefore, a trade; a class of people are thus employed—employed for mischief, for incendiary purposes, perhaps not always understood ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... but we think that a late spawning, having the advantage of a higher temperature as the result of a more genial season, will be followed by a more rapid development, and so the difference will not be so great, nor expanded over so many months, as that gentlemen supposes. Finally, the vagrant summer smolts, to which we have before alluded, may consist of that small number of anomalous fry, which we know to assume the migratory dress and instinct soon after the completion of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... overcame the shyness of the fisher lads, and brought clear to the front the sweet tenors of the schoolboys, on whom, he said, all his hopes depended. And how his own rich baritone ascended strongly and softly over all, blending into perfect harmony all discordance, and gently smothering the vagrant and rebellious tones that would sometimes break ambitiously through discipline, and try to assert their own individuality. He sang an Offertory solo, accompanying himself on the harmonium. Who will say it was not sweet? Who will say it ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... ambition, and pleasure, and to turn it to the contemplation of spiritual things. Yet on the first attack of a depressing illness I cease to be a gentleman, I am rude to ladies who do their best and kindest to serve me, and I talk to the friend who comes to cheer and comfort me as if he were an idle vagrant who wanted to sell me a worthless book with the recommendation of the pretence that he wrote it himself. Now that I am in my right mind, I am ashamed of myself, ashamed that it should be possible for me to behave so, and humiliated yet besides that ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... flesh through too much stress and strain, {10} Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip Back and rejoin its source before the term,— And aptest in contrivance (under God) To baffle it by deftly stopping such:— The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) Three samples of true snake-stone—rarer still, One of the other sort, the melon-shaped (But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs), And writeth ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... there had battle given, And left their ruin written on the scene! Yet o'er these ghastly shapes, soft lichens wind, And timid daisies droop, and tranquil flowers A robe of many-colored beauty, bind, As if some vagrant fairy claimed ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... Cheyenne, the cruel Kiowa, the blood-thirsty Arapahoe, with bands of Dog Indians and outlaws from every tribe, contested, foot by foot, for supremacy against the out-reaching civilization of the dominant Anglo-American. The lonely trails were measured off by white men's graves. The vagrant winds that bear the odor of alfalfa, and of orchard bloom to-day, were laden often with the smoke of burning homes, and often, too, they bore that sickening smell of human flesh, once caught, never to be forgotten. The story of that struggle for supremacy is a tragic drama of heroism ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... Joel Ham, B.A., and consider what was best to be done under the circumstances. The men of the township recognised that it was their bounden duty to support the master in an affair of this kind. When occasion arose they assisted in the capture of vagrant youths, and when Joel imagined a display of force advisable they attended at the punishment and rendered such assistance as was needful in the due enforcement of discipline. It was understood by all that the school would lose prestige and efficiency ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... It took nearly a week's time and caused the birds a great waste of labor to find this out. The coarse material they brought for the foundation would not bed well upon the rounded surface of the timber, and every vagrant breeze that came along swept it off. My porch was kept littered with twigs and weed-stalks for days, till finally the birds abandoned the undertaking. The next season a wiser or more experienced pair made the attempt again, and succeeded. ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... distressful experiment with a band of wandering Algonquins had convinced the Jesuits that their schemes of mission-conquest could not bear much fruit if they were confined to the vagrant tribes of the north. Farther west in the peninsula of the great lakes lived Indians of fixed habits and domicile, and otherwise further advanced towards civilisation than the improvident hunting tribes round about Quebec. Of ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... over with," he urged his executioners, "this 'ere's damned tiresome business for a gentleman." He begged a "quid o' terbacker" from one of the guards and chewed upon it stolidly until the noose tightened about his neck. He did not struggle much. A vagrant wind blew off his hat and gently stirred his long ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... cargo as already detailed, we had sundry items of live freight in the shape of some pigs, which were stowed in the long- boat on top of the deck-house; three cats, two belonging to the Portuguese steward and messing in the cuddy, while the third was a vagrant Tom that had strayed on board in the docks, and making friends with the carpenter Gregory, or "old chips" as he was generally called, was allowed to take up his quarters in the forepeak, migrating to the cook's cabin at meal-times with unwavering sagacity; ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... pasture-ground to a herd of many animals of minute size, he hinted his fears to the old man that he might leave some of his small body-guard, behind him. "No fear, sir; no fear," replied this deaf and venerable vagrant, contemplating the artist with serious serenity; "I don't think they are any of them likely to leave ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... high-bowed "mountain saddle," I could scarcely keep my seat on horseback. Before we left the fort we hired another man, a long-haired Canadian, with a face like an owl's, contrasting oddly enough with Delorier's mercurial countenance. This was not the only re-enforcement to our party. A vagrant Indian trader, named Reynal, joined us, together with his squaw Margot, and her two nephews, our dandy friend, The Horse, and his younger brother, The Hail Storm. Thus accompanied, we betook ourselves to the prairie, leaving ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... ferry analysis of this problem that I have overheard seems to believe that this army created its own degraded self, that a vagrant is a vagrant from personal desire and perversion. This analysis is as shallow as it is untrue. If unemployment and vagrancy are the product of our careless, indifferent society over the half-century, then its cure will come only by a ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... in Hastings's Theater, was not less than shocking. It had seemed so to the principal, but he knew Phil; and knowing Phil he laughed when the English teacher protested that it would compromise her professional dignity to allow a student to discuss the vagrant canines of Main Street in a commencement essay. She had expected Phil to prepare a thesis on "What the Poets Have Meant to Me," and for this "The Dogs of Main Street" was no proper substitute. The superintendent ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... stretched on a bed of straw, and her new-born child, hastily wrapped in some part of her dress, finds a cradle in the manger. A pitiful sight!—such a fortune as occasionally befalls the Arabs of society—such an incident as may occur in the history of one of those vagrant, vagabond, outcast families who, their country's shame, tent in woods and sleep under hedges, when no barn or stable offers a covering to their houseless heads. Yet princes on their way to the crown, brides on their way ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... seemed to seize Pauline. She crossed the floor towards me, and I made room for her at the piano. With a master hand she played brilliantly the prelude of the song of which I had struck a few vagrant notes. I waited breathlessly, expecting her to sing. Suddenly she started wildly to her feet and, uttering a wild cry of horror, sank into my arms. I laid her on a sofa close by. As I held her there, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... say what they please in their reports to their societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... unparalleled form and dimensions, was disposed upon his head, hiding the upper part of his face, and almost covering a pair of bushy grey eyebrows, that, in their turn, crouched over a quick and vagrant eye, little the worse for the wear of probably some sixty years. A grizzled reddish beard hung upon his breast; and his aspect altogether was forbidding, almost ferocious. A well-plenished satchel was on his shoulder; and he walked slowly and erect, as though little disposed to make way for his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... myself upon the world. That expression may seem too strong as applied to one who had already been for many months a houseless wanderer in Wales, and a solitary roamer in the streets of London. But in those situations, it must be remembered, I was an unknown, unacknowledged vagrant; and without money I could hardly run much risk, except of breaking my neck. The perils, the pains, the pleasures, or the obligations, of the world, scarcely exist in a proper sense for him who has no funds. Perfect weakness is often secure; it is by imperfect power, turned against its master, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... while Tess was doing the simple chores around the shack, she had the door open to admit the vagrant breezes of the summer day. Andy, as his custom was on such occasions, lay quietly upon the attic floor, secure from the observation of any chance passer-by. Stepping to the door to shake her dust rag, Tess saw Jake Brewer coming up ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... spring cleared the snow away, made the bare patches of earth quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks overhead—vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about the fire—there was no sorrow in the break-up of the family, but only a universal joy in starting off ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... so pleased at finding you as you are, my boy," Captain Bayley said, "for I had feared that if you were alive it must be as a vagrant, or perhaps even a criminal, that your bodily misfortune is as nothing in my eyes. This is my ward, Miss Hardy; she is something like a granddaughter to me, and is prepared to be a ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... green loops or bends on the banks of Corriewater, mouldered walls, and a few stunted wild plum-trees and vagrant roses, still point out the site of a cottage and garden. A well of pure spring- water leaps out from an old tree-root before the door; and here the shepherds, shading themselves in summer from the influence of the sun, tell to their children the wild tale of Elphin Irving and his ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... branch for his final jump—a bit of pure bravado because he felt nervous inside—discovered, with mingled terror and joy, that his vagrant foot had narrowly shaved Aunt Jane's neat hard summer hat: Aunt Jane—of all people—at such a moment, when you couldn't properly explain. He half wished he had kicked the fierce little ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... as the sun sank below the blue-black horizon, exhausted, red-eyed, gasping men struggled up from the drenched, smothering interior of the ship, and hurled themselves, not into the sea, but prone upon the decks! They had conquered! The scattered, vagrant fires, attacked in their infancy, while still in the creeping stage, had ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Him when we not only say 'Lord! Lord!' but when we do the things that He says. We feed on Christ, when we let His great, sacred, all-wise, all-giving, all satisfying love flow into our restless hearts and make them still, enter into our vagrant affections and fix them on Himself. Thus when mind and conscience and will and heart all turn to Jesus, and in Him find their sustenance, we shall be filled with the feast of fat things which He has prepared ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... live in, and a decent table for her to sit at. And he's always been brought up decent, having been a regular 'prentice to his uncle, and all that sort of thing. He's never been wandering about like a vagrant, getting his money nobody knows how. William Brisket's as well known in Aldersgate Street as the Post Office. And moreover," she added, after a pause, speaking these last words in a somewhat milder breath—"And moreover, it was my ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... people of Ireland: "We know that you are not without your grievances; we sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you. In the rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong to labor for ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... been speaking of my friend, the Tramp. "There is but one way of treating that class of impostors; it is simply to recognize the fact that the law calls him a 'vagrant,' and makes his trade a misdemeanor. Any sentiment on the other side renders you particeps criminis. I don't know but an action would lie against you for encouraging tramps. Now, I have an efficacious way of dealing ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... without a passport, without papers, without money. M. Baze, indignant, was obliged to have recourse to threats to induce them to take him and identify him before a magistrate. It was, perhaps, part of the petty joys of Bonaparte to cause a Questor of the Assembly to be treated as a vagrant. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Frontenac, His great heart torn with pride and pain, His clear eye dimming as it swept The land he might not see again, This infant world, this strange New France Dropped down as by some vagrant wind Upon the New World's vast expanse, Threatened yet safe! Through storm and stress Time's ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Court of Burgesses for the City and Liberty of Westminster, who alone considers himself entitled, by his appointment, to apply for Christmas boxes. He also urged that the prisoners, acting as Minstrels, came under the meaning of the Vagrant Act, alluded to in the 17th Geo. II.; however, on reference to the last Vagrant Act of the present king, the word 'minstrels' is omitted; consequently, they are no longer cognizable under that Act of Parliament; and, in addition ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... anywhere, is an unfeeling wretch, who, if he met the great god Cupid on the street, would promptly arrest that light of the world for indecent exposure and perhaps carry him to the nearest station by the tips of his golden wings as if he were but a vagrant chicken ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... legislatures, have unequivocally declared its object, to wit, the extermination of the free people of color from the Union; and to effect this they have not failed to slander our character, by representing us as a vagrant race; and we do therefore disclaim all union with the said Society, and, once for all, declare that we never will remove under their patronage; neither do we consider it expedient to emigrate any where, but to remain ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... petition; so I was soon lying in the coveted shadow. I went to work very severely; but the next moment found my eyes wandering; and heart, feeling, and fancy were going up and down the earth in the most vagrant fashion. It was hopeless dissipation to sit under the tree; and discovering a huge rock on the hillside, I made my way to that, to try what virtue there might be in a shadow not produced by foliage. Seated under the brow of the boulder, I again applied myself ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... consulate in the United States, sine cura, would be considered by him as a fair discharge of the obligation of the Government to him for his services. Lord Liverpool was not disposed to prostitute such favours upon a mercenary and intriguing vagrant, and referred him to the Government of Lower Canada, then in charge of Sir George Prevost, who had succeeded Sir James Craig. Henry knew the little estimate that was placed upon his services in Canada; he therefore betook himself back to the United States, and offered his traitorous ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... Glossin began to count up the chances in his favour. Meg Merrilies was dead. Gabriel Faa, besides being a gipsy, was a vagrant and a deserter. The other witnesses—he did not greatly fear them! If only Dirk Hatteraick could be induced to be steady, and to put another meaning upon the sums of money which had been paid to him on the day ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... what our Master teaches us to say: 'Our Father which art in heaven.' Think you it concerns you little to know where and what that heaven is, and where your Heavenly Father is to be sought and found? I tell you that for vagrant minds it matters much not only to believe aright about heaven, but to procure to understand this matter by experience. It is one of those things that strongly bind the understanding and recollect the soul. You already know that God is in all places: in fine, ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... of true love. And so, like Petrarch, whom his taste and fancy worshipped, and many another votary of the gentil Dieu, while his imagination devoted itself to the chaste and distant ideal—the spiritual Laura—his senses, ever vagrant and disengaged, settled without scruple upon the thousand Cynthias of the minute. But then those Cynthias were, for the most part, and especially of late years, easy and light-won nymphs; their coyest were of another clay from the tender but lofty Sibyll. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... quick notes of the song suited the sunshiny weather, the sheen of the river, the azure skies. A light wind brought from the orchard a vagrant troop of pink and white petals to camp upon the silken sleeve of Mistress Evelyn Byrd. The gentleman sitting beside her gathered them up and gave them again to ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... to one thou wert A Jew's possession, got in honest barter; Next, John the ostler's; last of all, past doubt A vagrant's hat; the equitable purchase Of an ill-sung song. Till quite worn out With rain, and wind, and sleet, and other 'ills Thy race is heir to,' the beggar cast thee From his plebeian pate—and here ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... exercise and were enervated in the ease so propitious to vices. At last the eldest of those who shared the name of Grep, wishing to regulate and steady his promiscuous wantonness, ventured to seek a haven for his vagrant amours in the love of the king's sister. Yet he did amiss. For though it was right that his vagabond and straying delights should be bridled by modesty, yet it was audacious for a man of the people to covet the child of a king. She, much fearing the impudence of her ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... cross the Tuileries Garden I run my eyes over the groups scattered among the chestnut-trees. I see children playing and falling about; nursemaids who leave them crying; mothers who pick them up again; a vagrant guardsman. No Jeanne. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Coton Manor would have been trying to anyone; to Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... short of breath, from her haste, she ran it down at last, and came upon it—a series of small waterfalls down which a small stream tumbled recklessly along a vagrant watercourse, seeming to care little when it reached its destination, so that it contrived to have plenty of fun and exercise by the way. And on the bank, stretched recumbent, hands clasped under head, ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... were happy, peaceful days for California. The vagrant keels of prying Commerce had not as yet ruffled the lordly gravity of her bays. No torn and ragged gulch betrayed the suspicion of golden treasure. The wild oats drooped idly in the morning heat, or wrestled with the afternoon breezes. ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... I thought of it, I suddenly remembered my dream of being similarly smothered in the Gnomons by slowly inpouring grain. A superstitious mind would have feared that dream foretold my fate, but I was rational enough to perceive that it must have been suggested to me by a vagrant memory of the ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... Delia, on thy balmy lips Let me, no vagrant insect, rove; O let me steal one liquid kiss, For Oh! my soul is ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... time there was a little hunchback girl in the court, upon whom the duke fixed his vagrant desires, and she became his unconcealed favorite. The duke was ever in the habit of talking freely with Catharine about his paramours and praising ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... 'Tis not the thing t' accept the terms, But dread th' event—the tale affirms. A Stag approach'd the Sheep, to treat For one good bushel of her wheat. "The honest Wolf will give his bond." At which, beginning to despond, "The Wolf (cries she) 's a vagrant bite. And you are quickly out of sight; Where shall I find or him or you Upon the day ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... a ballet-dancer with opera-glasses; we pick his rays to pieces with prisms as if they were so many skeins of colored yarn; we tell him we do not want his company and shut him out like a troublesome vagrant. The gods of the old heathen are the servants of to-day. Neptune, Vulcan, Aolus, and the bearer of the thunderbolt himself have stepped down from their pedestals and put on our livery. We cannot always master them, neither can we always master our servant, the horse, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that may be, I have thought it well to acquaint you with my way of thinking; and I venture to think—I venture to hope Mr. Kurnatovsky will be received a bras ouverts. He is no Montenegrin vagrant.' ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... told by the two witnesses was calculated to make. But, on hearing the cross-examination of those witnesses, and seeing no evidence against the defendant but from sources so impure and corrupt—recollecting the severe penalties of the Vagrant Acts, and sitting there not merely as a judge, but also exercising the functions of a jury, he could not bring himself to convict on such evidence. The witnesses, impure as they were, were NOT SUPPORTED BY MR MACKENZIE ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... donum; Poverty thy summum bonum; Thy frigid couch a sandstone stratum; A colder grave thy ultimatum; Circumventing, circumvented; In short, excessively tormented, Everything combines to scare Charity's dear pensioner! —Say, vagrant, can'st thou grant to me A slice of thy philosophy? Haply, in thy many trudgings, Having found unchallenged lodgings, Thy thoughts, unused to saddle-crupper, Ambling no farther than thy supper— Thou, by the light of heaven-lit taper, Mendest thy prospective paper! Then, jolly pauper, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... have a story yourself," said the dusty vagrant—impudently, it seemed to me. "Suppose you take your dime back and spin your yarn for me. I'm interested myself in the ups and downs of unfortunate ones who spend their ...
— Options • O. Henry
... sessions for the county of Northumberland, the chief constable was questioned by the magistrates about the strange state of affairs in the district, and reported that the encampment was a little way from the highway, and that, therefore, the lady could not be apprehended under the Vagrant Act! A summons, however, had been taken out by the local surveyor, and would be followed by a warrant. On that summons the so-called countess was convicted; but appealed to the Court of ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... It's twenty mile away; and coming back I begs a trifle on the road. To jail with him! At last, the constable, the keeper—anybody—finds me anywhere, a-doing anything. To jail with him, for he's a vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and jail's the only home ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... the philosophic sense of "accident") a cause of pleasure, pain, or desire seems to explain the essence of all the particular variations of the psychological phenomena known now by all who have been aroused to the significance of their vagrant cryptic slumbers, as the phenomena of symbolism, sublimation, and fetich worship. Spinoza's proposition explains all the phenomena adequately because among the fundamental human emotions, Spinoza like Freud—if ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... ideas. All those vagabond, roving propensities will cease. They are the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix the feelings. You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts about at the mercy of every vagrant breeze or trifling eddy. Get a wife, and she'll anchor you. But don't marry a fool because she has a pretty face, and don't seek after a great belle. Get such a girl as Mary ——, or get her if you ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant, is very characteristic of East Side tenements. She paid $36 a year for lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any definite space at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply the chance of getting such ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... sleep. Turning at full length upon his back, his arms above his head, he stared steadily up into the darkness until his brain, freed of all lesser problems, all vagrant thoughts, was concentrated upon the great problem ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... valley was a tapestry, where, from earliest Spring until the grapes were gathered colour and light were caught and imprisoned within the web. At the bend in the river, where the rushes grew thickly, the river-god kept his harp, which answered with shy, musical murmurings to every vagrant wind. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... disappeared; so did the old Acts against the Lollards; so did the Act of the Six Articles. A curious attempt was made to deal with the problem of vagrancy, the outcome of prevalent economic conditions, which the penalties of flogging and hanging had failed to repress. The vagrant was to be brought before the magistrates, branded, and handed over to some honest person as a "slave" for two years. If he attempted to escape from servitude, he was to be branded again and made a slave for life; if still ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... as she watched her down the street, With brow grown bright with sunny thought, And heart o'erfilled with something sweet, She knew the vagrant child had brought The blessing of ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... the marauders, determined Mothibi and his people to leave their present place of settlement and remove to the eastward. For a considerable time, however, they remained in an unsettled state, suffering from attacks, and leading a vagrant life. ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... went to the central police station Wednesday night and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy. He said he had been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that he was sure he must be a vagrant. In any event, he was so hungry he must be fed. Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety days' imprisonment."—San ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... because of its dimensions which were just about that square. It was a little improvement, though nothing to brag of. What fitful zephyrs there might be, caused no doubt by the rapid passage to and fro on the roof above and fence-tops below of vagrant felines on Cupid's contentious battles bent, to the disturbance of the still air, soughed softly through the meshes of my hammock and gave some measure of relief, grateful enough for which I ceased the perfervid language I had been using practically since ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... day at Palmerston, and there was an unusual amount of business that morning. A constable brought in a prisoner, and charged him with being a vagrant—having no lawful visible means of support. I entered the charge in the cause list, "Police v. John Smithers, vagrancy," and then looked at the vagrant. He was growing aged, was dressed in old clothes, faded, dirty, and ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... a dandelion. That most home-like and steadfast flower blooms in early springtime and later in the season, with no regard to the chronology of the year. It was one of the vagrant late gladdeners of the earth that his ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... It is the vagrant straw that shows the wind's direction, and since the attempt to bushwhack him Racey was not overlooking any straws. The door had been ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... gives directions to "Steal a piece of beef from a butcher's shop, and rub your wart with it, then throw it down the necessary house, or bury it, and as the beef rots, your warts will decay."[161] Some have great faith in having a vagrant count them, mark the number on the inside of his hat, and then when he leaves the neighborhood he takes the warts with him. Coffin water was also considered good ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... seemed to be Excelsior; and the lawful occupant of the clothes lay back against the cushions and endeavoured rapidly to evolve some means for putting an end to the dual ownership. It was unthinkable that he should continue for the space of a whole hour in the horrible position of a Rowton House for vagrant mice (already his imagination had at least doubled the numbers of the alien invasion). On the other hand, nothing less drastic than partial disrobing would ease him of his tormentor, and to undress in the presence of a lady, even for so ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... still hovered about Saltash's face; a smile in which cynicism and some vagrant, half-stifled ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... be content with such slender encouragement as I receive. In vain do I purchase choice brands of cigars and cigarettes, and load my side-table with the best Scotch whisky. Not eyen with that solace will the vagrant undergraduate consent to be douched under the stream of my ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of youth and joy she discerned upon his features even in the filtered moonlight, touched her again as with the spell of those shining, mild green presences. It sank down into her. She felt sleep grope for her. On the threshold of slumber one of those strange vagrant voices that loss of consciousness lets loose cried faintly ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... specific analysis of each social situation. The one consideration to be urged at this point is that the concept "social forces" has a real content. It represents reality. There are social forces. They are the desires of persons. They range in energy from the vagrant whim that makes the individual a temporary discomfort to his group, to the inbred feelings that whole races share. It is with these subtle forces that social arrangements and the theories of social arrangements have ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... desolate dwelling comes the vagrant spring breeze. It brings the tidings of flowers—the flowers that for your worship are ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... all time and all existence.' Nothing is contemptible in their eyes, for all things have a meaning, and they both walk in august reasonableness before all men, conscious of the workings of God yet free from all terror of mendicant priest or vagrant miracle-worker. But the parallel ends here. For the one stands aloof from the world-storm of sleet and hail, his eyes fixed on distant and sunlit heights, loving knowledge for the sake of knowledge and wisdom for the joy of wisdom, while the other is an eager ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... woman freedom. He would devote himself to restoring her to the air and sunshine. What nobler ambition! He was an idler, he had never done anything for anybody. He was only a killer of time, a vagrant, but now was his opportunity—he would do for this beautiful soul what no one else on earth could do. She was slipping away as it was—the world would soon lose her. Was there ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... unpleasant reflections, Glossin began to count up the chances in his favour. Meg Merrilies was dead. Gabriel Faa, besides being a gipsy, was a vagrant and a deserter. The other witnesses—he did not greatly fear them! If only Dirk Hatteraick could be induced to be steady, and to put another meaning upon the sums of money which had been paid to him on ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... question of "What is to be done with our vagrant children?" is occupying the attention of all men of philanthropic minds, it may be worth while to give place in your pages to the following order addressed by the Lord Mayor of London to his aldermen in 1650-51, which applies, amongst other things, to that very subject. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... no Idler who hath no particular calling, or vagrant Person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in Families, to or for the same: Seeing persons tainted with errours or aiming at division, may be ready (after that manner) to creep into houses and lead captive ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... sort of King one loves to imagine, not concerned in such petty matters as wars and parliaments and taxes, but a mellow and moderate despot who is a true patron of genius—a mild old chap who has in his court the greatest men and women in the world—and all of them vying to please the most vagrant of his moods! Invite any one of them to talk, and if your highness is not pleased with him you have only to put him back in his corner—and bring some jester to sharpen the laughter of your highness, or some poet to set your faintest emotion ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... find him after a long search, sitting fearlessly in some leafy glade. His dislike for the customary indoor studies became so marked that at last he was set down as stupid, and allowed to follow his own vagrant courses. No one understood that the spirits of Heaven were ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the cant phase, it was "the London season." And happy, take it altogether, happy above the rest of the year, even for the hapless, is that period of ferment and fever. It is not the season for duns, and the debtor glides about with a less anxious eye; and the weather is warm, and the vagrant sleeps, unfrozen, under the starlit portico; and the beggar thrives, and the thief rejoices—for the rankness of the civilisation has superfluities clutched by all. And out of the general corruption things sordid and things miserable ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts of ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sigh. "I suppose," said he, after an unquiet pause, "that the vagrant and the outlaw are strong in me, for I long to run back to my old existence, which was all action, and therefore ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... each poor hut! Filled with content so great, The smell of stubble burnt, delights. Piled high The wagons silent standing take their nightly rest, On distant hills the silver birches I descry, Framed gold by fertile fields the sacred picture blest. Then with a joy unshared save by the vagrant, I see the threshing floor well filled and fragrant, The sloping straw-thatched cottage roofs again, The window panels carved, of ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... ornaments of its predecessors, till we trace in the productions of this contemporary pottery, the patterns used by the nations of antiquity when just emerging from barbarism. Hunting, the most necessary of arts to the vagrant and carnivorous savage, is the employment celebrated on all these vessels, A stag, followed by ferocious quadrupeds and hungry bipeds, forms their general ornament. I have picked up the same groups among Roman ruins, have often contemplated ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... already?—Certain knights of the forest, by whom your quiet was for a time interrupted. Well—that incident hath come to our ear, and something we may presently form out of it.—Tell me, King Louis, were it not well, before this vagrant Helen of Troy [the wife of Menelaus. She was carried to Troy by Paris, and thus was the cause of the Trojan War], or of Croye, set more Kings by the ears, were it not well to carve out a ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif, then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it, Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the wire-grass. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day passed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of grass or a weed was allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh mould, black with fatness, was worked about the swelling tuber by my kind field-hand. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... steps of one, whom she knew by description must be widow Dobson's lodger, turn up from the newly-cut road which was to lead to the terrace walk around the North Cliff, a road which led to no dwelling but widow Dobson's. Tramp, and vagrant, he might be in the eyes of the law; but, whatever his character, Sylvia could see him before her in the soft dusk, creeping along, over the bridge, often stopping to rest and hold by some support, and then going on again ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... quietly and keeps out of scrapes poetical and political, and if Robert and I had but a little less modesty we are assured that we should find access to him easy. But we can't make up our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant minstrels, when he may probably not know our names. We never could follow the fashion of certain authors who send their books about without intimations of their being likely to be acceptable or not, of which practice poor Tennyson knows too much for his peace. If, indeed, a letter of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... well as realise, the love that kindles ours. It is the possession of the fact of redemption for my very own and of the blessings which accompany it, and that alone, that binds a man to God in the bonds of love that cannot be broken, and that subdues and unites all vagrant emotions, affections, and desires in the mighty tide of a love that ever sets towards Him. As surely as the silvery moon in the sky draws after it the heaped waters of the ocean all round the world, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... it, I might know as much of mirth To live and die a poet Of unacknowledged worth; For Fame is but a vagrant— Though a loyal one and brave, And his laurels ne'er so fragrant As when ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... were only that butterfly!" At that moment the luxurious vagrant, in the midst of its careless sports, and voluptuous banquet, became entangled in a web woven by a great black spider, which sat with eager impatience waiting until it had wound itself into the toils by its fruitless exertions, that he might seize ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... or less agreeably on the senses. The music we make automatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation may even modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side. The expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, in proportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automatic performer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection and criticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to be consecutive, impressive, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the sun went down, a vagrant breeze stole out from some leafy covert and disported itself blithely. The big Irish setter moved from the corner to the top step, and ceased yawning. An old colored man appearing from behind the house took his way across the lawn in quest of the colts. The dog, with his ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... A vagrant breeze sighed through the trees and made Saxon shiver. The mysterious cricket-noise ceased with suspicious abruptness. Then, from the rustling noise, ensued a dull but heavy thump that caused both Saxon and ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... conditions, at once charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... clothes in vagrant wards and hospitals for infectious diseases, on the contrary, a continued heat is necessary, and in this case the accumulation of reserve heat, which takes place slowly in a jacketed oven, becomes of value, as the gas can be turned low or out, and the ventilators ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... me. "With the Scarlet Woman—with Mathilde," I said, hoping in my heart that it was so, for somehow I felt even then that she, poor vagrant, would play a part in the history of Alixe's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "That of a vagrant student of manners and customs," answered the colorless voice. "Therefore, to imitate your frankness, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the crowds before, during, and after performances (the proprietor of the Cross Keys, it will be recalled, was described as "citizen and brewer of London"); and the resultant intemperance among "such as frequented the said plays, being the ordinary place of meeting for all vagrant persons, and masterless men that hang about the city, theeves, horse-stealers, whoremongers, cozeners, cony-catching persons, practicers of treason, and such other like,"[25] led to drunkenness, frays, bloodshed, and often to general disorder. Sometimes, ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... half the hurt to morals or manners that one grim-visaged justice did—the curmudgeon, you called him, Eusebius, that would, were they now on earth, and sleeping all lovely with their pearly arms together, locked in leafy bower, have Cupid and Psyche taken up under the Vagrant Act, or have them lodged in a "Union House" to be disunited. You thought the superstition of the world as it was, far above the knowledge it now brags of. You admired the Saxons and Danes in their veneration of the predictions of old women, whom the after ungallantry of a hard age would have burned ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Prepared the force of early powers to try; Sudden a look of languor he descries, And well-feign'd apprehension in her eyes; Train'd but yet savage, in her speaking face He mark'd the features of her vagrant race; When a light laugh and roguish leer express'd The vice implanted in her youthful breast: Forth from the tent her elder brother came, Who seem'd offended, yet forbore to blame The young designer, but could only trace The looks of pity in the trav'ller's face: Within, the Father, who ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... sister) accompanied him and mentioned what had been their own domestic experience of the case. They described the wandering propensities which took the lad away from home, and the odd concealment of his waistcoat, on the last occasion when he had returned from one of his vagrant outbreaks. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... chapter has been dealt with; firstly, because in this are enunciated those radical conceptions which he afterwards argues not to, but from; and secondly, because it has been the writer's desire, avoiding all vagrant and indecisive criticism, to have a fair grapple, and come to some clear result,—like that of a wrestler, who frankly proffers himself to throw or be thrown. It only remains to indicate, so far as may be, a comprehensive estimate of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... more spiritual each day of your life. That meditation does affect one's spirituality is an undeniable fact. Meditating upon God and his law is an excellent means of increasing spiritual life in the soul. Vagrant thoughts dull the finer sensibilities of the spiritual being, thereby rendering it less capable of impression by the ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... time that Henry set sail for Calais, Francis started from Montreuil for Ardres. It was a meagre old town, long since in ruins, the fosses and castle of which had been hastily repaired. He was attended on his route by a vast and motley multitude. No less than ten thousand of this poor vagrant crew were compelled to turn back, by a proclamation ordering that no person, without special permission, should approach within two leagues of the King's train, "on pain of the halter." As the French had proposed that both parties should lodge in tents erected on the field, they had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... won't need it, thank you. I'm not afraid of a few tramps. Besides I sent one of my men over to the island yesterday, and he couldn't find a sign of a vagrant. If any ...
— The Curlytops on Star Island - or Camping out with Grandpa • Howard R. Garis
... cap or bonnet, of unparalleled form and dimensions, was disposed upon his head, hiding the upper part of his face, and almost covering a pair of bushy grey eyebrows, that, in their turn, crouched over a quick and vagrant eye, little the worse for the wear of probably some sixty years. A grizzled reddish beard hung upon his breast; and his aspect altogether was forbidding, almost ferocious. A well-plenished satchel was ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... commanding the next to move over, stopping to whisper caressing words into the ear of a favorite. Sitting listlessly in the balcony of some theatre in the evening while a mimic world lived its joys and sorrows below and an orchestra played soft accompaniment to his vagrant thoughts. All this was Weary's ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... had rebaited my hook and dropped in a third time; but as before the vagrant school had moved on. They had seemed alarmed for the moment by the commotion, and darted off with accelerated speed. But we now had more confidence that they would return and again settled ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... straight for one of her ancient years, and her profuse hair was scarcely touched with the gray of age. Arrayed in a decent black dress, with a decent black bonnet and a black woollen shawl, the old lady looked intensely respectable. There was nothing of the picturesque vagrant about her. Therefore Miss Greeby, and with every reason, was disappointed, and when the queen of the woodland spoke she was still more so, for Mother Cockleshell did not even interlard her English speech with Romany words, as ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... men in the midst of it steadied me, and in my quest for them I forgot myself. For an hour I saw nothing but the naked, desolate sea. And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight struck the ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught a small black speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up. I waited patiently. Again the tiny point of black projected itself through the wrathful blaze a couple of points off our port-bow. I did ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... being made too amiable, or too plain? No, no! You are not vain. Whence comes this vagary?—well, we shall all know in good time. Were I to be with you, I should talk—perhaps maliciously—on purpose to see how your features would unsettle and shift themselves to the vagrant humour, that though one would know another from habit, and their old acquaintanceship, the painter would never be able to keep them steadily together. I should laugh to see every lineament "going ahead," and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... too late. Side by side with the peace of night, there dwell Spirits of Evil, the never-resting, vagrant, home-destroying guests, who enter unbidden into the human soul! Hark, the rustling of their raven-hued plumage! They take wing, they fly aloft; 't is the shriek of the vulture, swooping down ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... at once she set to work to win back her self-control. It might not yet be too late to help. She gripped herself, dispelling at once all hysteria, all her vagrant thoughts. He would have been hard at work long since. His face was still warm—perhaps ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... glimpse of a distant fire burning brightly through the dim trees. They quickened their pace, and striking a little out of their path into a common, soon approached two tents, the Arab homes of the vagrant and singular people with whom the gypsy claimed ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man's firewater had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it so happened, by no action of the boys', matters were suddenly brought to a sharp crisis. Over the patch of woods beyond the farm there came a vagrant puff of wind. It was followed ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... the state of a country be where those who are on the way to pauperism themselves are exclusively burdened with the support of the vagrant poor? It is like putting additional weight on a man already sinking under the burden he bears. The landlords suppose, that because the maintenance of the idle who are able, and of the aged and infirm who are not able to work, comes upon the renters of land, they ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... our legislators took proper steps to prevent the maiming of the little show children, who are put through excruciating practices to please a British public, and they would have done well at the same time if they had taken steps to prevent the warping influence of a vagrant's life having its full force upon the tribes of little Gipsy children, dwelling in calico tents, within the sound of church bells—if living under the body of an old cart, protected by patched coverlets, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... appalled. Evidently I had been wasting my time, for I could have no doubt that the gallant six hundred would include a sample of every kind of pundit, stationary or vagrant, encompassed within the seven seas; and against such competition I felt my chances to be ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... of all restraint from the coloured population of the colony, without the protection to the whites of even a Vagrant Act. Several of the colonial divisions had been for ten or twelve years overrun by fugitives from the Basuto and Betshuana countries, who had been driven from their own homes by the troubles already recorded. These people were ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... too, "twice or thrice in a month;" and he complains that it is "poverty which alone maketh me so unconstant to my determined studies, trudging from place to place to and fro, and prosecuting the means to keep me from idlenesse." An author was then much like a vagrant. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Saturday nights, outside a house of general refreshment (familiarly termed a wine vaults) at Battle-bridge. The singer is a young gentleman who can scarcely have numbered nineteen summers, and who before his last visit to the treadmill, where he was erroneously incarcerated for six months as a vagrant (being unfortunately mistaken for another gentleman), had a very melodious and plaintive tone of voice, which, though it is now somewhat impaired by gruel and such a getting up stairs for so long a period, I hope shortly to find restored. I ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... his heart out of dread of hearing it mocked or of finding it something common to all men. While, then, the words "Premier of Russia" still echoed through his head, there rose upon his inner ear a sudden note of melody, vagrant, sweet and melancholy as the songs of the Steppes. Known song it was not, however; but something unique, as were all the airs that came to him unbidden. Under its influence it was natural that his face should change, and soften. But Michael, imagining that rapt expression ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... delicate since 1800: and it is not surprising to find—as we do find—that between the text of the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, and that of 1802, there are many important variations. This is seen, for example, in the way in which he dealt with 'The Female Vagrant', which is altered throughout. Its early redundance is pruned away; and, in many instances, the final text, sanctioned in 1845, had been adopted in 1803. Without going into further detail, it is sufficient to remark that in the year 1803 Wordsworth's critical faculty, the faculty ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... pricks and cracks Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, 10 Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip Back and rejoin its source before the term— And aptest in contrivance (under God) To baffle it by deftly stopping such— The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) Three samples of true snakestone—rarer still, One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, (But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) And writeth ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... hero of his 'Excursion.' Much ridicule, and even obloquy, did the staunch poet of Rydal incur for choosing such a character, when he might have taken Laras and Conrads by the score, and been praised for his choice. But "the vagrant merchant under a heavy load," being a portion of the mountain life which surrounded the poet's home, was better than any hero of romance for his purpose; and a younger generation has confirmed the poet's ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... the swagman is the happiest vagrant's life in the world. He is usually regarded as a bona fide seeker for work, and food is readily given him for the asking. Unlike the American hobo, he is given his food raw, and is expected to cook it himself. So he carries what ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... of Drusilla's vagrant lord. The others looked up, interested. "Say, everybody, Lady Agnes and I have hit upon a ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... Dutchess County, New York, they had established a flourishing Indian congregation; and now, the Assembly of New York, stirred up by some liquor sellers who were losing their business, passed an insulting Act, declaring that "all vagrant preachers, Moravians, and disguised Papists," should not be allowed to preach to the Indians unless they first took the oaths of allegiance and abjuration {1744.}. James Hutton was boiling with fury. If this ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... they got up in the morning. Out the little old woman jumped, and whether she broke her neck in the fall or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the three Bears never saw anything more ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... grade, then he climbed back through the window. Inside, every vestige of impudence deserted him. A grave frown puckered his forehead as he seated himself thoughtfully on the solitary chair to sit like a statue staring at the floor. Certain sudden twistings of his clumsy frame revealed the vagrant meanderings of his mind, now satisfied and determined, now uncertain and reflective. Plainly it was a mind ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... those gloomy eyes at the head of the table watched them with a sort of envy, I think there must be something fatal to gaiety in the mere responsibilities of wealth; I am sure that there is something corrupting in the labours of its acquisition. I think I had rather be a vagrant, with a crust in my knapsack, a blue sky above me, and the adventurous road before me, than look upon the world with a pair of eyes so laughterless as his who was our host ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... the particulars of our cargo as already detailed, we had sundry items of live freight in the shape of some pigs, which were stowed in the long- boat on top of the deck-house; three cats, two belonging to the Portuguese steward and messing in the cuddy, while the third was a vagrant Tom that had strayed on board in the docks, and making friends with the carpenter Gregory, or "old chips" as he was generally called, was allowed to take up his quarters in the forepeak, migrating to the cook's cabin ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the vagrant feet of youth are the roads of Manhattan beset "with pitfall and with gin." But the civic guardians of the young have made themselves acquainted with the snares of the wicked, and most of the dangerous paths are patrolled by their agents, who seek to turn straying ones away from the peril that ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... XIIIth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had been ratified by aid of their votes. Congress, however, still refused to admit their Senators or Representatives. The first action of many of the new governments had been to pass labor, contract, stay, and vagrant laws which looked much like a re-establishment of slavery, and the majority in Congress felt that further guarantees for the security of the freedmen were necessary before the war could be ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... morning. Out the little old Woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant, as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Great War a somewhat casual visitor was present when a vagrant shell smashed the refreshment dug-out where a young Red Cross man was handling some comforts for the khaki-clad boys near the front line. And when the alarmed visitor explained to the dispenser of refreshments, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... quality of godless young heroism not unexhausted in Beauchamp's blood. Reanimated by him, she awakened his imagination of the vagrant splendours of existence and the rebel delights which have their own laws and 'nature' for an applauding mother. Radiant Alps rose in his eyes, and the morning born in the night suns that from mountain and valley, over sea and desert, called ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of a heavy gun, and all eyes turned to a huge shell, making its curve a mile above our heads, reminded us that the artillery had a field-day as we passed Woolwich, and that there was every possibility that this vagrant messenger of destruction, might plump into our midships. The consternation on board grew, as it descended, looking bigger and blacker every instant. If it had come on board, it must have torn us up like paper. The catastrophe would have been invaluable to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... control; that Count Bossu, or some other person nominated by himself, should be appointed to the government of Friesland; that the people of Brabant and Flanders should set themselves instantly to hunting, catching, and chastising all vagrant heretics and preachers. He required, in particular, that Saint Aldegonde and Theron, those most mischievous rebels, should be prohibited from setting their foot in any city of the Netherlands. He insisted that the community of Brussels ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Gould says it is abundant in all parts of Europe, in all the islands of the Mediterranean, and in Madeira and the Azores. And then he says—(now notice the puzzle of this),—"In many parts of the Continent it is a migrant, and, contrary to what obtains with us, is there treated as a vagrant, for there is scarcely a country across the water in which it is not shot ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... are other proofs pointing as decidedly to the determination of this long-continued controversy in favour of Scotland, as the soil from which this vagrant child of the muses sprung. No evidence seems to have been hitherto sought from the most obvious source, his writings. The writer of the memoir in the Biographia Brittanica, (who certainly dealt a well-aimed, though by no means decisive, blow, in observing, "It is pretty ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... occurs which gives the first great impulse to the mind of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached each other by the same sympathies, and communicating ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... small table to themselves, close by one of the long glass doors opening out into the garden. It was a warm evening, and sweet, vagrant perfumes came straying in at the open door, and in the momentary hush which sometimes falls upon the noisiest table d'hote, pretty plashing sounds could be heard in the Canal ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Jennet blush'd, how Alfred with a stride Bore off his prize, and fancied every charm, And clipp'd against his ribs her trembling arm; How mute we seniors stood, our power all gone? Completely conquer'd, Love the day had won, And the young vagrant triumph'd in our plight, And shook his roguish plumes, and laugh'd outright. Yet, by my life and hopes, I would not part With this sweet recollection from my heart; I would not now forget that tender scene To wear a crown, or make my girl ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... It is a bad cell that in which M. de Boiscoran is staying. Since I have been at Sauveterre, one man has killed himself in it, and one man has tried to commit suicide. So I called Trumence, a poor vagrant who assists me in the jail; and we arranged it that one of us would always be on guard, never losing the prisoner out of sight for a moment. But it was a useless precaution. At night, when they carried M. de Boiscoran his supper, he was perfectly calm; ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... big clouds slowly sail; A faint breeze lingers in the rustling beech; Atop the withered oak with vagrant speech The brawling crows call down the sleepy vale; Unseen the glad cicadas trill their tale Of deep content in changeless vibrant screech, And where the old fence rambles out of reach, The drowsy lizard hugs the shaded rail. Warm odors from the hayfield wander by, Afar the ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... immortal joys I mount The proudest emperors above, For I am honoured with the love Of the fair daughter of a count. A lace from Na Raymbauda's hand I value more than all the land Of Richard, with his Poctou, His rich Touraine and famed Anjou. When loup-garou the rabble call me, When vagrant shepherds hoot, Pursue, and buffet me to boot, It doth not for a moment gall me; I seek not palaces or halls, Or refuge when the winter falls; Exposed to winds and frosts at night, My soul is ravished with delight. Me claims my she-wolf (Loba) so divine: And justly she that claim prefers, For, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of life, unheeded until passed, but never to be recalled without pleasure. About eleven the guests generally depart, and by midnight the great avenue of this city is hardly disturbed by a foot-fall; not a sound comes on the ear except the short, fierce wrangle of packs of vagrant curs crossing each other's hunting-ground, which they are as tenacious of as the Indians are of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... over her hat, and she stood revealed. She was not pale; she was fresh from the woods, and in the glory of renewed health. A murmur of admiration went around the room like the stirring of leaves before a vagrant breeze. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... of his paper, too disturbed to read; the young vagrant's words kept sounding in his ears. He raised his eyes. The plump hand of the lady with the Roman nose still rested on her lap; it had been recased in its black glove with large white stitching. Her frowning gaze was fixed on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... path of the outmost sun through utter darkness hurled — Further than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled — Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives. Not consciously and strongly to will the right, not resolutely and with coercion of the vagrant self to will to take God for our aim, is to choose the low, the wrong. Perhaps none, or very few of us, would deliberately say 'I choose Mammon, having carefully compared the claims of the opposite systems of life that solicit me, and with open-eyed scrutiny measured their courses, their goods and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... again, beginning to roll down his sleeves, "suppose we do; I aren't above giving a lift to a chap as can use 'is fists,—not even if 'e is a vagrant, and a uncommon dusty one at that;—so, if you're in the same mind about it, up you get,—but no more furrin curses, mind!" With which admonition, the Waggoner nodded, grinned, and climbed back to his seat, while Bellew swung himself up into the ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... forces of the air were merciful. During the twenty-four hours there was nothing but little vagrant breezes and the drafts created by the heat of the fire itself. When day came again, without striking a single futile blow at the heart of the fire, they had drawn the enemy's teeth and clipped his claws—in so far as the flats of the Toba were threatened. The fire would burn up to that cleared ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... not, and care not. She's a real vagrant, that girl is. No manner of use. She may go her own ways; I wash ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... soon taken; princesses came into the world to be sacrificed. The plot ran on for some time, the Queen, who was in the habit of calling Charles Albert 'that little vagrant,' giving it her indefatigable support. Victor Emmanuel was weak, and stood in considerable awe of his wife, who had obtained a great ascendancy over him in the miserable days of their residence in the island of Sardinia. ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Coleridge and his own growing repute in the world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends—Southey, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest—more congenial, and certainly more profitable, than the vagrant intimados, "to the world's eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... habit and the manners of those vagrants with whom he had nearly been confounded by the hasty proceedings of Trois Eschelles and Petit Andre, and he, too, entertained very natural apprehensions concerning the risk of reposing trust in one of that vagrant race. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... this Martian's wooing? Yet was held to him by some power he might have over her brother? The vagrant thought ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... must be done. What! surely you will not have him collared by a constable, and commit his innocent pallor to the common jail? And upon what ground could you procure such a thing to be done?—a vagrant, is he? What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? It is because he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant. That is too absurd. No visible means of support: there I have him. Wrong again: for indubitably ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... more in the way of reading after the boating and the cricket began, than while we continued in a state of vagrant idleness, without a fixed amusement of any kind. In the first place, it was necessary to conciliate Hanmer by some show of industry in the morning, in order to keep him in good humour for the cricket in the evening; for he was decidedly the main hope of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... all those formulas which in the past were supposed to have served the turns of those seeking adventure in a great city. There was the trick of bestowing a thousand-dollar bill upon a chance vagrant and then trailing after the recipient to note what happened to him, in his efforts to change the bill. Heretofore, in fiction at least, the following of this plan had invariably brought forth most beautiful results. Accordingly, Judson Green ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... were the servants, my dear? Surely you are not required, in your brother's house, to perform such menial services as taking food and medicine to a sick vagrant." ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the dismay of his amazement in finding himself quarreling with the perfect wife, a vagrant memory came to George that he had heard that Genevieve had a hot temper. She certainly had. He didn't notice how handsome she looked kindled with anger. He only knew that the rose garden in which they lived was ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... all vnhabited, sauing that vpon the riuer Volgha on the Westside, the Emperour hath some fewe Castels with garisons in them. This happeneth by meanes of the Crimme Tartar, that will neither himselfe plant Townes to dwel there, (liuing a wild and vagrant life) nor suffer the Russe (that is farre off with the strength of his Countrey) to people those parts. From Vologda (whieh lieth almost 1700. verst from the port of S. Nicholas) downe towards Mosco, and so towards the South ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... to curb my vagrant Muse; A subject waits my pen she well may choose. Now aid me, O my God! who dwell'st above, While I attempt to sing Redeeming Love! Nor let one line, or word, be writ by me Not in accordance with that Mystery! May I, to profit ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... malignant cunning so as not to be limited in specific form of words to the negro race, but they were exclusively confined to that race in their execution. It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted to fit his case. Loitering around tippling-shops, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor. As to magnetism, that is only a matter of fancy. You sometimes need just such a field in which to wander vagrant, and if it bear a higher name, yet it may be that, in last result, the trance of Pythagoras might be classed with the more infantine transports of ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... his pay-roll. Naturally he is promptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the same experience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he be inactive, he is not safe—far from it. He is known to the police and liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means of support. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archives as a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culprits escape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest be made, if not of the person ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... at the time an urban centre capable of utilising the vast possibilities of the area in which it was placed. But this twofold object was not to be limited to Italy. He dreamed of transmarine enterprise taking a more solid and more generally useful form than that furnished by the vagrant trader or the local agent of the capitalist.[652] The idea and practice of colonisation across the sea were indeed no new ones; isolated foundations for military purposes, such as Palma and Pollentia in the Balearic Isles, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... is he? A man of vnreasonable boldnesse, bent to conspiracie, inconstant to performe that which he rashlie taketh in hand, readie to run into batell, vncircumspect in danger, practising things of great importance, seking after things vnpossible, bringing with him few good soldiers, but gathering a vagrant rout of rascals. There is nothing in him that we ought to be afraid of, for looke whatsoeuer he attempteth manfullie, the same he giueth ouer womanlie, in all his dooings vnfortunate, in all encounters either he is ouercome and ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (4 of 12) - Stephan Earle Of Bullongne • Raphael Holinshed
... read by most classes of Chinese who have been educated up to the requisite standard, and long journeys have often been undertaken to distant parts of the Empire, not so much from a thirst for knowledge or love of a vagrant life, as from a desire to be enrolled among the numerous contributors to the deathless literature of the Middle Kingdom. Such travellers start with a full knowledge of the tastes of their public, and a firm conviction that unless they ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... wandering slowly passed. Few people they met, and those, for the most part, various types of vagabonds and nomads; some wild and savage, roaming like beasts from place to place; others, harmless, mere bedraggled birds of passage. In this latter class were the vagrant-entertainers, with dancing rooster or singing dog, who stopped at every peasant's door. To the shrill piping of the flageolet, these merry stragglers added a step of their own, and won a crust for themselves, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... rather, he said that they sent him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... lightly, as a man should, for if one followed every vagrant fancy and intuition, taking account of signs and omens, he would slue and waver in his course like a toy boat in a mill pond, which after great labor and adventure comes, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... raisonnees. If I succeed in this Bill, as I expect to do, relating to the able poor, I shall, next sessions, proceed to accomplish the rest of my plan, by amending and giving force to (where necessary) the Bastard, Vagrant Laws, and generally those of police respecting the poor. The plan is extensive, but I have much considered it. I think I have it clear in comprehension, and can pursue it through each effect on the industry and manners of our people. I cannot be idle, ainsi ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... no mirage of a vagrant brain like that sea-picture, or that wild vision at Beauseincourt, but sober, and sad, and strange reality. I understood my position from that moment, geographically as well as physically. I was a prisoner ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... wished that she might walk among them. She knew, too, that the little sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate had been locked ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... man sees you as he is going home in the evening, and takes you to the overseers of the poor, and says, "Here is a little vagrant girl I found in the streets. We must send the poor little thing to the poor house, or she will starve ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... half-opened windows, soft and cool As Spring's young breath, the vagrant evening air, My day-worn soul is hushed. I fain would bear No burdens on my brain to-night, no rule Of anxious thought; the world has had my tears, My thoughts, my hopes, my aims ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... generosity to the government's friends. Its acts did not show this. Enactments in respect to freedmen, passed by the President's reconstructed legislatures, grudgingly bestowed civil rights. A different punishment for the same offence was prescribed for the negroes; apprentice, vagrant, and contract labour laws tended to a system of peonage; and the prohibition of public assemblies, the restriction of freedom of movement, and the deprivation of means of defence illustrated the inequality of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... angels leave heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy." I think that is nearly equal to this: "If you do not want your wife, give her a writing of divorcement," and make the mother of your children a houseless wanderer and a vagrant—nearly as good as that. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Major-Generals was coming into operation, he had been apprehended, on his way to Newark, by the vigilance of Major-General Haynes, and committed to prison in Yarmouth, There seems to have been no definite charge, other than that he was "the poet Cleveland" and was a questionable kind of vagrant. He had been in prison for some months when it occurred to him to address a letter to the Protector himself. "May it please your Highness," it began, "Rulers within the circle of their government have a claim to that ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... remember that for any outside the circle of the ancient blood to lift his eyes to the daughter of Solomon is to earn death, death slow and cruel for himself and all who aid and abet him. Let him remember, lastly, that this high-born lady to whom he, an unknown and vagrant Gentile, dares to talk as equal to equal, has from childhood been my affianced, who will shortly be my wife, although it may please her to seem to flout me after the fashion of maidens, and that we Abati are jealous of the honour of our women. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... to drown those other strains, vagrant wraiths that now floated upwards over fields and houses on the tepid wings of the sirocco—fragmentary snatches, torn from the brazen measure of the municipal band as it marched with the funeral ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... as far as Miss Unity was concerned; she had seldom spent such an afternoon in her life. She had been taken out for a walk in the mud, with rain threatening; she had talked in the open High Street, under the very eye of the dean, with a little vagrant out of Anchor and Hope Alley; she had of her own accord, unadvised and unassisted, formed an original plan, and not only formed it, but taken the first step towards carrying it out. Miss Unity hardly knew herself and felt quite uncertain ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... poor hut! Filled with content so great, The smell of stubble burnt, delights. Piled high The wagons silent standing take their nightly rest, On distant hills the silver birches I descry, Framed gold by fertile fields the sacred picture blest. Then with a joy unshared save by the vagrant, I see the threshing floor well filled and fragrant, The sloping straw-thatched cottage roofs again, The window panels carved, ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... State officials be entrusted with the unhampered control of civil affairs, and this was more than enough to revive the bulldozing methods that had characterized the beginning of Hamilton's administration. Oppressive legislation in the shape of certain apprentice and vagrant laws quickly followed, developing a policy of gross injustice toward the colored people on the part of the courts, and a reign of lawlessness and disorder ensued which, throughout the remote districts of the State at least, continued till Congress, by what are known as the Reconstruction Acts, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... your rose bushes through the pickets, and nooned upon your front porch, and pigs dreamed Arcadian dreams under your garden fence or languidly frescoed it with pigments from the nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor man's golden age. Your cow, or your goat, or your pig led a vagrant, wandering life, and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees, which was almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and came home fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled yourself where she went or how far ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Cambridge in the ninth century, but in 870, and again in 1010, the Danes sacked the town, and it would seem that the bridge was destroyed, for early in the twelfth century we find a reference to the ferry being definitely fixed at Cambridge, and that before that time it had been "a vagrant," passengers crossing anywhere that seemed most convenient. This fixing of the ferry, and various favours bestowed by Henry I., resulted in an immediate growth of prosperity, and the change was recognized by certain Jews who took up their quarters in the town and ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... frequently seen floating upon the sea in these regions, some of which are no doubt thrown upon the shores of the new created lands; from which accidental circumstance this fruit is there propagated. Vagrant birds unconsciously deposit the germs of various other productions of the vegetable kingdom, which in due season spring up and clothe their surfaces with verdure; and the natural accumulation of dead and putrid ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first chapter there is a certain stiffness; but ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the sea-blue swallow-wort, and there The pale-hued maidenhair, with parsley green And vagrant marsh-flowers; and a revel rare In the pool's midst the water-nymphs were seen To hold, those maidens of unslumbrous eyes Whom the ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... destitute sick wherever found; some requiring only temporary medical aid and nursing; others, whom God has chastened with more continuous suffering, requiring, in their penury, constant care and continual ministration." There is also under their charge a church school for vagrant children, and one also for the children of those comfortably situated ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... you live; you are a vagrant on the water—you have the reputation of a bad man—you live with us. Who will you make believe that you are ignorant ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... shade, bareheaded, dressed in white, stood a girl, so amazingly beautiful, that Sam wondered for a few moments whether he was asleep or awake. Her hat, which she had just taken off, hung on her left arm, and with her delicate right hand she arranged a vagrant tendril of the passion-flower, which in its luxuriant growth had broken bounds and fallen from its place above.—A girl so beautiful that I in all my life never saw her superior. They showed me the other day, in a carriage in the park, one they said was the most beautiful girl in England, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... no attention to anybody, until once, at court time, some carousing fellows hired Jack Wonnell to walk up to Meshach Milburn and ask to swap a new bell-crown for the old decrepit steeple-top. Looking at Wonnell sternly in the face, Meshach hissed, "You miserable vagrant! Nature meant you to go bareheaded. Beware when you speak to ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... India House; the introductions of Coleridge and his own growing repute in the world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends—Southey, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest—more congenial, and certainly more profitable, than the vagrant intimados, "to the world's eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Major had left behind her the reputation of "a saint." It was not undeserved: her quiet, constant charities,—her kindliness of look and manner, which were in themselves the best of charities,—a gentle, Christian way she had of dealing with all the vagrant humors of her husband,—and the constancy of her devotion to all duties, whether religious or domestic, gave her better claim to the saintly title than most who wear it. The Major knew this, and was proud to say it. "If," he was accustomed to say, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... novels and "purpose" books dealing with great industries and commodities cease to sell, the vagrant atoms and shadings of history ending with the opening of the two world-important canals might be employed by writers seeking incidents as entrancing as romances and which are capable of being woven into narrative sufficiently ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... wild day in Manila. Far over near the Escolta somebody shot at a vagrant dog lapping water from a little pool under one of the many hydrants. The soldier police essayed an arrest; the culprit broke and ran; the guard fired; a lot of coolies, taking alarm, fled jabbering to the river side. The natives, ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... and pleasure of a large district. It is so beautifully clean that, as at Nikko, I should feel reluctant to walk upon its well-swept streets in muddy boots. It would afford a good lesson to the Edinburgh authorities, for every vagrant bit of straw, stick, or paper, is at once pounced upon and removed, and no rubbish may stand for an instant in its streets except in a covered box or bucket. It is correctly laid out in square divisions, formed by five streets over a mile long, crossed by very numerous short ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... sundry items of live freight in the shape of some pigs, which were stowed in the long- boat on top of the deck-house; three cats, two belonging to the Portuguese steward and messing in the cuddy, while the third was a vagrant Tom that had strayed on board in the docks, and making friends with the carpenter Gregory, or "old chips" as he was generally called, was allowed to take up his quarters in the forepeak, migrating to the cook's cabin at meal-times with ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... was a fine grove for picnic purposes within easy reach, which was also frequently used for camp-meeting purposes. Gnarly old live-oaks spread their branches like a canopy over everything, while the sea-green moss hung from every limb and twig, excluding the light and lazily waving with every vagrant breeze. The fact that these grounds were also used for camp-meetings only proved the broad toleration of the people. On this occasion I distinctly remember that Miss Jean introduced a lady to me, who was the wife of an Episcopal ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... down the long driveway that led to Tutors' Lane, Tom slowed his pace. Overhead, Betelgeuse was making the most of its recent publicity, unobstructed by vagrant clouds. Tom gazed up at it with a certain air of proprietorship. He had known Betelgeuse years ago and personally had always preferred its neighbour Rigel, which had received no publicity at all. As a small boy some one had given him a Handbook of the Stars, ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... Secretary of State, had since he came to manhood, resided principally on the Continent, and had learned that cosmopolitan indifference to constitutions and religions which is often observable in persons whose life has been passed in vagrant diplomacy. If there was any form of government which he liked it was that of France. If there was any Church for which he felt a preference, it was that of Rome. He had some talent for conversation, and some talent also for transacting the ordinary business of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... again, he took it many hundred yards round to the bridge. Smoaker died at the great age of eighteen years. His son Shark was also a beautiful dog. He was by Smoaker out of a common greyhound bitch, called Vagrant, who had won a cup at Swaffham. Shark was not so powerful as Smoaker; but he was, nevertheless, a large-sized dog, and was a first-rate deer greyhound and retriever. He took his father's place on the rug, and was inseparable from me. He was educated and entered at deer under Smoaker. When Shark ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... Woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant, as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... open sloping field, where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its lacy, crystaled edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the establishment of a bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out against a red barn. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... what it is to be vagrant born? A waif is only a waif. And so, For another idle hour I sit, In large content while the fire ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... handsome; a narrow forehead, the hair receding from the temples, a high-bridged nose with wide-cut nostrils, lips thin and fine, moving flexibly as they muttered. It matched with what the voice had told Mark, was not the face of the brutalized hobo or low-bred vagrant, but beneath its hair and dirt showed as the mask of a man who might have fallen from high places. Even his curses went to prove it. They were not the dull profanities of the loafer, but were varied, colorful, imaginative, such curses as might come from one who ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... at all events, are not enclosed in envelopes, writing on their knees, evidently on account of a paucity of tables. There are, besides, sundry figures, who, if they were to appear in the streets of London, or any of our highways, would be liable to the penalties of the Vagrant Act for indecent exposure. Under the tableland by which these figures are supported, some evidence of a laudable curiosity is depicted, by three or four ladies, who are represented reading a billet doux, or valentine, and some little boys, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... very tailors and cooks worked fantasies in silk and velvet, sugar and paste. Thomas Harman, whose grandfather had been Clerk of the Crown under Henry VII., and who himself inherited estates in Kent, became greatly interested in the vagrant beggars who came to his door. He made a study of them, came to London to publish his book, and lodged at Whitefriars, within the Cloister, for convenience of nearness to them, and more thorough ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... a cry of the joy of youth. She stood facing the coming day, and the sea and sun; and a puff of morning breeze flung behind her a vagrant strand ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... aspect of a warrior, was an object of terror to his soldiers, at least, and to his kinsmen. Before and after the death of Alexius, the Greeks made two vigorous and well-conducted attempts to burn the navy in the harbor; but the skill and courage of the Venetians repulsed the fire-ships; and the vagrant flames wasted themselves without injury in the sea. [78] In a nocturnal sally the Greek emperor was vanquished by Henry, brother of the count of Flanders: the advantages of number and surprise aggravated the shame of his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... pomp which waits on greatness, Ill suits my humble, unambitious soul;— Then leave me here, to tread the safer path Of private life; here, where my peaceful course Shall be as silent as the shades around me; Nor shall one vagrant wish be e'er allow'd To stray beyond the bounds ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... the rear, as a goose does an intruder, and now and then picked something from his coat, which I supposed to be a vagrant thread, or a piece of lint or straw, and then retreated a step or two to avoid closer contact. He was compelled at last to turn again on his pursuer, and expostulate with her in no gentle terms. I heard ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... now evening; faint shadows encircled them. Sanine lit a cigarette and the delicate odour of tobacco mingled with the fragrance of the garden. He told them how life had tossed him hither and thither; how he had often been hungry and a vagrant; how he had taken part in political struggles, and how, when weary, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... customers were suddenly distracted from their thoughts of gain as we whirled by; the crowd close behind sweeping everything before it. The falling of barrels and boxes, the rattling of tin cans, the crashing of crockery, the howling of the vagrant dogs that were trampled under foot, only ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... whispering aspens, bright green in their new foliage, with small spruce and pine. Here and there a few flowers showed; by the side of the road the wild roses peeped up from the denser growths of foliage, and a vagrant butterfly or so made the round of blossom after blossom. It was spring-summer down here, sharp contrast indeed to the winter which lurked above and which would not fade until June had far progressed. But with it all, its ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... maintenance of two former nuns, noble and well educated, who, at the fall of their community, had been recommended, or had procured a recommendation, to her. Mesdames de Brinon and du Basque were these two vagrant nuns. Madame de Maintenon, instinctively attracted to this sort of persons, welcomed and ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... are the eternal humorist The eternal enemy of the absolute, Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—" ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... themselves over the immense plains which lie between the Vistula and the Volga. The care of their numerous flocks and herds, the pursuit of game, and the exercises of war, or rather of rapine, directed the vagrant motions of the Sarmatians. The movable camps or cities, the ordinary residence of their wives and children, consisted only of large wagons drawn by oxen, and covered in the form of tents. The military strength of the nation was composed of cavalry; and the custom of their warriors, to lead ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... this while in a vagrant life, among infidels, Turks, pagans, and such sort of people. I had no minister, no Christian to converse with but poor William. He was my ghostly father or confessor, and he was all the comfort I had. As for my knowledge of religion, you have ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... saying that you Australians have queer ways of maintaining authority," continued the European, lazily raising his eyebrows, and speaking with the accent—or rather, absence of accent—which, in an Englishman, denotes first-class education. "A vagrant, by appearance, and probably not overburdened with honesty, is found trespassing on your property; then this individual—by Gad, I feel curious to know who our learned brother for the defence is—bandies words with you on the other ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... joke-importers. The club was heterogen'ous By strangers seen as A refuge for destitute bons mots— Depot for leaden jokes and pewter pots; Repertory for gin and jeux d'esprit, Literary pound for vagrant rapartee; Second-hand shop for left-off witticisms; Gall'ry for Tomkins and Pitt-icisms;[3] Foundling hospital for every bastard pun; In short, a manufactory for all sorts of fun! * * * * Arouse my muse! such pleasing themes to quit, Hear me while I say ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... me one day, looking in at a shop window where I could see myself, that I was a most disreputable-looking object, quite eligible to be apprehended as an able-bodied vagrant.' ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... community. In this stage it can now be seen among barbarous tribes—as, for instance, in Central Africa. And some traces of it still survive, under different pretexts and disguises, in the lowest strata of civilised nations, where it may be said to represent the natural reluctance of the vagrant human fancy to be satisfied with higher forms and purer conceptions that are always imperfectly assimilated ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the store the first afternoon I noticed a Bible open at Judges and a number of slips of paper on which questions had been written. On my second visit for oil and vinegar, two strangers from off a vagrant yacht which had entered the little harbor nudged one another and demanded to know whether either had ever seen anything like it. On the third, my companion protested that it was not clean, and seeing that there were other stores we decided to ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... As you see, my portmanteau contains a shirt, a pair of socks, a comb and a toothbrush. Also a copy of the works of the divine vagrant Maitre Francois Villon, which I will take out at once. He was a thief and a reprobate and got nearer hanged than any man who ever lived, and he is the dearest friend ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... skies and watched by him from the stony bases of inaccessible cliffs—and yet it was familiar, goodly, his old accustomed company. This face—and that—and that! how he startled from it laughter or indifference or vagrant thought. There were low exclamations, a woman's slight scream, pause, confusion, and from the rear an authoritative voice demanding reason for the delay. Past him, staring and murmuring, swept the peacock-tinted ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... history. Glimpses of moral truth, or suggestions of what may lead to it; indications of neglected difficulties, and occasionally conjectural solutions of such difficulties,—these are what this essay offers. It was meant as a specimen of fruits, gathered hastily and without effort, by a vagrant but thoughtful mind: through the coercion of its theme, sometimes it became ambitious; but I did not give to it an ambitious title. Still I felt that the meanest of these suggestions merited a valuation: ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Life of Milton, Johnson records his own experience. 'Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... me its rough side, was not such a bad place after all. I began seriously to regard the universe from the standpoint of a professional tramp to realize that there is something to be said for the philosophy of the unmitigated vagrant. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... her timidity away and with the same gesture accepted Donnegan as something more than a dangerous vagrant. She took the lamp from the hands of the crone and sent her about her business, disregarding the mutterings and the warnings which trailed behind the departing form. Now she faced Donnegan, screening the light from her eyes with a cupped hand and by the same device focusing ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... he saw his old friend. It took him a full minute to realize that the gentle sportsman, the true Christian, the delicate man, the delightful companion, was there before him, a wreck—cast out from among his fellows, confined in a noisome cell, and hopelessly given over to his vagrant fancies and the tender mercies of Thomas Buffum. When the memory of what Paul Benedict had been to him, at one period of his life, came to Jim, with the full realization of his present misery and degradation, the strong man ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... above sixty (which is the prime of life, nowadays) and he lives quietly and keeps out of scrapes poetical and political, and if Robert and I had a little less modesty we are assured that we should find access to him easy. But we can't make up our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant minstrels, when he may probably not know our names. We could never follow the fashion of certain authors, who send their books about with intimations of their being likely to be acceptable or not—of which practice ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... name. Don't talk to me about 'her being providentially thrown into your hands,' unless you desire to hear me say things which you have frequently taken occasion to inform me 'deeply grieved' you. I dare say the little vagrant whines in what she considers orthodox phraseology, that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb!' and, like some other pious people whom I have heard canting, will saddle some Jewish prophet or fisherman with the dictum, thinking that it sounds like the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Every vagrant joy-maker and world-builder the modern era boasts—genius, lover, singer, artist, has had to have his struggle with the hod-carriers of culture, and if a lover of books has not enough love in him to refuse to be coerced into joining the huge Intimidator, the aggregation of the Reading Labour Unions ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... must recognize a taste as fine and fastidious as her own. He suspected Mrs. Upton of finding him merely ethical and he was eager that she should see that his grasp on life was larger than she might imagine. His taste was fine and fastidious; it was also disciplined and gracefully vagrant; she must see that in the few but perfect pictures and mezzotints on his walls; the collection of old white Chinese porcelain standing about the room on black carved stands; in his wonderful black lacquer cabinets and in all the charming medley of ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... but never to be recalled without pleasure. About eleven the guests generally depart, and by midnight the great avenue of this city is hardly disturbed by a foot-fall; not a sound comes on the ear except the short, fierce wrangle of packs of vagrant curs crossing each other's hunting-ground, which they are as tenacious of as the Indians are of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... hand, confidently, caressingly. The end of the thin black veil, that was shabby now, and had darns in many places, was wafted across her face by a vagrant puff of cooled air from the river, and she kissed it, bringing the tears very near the deep, sad eyes that looked at her, and then turned away. Saxham, in default of any excuse for lingering near her, went back ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... scarcely touched with the gray of age. Arrayed in a decent black dress, with a decent black bonnet and a black woollen shawl, the old lady looked intensely respectable. There was nothing of the picturesque vagrant about her. Therefore Miss Greeby, and with every reason, was disappointed, and when the queen of the woodland spoke she was still more so, for Mother Cockleshell did not even interlard her English speech with ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... of a sudden a wretched bitch waddled out from the woods into his path. It was a vagrant bitch, as thin as a skeleton, and so big in the belly that she walked with difficulty. Her dugs dragged along the snow, for she was in pup. They came from opposite directions, two lonely creatures, who are paddling their own canoes in America, and meet one cold winter day out in the snow. At first ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... two houses, land, peasants, silver and glass, and talk of wandering about from one shelter to another like a beggar, like Markushka, the vagrant." ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... save my life or anything like that, did you?" she adventured; like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion—I shouldn't know ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the crater, "vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together a thousand feet under us and totally shut out land and ocean; not ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... ask, "Where did the Hastur kid go?" before a vagrant logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he did not even speak the trailmen's language, that it had slipped from ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... believed by the jury. But suppose that, on cross-examination, it turns out that this witness can give no good account of his manner of earning his living or of his place of residence; that he had been arrested not long before as a vagrant, and that down to the time of the action he had no respectable clothes, and that he suddenly became possessed of some; that he deserted from the army immediately after getting his bounty-money, and so on, there can be little doubt that his credit with the jury would ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... a wider meaning; in which it becomes true also for our historical experience. Csar and Rome have flourished and expired together. The illimitable attributes of the Roman prince, boundless and comprehensive as the universal air,—like that also bright and apprehensible to the most vagrant eye, yet in parts (and those not far removed) unfathomable as outer darkness, (for no chamber in a dungeon could shroud in more impenetrable concealment a deed of murder than the upper chambers of the air,)—these attributes, so impressive to the imagination, and which all ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... bench—its only furnishing—Take-a-Stitch hastened to make all secure. The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, but still and happily the worn-out "Guardian" slept; so that, herself overcome by fatigue and the closeness of the atmosphere the now vagrant "Queen of Elbow Lane" dropped in a heap on ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... think a gentleman degraded, by having subjected himself to the denomination of a vagrant? Though, no; you have wit enough to laugh at gray-beards, and their ridiculous forms and absurd distinctions. Know then, there is a certain set or society of men, frequently to be met in straggling parties about this kingdom, who, by a peculiar kind of magic, will metamorphose ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... woman, but emaciated, with long black hair. Some vagrant—quite in rags. She's got a wedding-ring on, however. They must fetch her away to the workhouse to-morrow. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... and his occupation; The jolly bird hath learned his cheer Upon [50] the banks of Windermere; Where a tribe of them make merry, 565 Mocking the Man that keeps the ferry; Hallooing from an open throat, Like travellers shouting for a boat. —The tricks he learned at Windermere This vagrant owl is playing here—570 That is the worst of his employment: He's at the top [51] ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the snow away, made the bare patches of earth quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks overhead—vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about the fire—there was no sorrow in the break-up of the family, but only a universal joy in ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... understanding passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... a week ago they were burning and burying alive those who differed from the ruling party in regard to salvation, eviscerating in public those who had new ideas of government, and hanging old women who were accused of traffic with the devil. All of them had been no better than vagrant savages a year before. Their fuller knowledge was altogether too recent to have gone very deep, and they had many institutions and many leaders dedicated to the perpetuation of outworn notions which would otherwise ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... have before been told, This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold, And with his dancing crest So beautiful, through savage lands Had roam'd about, with vagrant bands Of Indians in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a mistake again! if you do I will make you suffer severely for it! And you, shameless girl! if you presume to set foot on these premises but once again, I will have you sent to the work-house as a troublesome vagrant." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... county jail. During the succeeding night one of these persons thrust a poker into the stove, and heating it red hot, made an effort to push the hot iron through the door, thus burning a large hole in the door-casing. The next morning the sheriff, entering the jail, perceiving what this vagrant had done, was displeased, and tried to ascertain which one of the ten was guilty of the offense. The comrades of the guilty party refused to disclose the perpetrator of the act. Court was then in session. The sheriff had these ten fellows brought into ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... the Assizes before they could enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. But the Government were dealing with the difficulty in a wiser and more effectual way. The old powers to enforce labour on the idle and settlement on the vagrant class which had been given by statutes of Henry the Eighth were continued; and each town and parish was held responsible for the relief of its indigent and disabled poor, as well as for the employment of able-bodied mendicants. But a more efficient machinery ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... them, so close that they all but rested in its shadow, was one of those monster aircars, its tentacles moving to and fro as though wafted into motion by some vagrant breeze. But since neither Sarka nor Jaska could feel the breeze, Sarka knew that it was life which caused the waving motion of those tentacles ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... "'Vagrant, your Honor,' the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, 'Ten days,' ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... chosen, their sanctum. Before the door hung a friendly oak branch, heavy with leaves, that swayed and swung with every breeze. Now it hid the entrance from the east, now from the west, and with every change of the vagrant wind the observer must choose a new point ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was exquisite. Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight, and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster. He had slept in the desert one night. The enamelled turquoise of the daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber of the afterglow gave way to moonlight. As he lay and watched the silver bloom spread over the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... In the opinion of respectable authors, they are called Cingary or Cinli, because they in every respect resemble the bird cinclo, which we call in Spanish Motacilla, or aguzanieve (wagtail), which is a vagrant bird and builds no nest, (37) but broods in those of other birds, a bird restless and poor of plumage, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... floweret's velvet breast, How close the busy vagrant lies? His thin-wrought plume, his downy breast, Th' ambrosial gold that swells his thighs. Perhaps his fragrant load may bind His limbs;—we'll set the captive free— I sought the living bee to find, And found the picture ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... had been pushed into it by a social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure. Their source was Virginia. They were of a thriftless, unstable class; that vagrant peasantry which had drifted westward to avoid competition with slave labor. The niece, Nancy, has been reputed illegitimate. And though tradition derives her from the predatory amour of an aristocrat, there is ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... tapestry, where, from earliest Spring until the grapes were gathered colour and light were caught and imprisoned within the web. At the bend in the river, where the rushes grew thickly, the river-god kept his harp, which answered with shy, musical murmurings to every vagrant wind. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... sat, hammering out my thoughts, and with them the conviction that stonebreaking should be allotted to minor poets or vagrant children of nature like myself, never to such tired folk as my poor mate at ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... Vagrant Acts included "minstrels" in their definition of rogues and vagabonds, it is evident that the suitors of the Minstrelsy Court would have run the risk of commitment to the House of Correction and a whipping, if the acts had not specially excepted the franchise of the Dutton family from their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... a little gasp for breath, as if frightened at her own audacity. Her manner and phrases were an evident imitation of the way in which she had heard advice bestowed upon vagrant or criminal by the benevolent judge whose memory she so tenderly cherished. It was second nature to her to act as she fancied he would have acted. Courthope composed himself to receive the judicial admonition with ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... to sleep. Turning at full length upon his back, his arms above his head, he stared steadily up into the darkness until his brain, freed of all lesser problems, all vagrant thoughts, was concentrated upon the great problem which now ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... inner eye were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd little lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable. He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the smells of things, the sounds of woods and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... election unawares, and infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives. Not consciously and strongly to will the right, not resolutely and with coercion of the vagrant self to will to take God for our aim, is to choose the low, the wrong. Perhaps none, or very few of us, would deliberately say 'I choose Mammon, having carefully compared the claims of the opposite ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... more delicate since 1800: and it is not surprising to find—as we do find—that between the text of the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, and that of 1802, there are many important variations. This is seen, for example, in the way in which he dealt with 'The Female Vagrant', which is altered throughout. Its early redundance is pruned away; and, in many instances, the final text, sanctioned in 1845, had been adopted in 1803. Without going into further detail, it is sufficient to remark that in the year 1803 Wordsworth's ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... begun when it ended; it was all over in an instant. The two who had escaped injury leaped back aboard the Drab. Those who needed assistance were helped back. The Drab drifted away, her vagrant course unheeded at first, for it looked as though all aboard had taken part in ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... care not. She's a real vagrant, that girl is. No manner of use. She may go her own ways; I wash my ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... been a reckless vagrant creature, wandering through the woods at night like a half-deranged person; but she had wit enough to see that there was safety in confession. She pretended to have committed, by witchcraft, crimes enough to have hanged her a dozen times. If she had stood ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... a good gardener's year, and I am sorry that the fall anemones and the blooming of the earliest chrysanthemums insist upon telling me that it is nearly over,—that is, as far as the reign of complete garden colour is concerned. And amid our vagrant summer wanderings among gardens of high or low degree, no one point has been so recurrent or interesting as the distribution of colour, and especially the dominance of white flowers in any landscape or garden in ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... who watch and listen, lie in wait, Seeing the cloudy cavalcades blow past,— Happy if some bright vagrant, soon or late, May venture near the snares of sound, at last— Most fortunate captor if, from time to time, One may be taken, trembling, ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... the long wall from the door to the garden gate is only one small high window. But time and nature have done much to beautify the spot. In the cracks of the roof, thatched or tiled, whichever it may be, many a vagrant seed has found lodgment. The weeds have grown up in profusion to cover the bare little place with leaf and flower. Indeed, there is here a genuine roof garden of the prettiest sort, and it extends along the stone wall separating the dooryard ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... you took to this kind of life," said the baronet, strangely interested in this vagrant girl; "how did you get your ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... know Fatty Budlow?" asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale. But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course. The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... with slightest touch of rein against arched neck, or with tickle of spur or press of knee, he kept the mare to the way he willed. Once, as she whirled and danced, he caught a glimpse of the Big House. Big it was in all seeming, and yet, such was the vagrant nature of it, it was not so big as it seemed. Eight hundred feet across the front face, it stretched. But much of this eight hundred feet was composed of mere corridors, concrete-walled, tile-roofed, that connected and assembled the various ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... out-of-door life we now led. Emperor penguins began to visit us in companies up to forty in number: probably they were birds whose maternal or paternal instincts had been thwarted at Cape Crozier and had now taken to a vagrant life. They suffered, I am afraid, from the loose dogs, and on one occasion Debenham was out on the sea-ice with a team of those dogs of ours which were useless for serious sledging. He had taken them in hand ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... and jocular companion. Though he loved good cheer, and frequented the houses of the rich or more hospitable people of America, yet he was an enemy to all manner of excess and intemperance. While his vagrant temper led him from place to place, his natural discernment enabled him to form no bad judgment of the characters and manners of men wherever he went. Though he appeared a friend to no established church, yet good policy winked at all his irregularities, as he every where proved a steady friend ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... Western Isles, And in your confines with his lawless train Daily commits incivil [8] outrages, Hoping (misled by dreaming prophecies) To reign in Asia, and with barbarous arms To make himself the monarch of the East: But, ere he march in Asia, or display His vagrant ensign in the Persian fields, Your grace hath taken order by Theridamas, Charg'd with a thousand horse, to apprehend And bring him ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... those who would assert the theory to bring forward positive proof of it. There is, however, one point in Mr. Darwin's view of domesticated animals which tells against his theory. The cat remains unchanged, because from its vagrant habits man has no control over its pairing [Footnote: Darwin's "Animals and Plants," vol. ii. p. 236.]. Now considering the variety of conditions under which cats exist, here is surely a great opening for natural selection. But it ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... thoughtless woodman, Hew but what you need, They give balm to vagrant breezes, For their lives ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... Artificial Swarming. If the Apiarian perceives that his swarm instead of clustering begins to rise higher and higher in the air, and evidently means to depart, not a moment is to be lost: instead of empty noises, he must resort to means much more effective to stay their vagrant propensities. Handfulls of dirt cast into the air, or water thrown among them, will often so disorganize them as to compel them to alight. Of all devices for stopping them, the most original one that I have ever heard of, is to flash the sun's rays among them, by the use of a looking glass! ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... then, I entreat you, seek speech without delay with our sublime fellow-Shade—with him who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name was the common property of the winds; it, as it were, floated naked over the waters about the equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics, and have essayed to put into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity—feats which you ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... 'Excursion.' Much ridicule, and even obloquy, did the staunch poet of Rydal incur for choosing such a character, when he might have taken Laras and Conrads by the score, and been praised for his choice. But "the vagrant merchant under a heavy load," being a portion of the mountain life which surrounded the poet's home, was better than any hero of romance for his purpose; and a younger generation has confirmed the poet's choice of a hero, and few remain now to mock at the Pedlar. ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country seat. I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle fancies. I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant humor had been fostered in me by Tom Dribble, the prime wag and great genius of the school, who had all the rambling propensities ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... to the outer door. A vagrant breeze stirred the stale air in the room. Back in the patio his Mexican, Manuelo, lay snoring, wrapped in a tattered blanket. The Spider turned from the doorway and gazed at the sanded spot on the floor, leaning against the bar and drumming on its edge with his nervous fingers. "He'll see ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... all these seas are holiday seas—the yachts, the sail vessels, the puffing steamers, moving swiftly from one headland to another, or loafing about the blue, smiling sea, are all on pleasure bent. The vagrant vessels that are idly watched from the rocks at the Pier may be coasters and freight schooners engaged seriously in trade, but they do not seem so. They are a part of the picture, always to be seen slowly dipping along in the horizon, and the impression is that they are manoeuvred for ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fringed with spruce and fir; stretches of woodland, too, where the road is lined with giant pines and you lift your face gratefully to catch the cool balsam breath of the forest. Coming from out this splendid shade, this silence too deep to be disturbed by light breezes or vagrant winds, you find yourself on the brow of a descending hill. The first thing that strikes the eye is a lake that might be a great blue sapphire dropped into the verdant hollow where it lies. When ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... thereabouts thought they could tell her. Nat was into one scrape after another—nothing especially wicked; but a compound of the bubbling mischief in a too ardent life—robbed orchards, broken windows, practical jokes, Halloween jinks, vagrant whimsies of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Lollards; so did the Act of the Six Articles. A curious attempt was made to deal with the problem of vagrancy, the outcome of prevalent economic conditions, which the penalties of flogging and hanging had failed to repress. The vagrant was to be brought before the magistrates, branded, and handed over to some honest person as a "slave" for two years. If he attempted to escape from servitude, he was to be branded again and made a slave ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... his absence. He was amazed now at his own assumption that design, not accident, had caused such desertion. He could almost have started in his solicitude, to seek the missing man, such was the rebound of his mind. Yet to all this he only gave vagrant thoughts, such as we give to our fellows in church. The temple of the night had become a holy place, and his heart was heavy—perhaps for his old friend, standing there with uplifted face, perhaps on account of the words he was uttering, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... I hope, been successful, and it is as painful for me to tell as for you to hear, that there exists in your midst a youthful reprobate, trained in all the arts of ensnaring the vagrant fancies ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... from commercial enterprises which appealed to the cupidity of capitalists and led to investments that promised speedy and ample returns. A desire to improve social conditions and to solve the problem of the poor and the vagrant, which had become acute since the dissolution of the monasteries, was arousing the authorities to deal with the pauper and to dispose of the criminal in such a way as to yield a profitable service to the kingdom. England was full of resolute men, sea-dogs and soldiers of fortune, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... Oroville, he got up, and read these words, or some like them, in the village newspaper:—"The heavy frost which fell last night brings with it at least one source of congratulation for our citizens. Soon the crowd of vagrant street-sleepers, which infests our town, will be forced to go forth and work for warmer quarters. It has throughout this summer been the ever-present nuisance and eyesore of our otherwise beautiful and romantic moonlit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... way they did much toward ridding European society of its most turbulent elements; while at the same time they gave fresh development to the spirit of romantic adventure, and connected it with something better than vagrant freebooting.[321] By renewing the long-suspended intercourse between the minds of western Europe and the Greek culture of Constantinople, they served as a mighty stimulus to intellectual curiosity, and had a large share in bringing about that great ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... predict how Passepartout's lively nature would agree with Mr. Fogg. It was impossible to tell whether the new servant would turn out as absolutely methodical as his master required; experience alone could solve the question. Passepartout had been a sort of vagrant in his early years, and now yearned for repose; but so far he had failed to find it, though he had already served in ten English houses. But he could not take root in any of these; with chagrin, he found his masters invariably whimsical and irregular, constantly running ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... country, Robert," said Mr. Massey to his coachman, and so away they started at a leisurely pace, since the complacent horses refused any other. Sometimes vagrant chickens wandered into the road, exhibiting a daring that enthralled Peter. His opinion of chickens rose when, the fat horses almost upon their tail ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... made them pliable for his use, Magician he could be by planned surprise. For do they see the deuce in human guise, As men's acknowledged head appears the deuce, And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal. Among them certain vagrant wits that had Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad; Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal; But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane. With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings The way of such transfeminated ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... related in Exodus, Jahveh was but the tutelary god of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial possessions, was not even a nation. Like his people he too was a vagrant. Like them he had no home. Other gods had temples and altars. He lacked so much as a shrine. In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew, each day he moved on. The threats of a land that never smiled were reflected in his face. The sight of him was death. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... to admire the roses, and no one entered the cool, inviting tent. The whole place might have been dead, as far as human life was concerned; and although the smoke did ascend straight up from the kitchen chimney, a vagrant or a tramp might have been tempted to enter the house by the open hall door, were it not protected ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... pale, thin vapour that clung close to the shimmering surface and dazzled the eye with an ever-shifting glaze. The air was lifeless, sultry, stifling; not a leaf, not a twig in the tall, drooping willows moved unless stirred by the passage of some vagrant bird. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... mere habit, towards the feebly lighted windows of his mother's room, his eyes encountered the figure he had just lost, standing against the iron railings of the little waste enclosure looking up at those windows and laughing to himself. Some of the many vagrant cats who were always prowling about there by night, and who had taken fright at him, appeared to have stopped when he had stopped, and were looking at him with eyes by no means unlike his own from tops ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... its appropriate functions has no connection with the working of freedom, any further than it may have been a struggle to get rid in some measure of the surveillance of the mother country in order to coerce the labourer so far as possible by vagrant laws, &c. The immediate pretext was the passing of a law by the imperial Parliament for the regulation of prisons, which the House of Assembly declared a violation of that principle of their charter which forbids the mother-country to lay a tax on them ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... scarcely any success whatever. Sometimes, when most fortunate, he sold two or three volumes a week, but oftener did not find a single purchaser. Kindness, too, he met but little, most of the people treating him as a pauper or a vagrant. Many advised him to try the sale of trinkets and drapery, or of pills and 'patent medicines,' instead of poetry; while others went so far as to recommend him to become an itinerant musician. Having traversed the country in all directions, suffering from want and fatigue, and, more still, from ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... honest, at least in the expression of your ideas, was a felony. To do right was a capital offense; and in those days chains and whips were the incentives to labor, and the preventives of thought. Honesty was a vagrant, justice a fugitive, and liberty in chains. Only a few years ago men were denounced because they doubted the inspiration of the bible—because they denied miracles and laughed at the wonders recounted by ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... at her face in one of the mirrors, and then tucked into place a vagrant lock of hair with a shapely finger, thereby suggesting, had there been a cynical observer present, that Miss Alma Marston never allowed any situation, no matter how crucial, to take her ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Spuyten Duyvil. To port, only a few scattered gleams along the base of the cliff or atop it, showed that the sparsely settled Palisades were drawing abeam. The ceaseless, swarming activities of the metropolis were being left behind. Silence was closing in, broken only by vagrant steamer-whistles from astern. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Rend and ravel and tear and pick; What can resist these hooks of steel, Sharp as the claws of the ancient Nick? Cast-off mantle of millionaire, Pestilent vagrant's vesture chill, Rags of miser or beggar bare, All ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... deserved distinction for its opening poem, "The Vagrant," which proceeds from the thrice-gifted pen of Mrs. W. V. Jordan. The piece is one well worthy of close attention, since it contains to a marked degree those elements of charm which render its author so prominent among amateur bards. Bold and discriminating choice of words and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... are many others. The Burges were religious people, used their slaves kindly, and brought them up well, so that the negroes on the plantation to-day are respectable, and in some instances, exemplary people, very different from the vagrant negro type which has developed since the War, making labor conditions in some parts of the South uncertain, and plantation life, in some sections, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... age of the Romans. Each may have continued to imitate the approved ornaments of its predecessors, till we trace in the productions of this contemporary pottery, the patterns used by the nations of antiquity when just emerging from barbarism. Hunting, the most necessary of arts to the vagrant and carnivorous savage, is the employment celebrated on all these vessels, A stag, followed by ferocious quadrupeds and hungry bipeds, forms their general ornament. I have picked up the same groups among Roman ruins, have often contemplated them in the cabinets of the curious, and here I ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... mentioned what had been their own domestic experience of the case. They described the wandering propensities which took the lad away from home, and the odd concealment of his waistcoat, on the last occasion when he had returned from one of his vagrant outbreaks. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... the town an hour's walk lives the mother of Basilio and Crispin. The wife of a heartless man, she struggles to live for her sons, while her husband is a vagrant gamester with whom her interviews are rare but always painful. He has gradually stripped her of her few jewels to pay the cost of his vices, and when the suffering Sisa no longer had anything that he might take ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the days He went about his vagrant ways, And prowled at eve for good or bad In lanes and alleys of BAGDAD, Once found, at edge of the bazaar, E'en where the ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... equality of sleep, to inquire how many of its phenomena are common to all classes, to all degrees of wealth and poverty, to every grade of education and ignorance. Here, for example, is her Majesty Queen Victoria in her palace, this present blessed night, and here is Winking Charley, a sturdy vagrant, in one of her Majesty's jails. Her Majesty has fallen, many thousands of times, from that same Tower, which I claim a right to tumble off now and then. So has Winking Charley. Her Majesty in her sleep has opened or prorogued ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... need it, thank you. I'm not afraid of a few tramps. Besides I sent one of my men over to the island yesterday, and he couldn't find a sign of a vagrant. If any tramps were ...
— The Curlytops on Star Island - or Camping out with Grandpa • Howard R. Garis
... my spectacles! [EVERSMANN goes out and returns again with a big pair of glasses.] The Attorney-General must make a thorough examination of this vagrant's papers.... I will not have these French clowns in my country. [He looks through one of the books.] The Crown Prince's seal—But no—no ... the vagabond must have stolen ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... held a consultation. Three were for going on, after they had breakfasted, and leaving the vagrant to his fate. One was for giving help and, being the leader of the party as well as a red-skinned "Good Samaritan," ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence, because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life with Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the tyranny of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without answer by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly entered into him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone, that was, who had a trace of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and ceremony held in Hastings's Theater, was not less than shocking. It had seemed so to the principal, but he knew Phil; and knowing Phil he laughed when the English teacher protested that it would compromise her professional dignity to allow a student to discuss the vagrant canines of Main Street in a commencement essay. She had expected Phil to prepare a thesis on "What the Poets Have Meant to Me," and for this "The Dogs of Main Street" was no proper substitute. The superintendent of schools, scanning the programme before it went ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... a heavenly, warm spring morning, and Sheba, having made herself ready, wandered into the garden to wait among the flowers. The rapturous first scents of the year were there, drawn by the sun and blown by vagrant puffs of wind from hyacinths and jonquils, white narcissus and blue violets. Sheba walked among the beds, every few minutes kneeling down upon the grass to bury her face in pink and yellow and white clusters, inhaling the breath of flowers and ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... who shall find his way home before sunlight, has just staggered heavily along, roaring out the burden of the drinking song of the previous night: the last houseless vagrant whom penury and police have left in the streets, has coiled up his chilly limbs in some paved comer, to dream of food and warmth. The drunken, the dissipated, and the wretched have disappeared; the more sober and orderly part of the population ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... that evening to confer with Joel Ham, B.A., and consider what was best to be done under the circumstances. The men of the township recognised that it was their bounden duty to support the master in an affair of this kind. When occasion arose they assisted in the capture of vagrant youths, and when Joel imagined a display of force advisable they attended at the punishment and rendered such assistance as was needful in the due enforcement of discipline. It was understood by all that the school would lose prestige ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the hill—for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that you are outside the spread of the fan; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... fitting place it well might grace An honest farmer's dwelling These cornflowers mild and poppies wild, With others past my telling; The osier fine, the blossoming vine, The meadow-sweetening clover— All vagrant stuff, and like enough To ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... clad, as usual, with elegant simplicity, and her fair hair resembled gold in the vagrant gleams of sunlight which stole through the boughs, drooping their odorous blossoms over her, and scattering the delicate rosy-snow leaves on the ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... beside himself. "Zounds!" he stormed. "I have had enough impudence to contend with to-night. Begone; or up you go for a vagrant." ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... of the faithful, but only at saving individual souls, which in the act of being saved are removed beyond all activity and all contact with the world. Buddhism, therefore, is not a power which makes actively for civilisation. It is a powerful agent for the taming of passion and the prevention of vagrant and lawless desires, it tends, therefore, towards peace. But it offers no stimulus to the realisation of the riches which are given to man in his own nature: it checks rather than fosters enterprise, it favours a dull conformity to rule rather than the free cultivation of ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... ninth century, but in 870, and again in 1010, the Danes sacked the town, and it would seem that the bridge was destroyed, for early in the twelfth century we find a reference to the ferry being definitely fixed at Cambridge, and that before that time it had been "a vagrant," passengers crossing anywhere that seemed most convenient. This fixing of the ferry, and various favours bestowed by Henry I., resulted in an immediate growth of prosperity, and the change was recognized by certain Jews who took up their quarters ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... were dried. How Jennet blush'd, how Alfred with a stride Bore off his prize, and fancied every charm, And clipp'd against his ribs her trembling arm; How mute we seniors stood, our power all gone? Completely conquer'd, Love the day had won, And the young vagrant triumph'd in our plight, And shook his roguish plumes, and laugh'd outright. Yet, by my life and hopes, I would not part With this sweet recollection from my heart; I would not now forget that tender scene To wear a crown, or make my girl a queen. Why need ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... dismay of his amazement in finding himself quarreling with the perfect wife, a vagrant memory came to George that he had heard that Genevieve had a hot temper. She certainly had. He didn't notice how handsome she looked kindled with anger. He only knew that the rose garden in which they lived was being destroyed by their angry hands; ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... to pay Alfred's father; he also forgot to visit Brownsville. Years afterwards Alfred met Palmer. He was painting, he was an artist, so he stated. He looked like a vagrant; there was not much change in his face, only a little more weather beaten, the lines and wrinkles deeper, the eyes more dull and his ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa: either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had breathed fitfully for a season upon the ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... he! Aha, there be never a vagrant, gipsy nor beggar dare come anigh in Sir Richard's time. And witches be few hereabouts since old Mother Mottridge was ducked, and scolds and shrews be fewer by reason ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... life, unheeded until passed, but never to be recalled without pleasure. About eleven the guests generally depart, and by midnight the great avenue of this city is hardly disturbed by a foot-fall; not a sound comes on the ear except the short, fierce wrangle of packs of vagrant curs crossing each other's hunting-ground, which they are as tenacious of as the Indians are of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... let me instance further the attitude toward "Fashion" of that class of women who live most openly and directly upon the favor of men. These know their business. To continually attract the vagrant fancy of the male, nature's born "variant," they must not only pile on artificial charms, but change them constantly. They do. From the leaders of this profession comes a steady stream of changing fashions; the more extreme and bizarre, the more successful—and because they are ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... general policy against him. He had a brave manner of coming up to a party of them in a bar and of holding himself nimbly at the borders of the company until he was included in a round. He was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles. He was insensitive to all kinds of discourtesy. No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living, but his name was vaguely ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... them therein, upon the penalty of twenty shillings, to be payd as a fine to the county treasury, and to be leuyed upon theire estates for non-payment in way of distresse by warrant from any one Assistant or Com'r. This order to be observed as to vagrant and susspected persons fownd wandring from town to town, hauveing no passes; such to be seized for examination and farther disspose by the authority; and if any negroes are free and for themselves, travelling without such ticket or certificate, they to bear the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... violet. There was never a definite sound, only the sibilance of a stillness made of many interwoven sounds, soft lisp of wavelets on the sands a hundred feet below, hum of nocturnal insect life in thickets and plantations, sobbing of a tiny, vagrant breeze lost and homeless in that vast serenity, wailing of a far violin, rumour of distant motor-cars. A night of potent witchery, a woman willingly bewitched. . ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... things. Yet on the first attack of a depressing illness I cease to be a gentleman, I am rude to ladies who do their best and kindest to serve me, and I talk to the friend who comes to cheer and comfort me as if he were an idle vagrant who wanted to sell me a worthless book with the recommendation of the pretence that he wrote it himself. Now that I am in my right mind, I am ashamed of myself, ashamed that it should be possible for me to behave ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... purify'd by flames, ascend the sky, My better and more Christian progeny! Unstain'd, untouch'd, and yet in maiden sheets, While all your smutty sisters walk the streets. Ye shall not beg, like gratis-given Bland, Sent with a pass and vagrant through the land; Nor sail with Ward, to Ape-and-monkey climes, Where vile Mundungus trucks for viler rhymes. Not sulphur-tipt, emblaze an ale-house fire! Not wrap up oranges, to pelt your sire! O! pass more innocent, in infant state, To the mild limbo of our father ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... there Loveday earned a few odd pence, for a few hand's turns done when necessity or charity called in her vagrant services, but the Flora Dance of Bugletown was held upon the eighth of May, and when May Day dawned she had but tenpence for all her store—and the riband would cost as many shillings. Despair settled in her heart for the first time; often before it had knocked but been refused more than a ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... Dr. Frazer's remarks in G.B. ii. p. 454. He thinks that the air might in this way be purged of vagrant spirits or baleful ghosts, as the Malay medicine man swings in front of the patient's house in order to chase away the disease. Cp. G.B. ii. 343, where a rather different explanation is attempted ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... meadow and took a road that skirted another great piece of forest. The sun came up, drank off the vagrant wreaths of mist and dried the dew from the sedge. There was promise of a hot, fierce, dazzling day. Another halt. "What's the matter this time?" asked the men. "God! I want to march on—into something happening!" Rumour came back. "Woods in front of us full of something. Don't know yet whether ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... into the market without title or masquerade that blinds the public to the value of what he has to sell? I would turn art adrift, titleless, R.A.-less, out into the street and field, where, under the light of his original stars, the impassioned vagrant might dream once more, and for the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... be. The most grotesque, the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea, and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and diseased love of self, intertwined ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Suddenly, a vagrant ray of the brilliant sun reached down through a break in the overcast of clouds and touched the shining hull of the Ancient Mariner with a finger of gold. Instantly, the ship shone like the ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... knew, too, that the little sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... States, sine cura, would be considered by him as a fair discharge of the obligation of the Government to him for his services. Lord Liverpool was not disposed to prostitute such favours upon a mercenary and intriguing vagrant, and referred him to the Government of Lower Canada, then in charge of Sir George Prevost, who had succeeded Sir James Craig. Henry knew the little estimate that was placed upon his services in Canada; he therefore betook himself back to the United States, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... capital. In 1886, England was shocked by the expulsion from Moscow of the well-known English Member of Parliament, the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling). Despite his influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital "within twenty-four hours," like an itinerant vagrant. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... wonderment. Here was a vagrant of the highroads and woods, quoting the refrain of Villon's Contreditz de Franc-Gontier, and pronouncing the French language with as soft and pure an accent as ever came out of Provence. Meanwhile, Mr. Arbroath, paying ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... soul-stirring acclamations, I acknowledged in what is generally termed a neat and appropriate speech. Noggs was at the first ballot elected Sergeant-at-Arms and door-keeper in general, the duty of which offices he promised to fill to the very best of his abilities. A vagrant-opinion was rife that Monsieur Souley would have filled the office of door-keeper much better, himself being so easily opened and shut. However, as Noggs had been voted the office, we all reconciled ourselves ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... saying that the evil of a vagrant and brutalised population began in your days, and is approaching to ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... chairs and silver plate, from oatmeal, cheese, and wine to nutmegs and Shakespeare's plays; but here came also tramp craft—broad, deep-laden bottoms from the Netherlands, and English and Dutch boats from the West Indies. These picturesque vagrant sails sought their customers from landing to landing, and sold their cargoes at comparatively low prices. Such a ship was assort of bargain boat for these scattered settlers up the creeks of the James; a queer, transient department store at the ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... book into the open day; Happy, if made so by its garish eye. O'er earth's wide surface take thy vagrant way, To imitate thy master's genius try. The Graces three, the Muses nine salute, Should those who love them try to con thy lore. The country, city seek, grand thrones to boot, With gentle courtesy humbly bow before. Should nobles gallant, soldiers frank and brave ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... As the early Vagrant Acts included "minstrels" in their definition of rogues and vagabonds, it is evident that the suitors of the Minstrelsy Court would have run the risk of commitment to the House of Correction and a whipping, if the acts had not specially excepted the franchise ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... tailors and cooks worked fantasies in silk and velvet, sugar and paste. Thomas Harman, whose grandfather had been Clerk of the Crown under Henry VII., and who himself inherited estates in Kent, became greatly interested in the vagrant beggars who came to his door. He made a study of them, came to London to publish his book, and lodged at Whitefriars, within the Cloister, for convenience of nearness to them, and more thorough knowledge of their ways. He first published his book in 1567 as A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... said Lord Dunseveric. "In time you will perhaps learn courtesy. But I did not come here to-night to teach manners to vagrant Yankees. I came to tell Mr. Ward that he has been denounced to the Government as a seditious person, and that I received orders to-night ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... If however you still doubt me, bring me a dollar next time, make a secret mark on it, and I will give it you back turned into gold. But the matter must not go further. And then you will no longer question my chance of discovering the elixir of life. Only I should like to punish that beggarly vagrant, that rascally herb-culler, and pitiful conjuror, as he deserves. Let him only come for once into my quarters! With all his contemptible jugglery, I would astound him! I am so enraged with the fellow, the blood runs into my head at ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... men speak of her Unmoved, and vagrant pulses stir To greet her passing-by, And I, in all her worshipper Must serve ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... must be trim, Must not indulge in vagrant whim, Of voice or vesture. Boudoir decorum will allow No gleaming eye, no ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... noble men, Will blind them to a host of flagrant faults. The moon was full, and 'twixt two silvered clouds Looked forth, like any princess from between The tasseled curtains of her downy bed. The vagrant wind came through the opened blind, And whispered of the desert; with its hand Fanning the flame that in the silver urn Mimicked a star. Beneath the rays I wrote: I should have slain you both for your intent Of murder; but I spare, ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a vagrant," the young man answered. His voice was low and singularly sweet. It seemed to suit the indolence of his attitude and the lazy, inconsequent smile. "I called on our consular agent here," he continued, ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the Roumanian people; hiding in the maize to catch the reaping songs; listening at spinning parties, at festivals, at death-beds, at taverns; taking the songs down from the lips of peasant women, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and all manner of humble folk who were the custodians of this vagrant community verse. We have passed so entirely out of the song-making period, and literature has become to us so exclusively the work of a professional class, that we find it difficult to imagine the intellectual and social ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... having you arrested for vagrancy? How I do regret that Cousin Augusta's entreaties mollified my heart toward you. Pardon me, I have not introduced you. This is my cousin, Miss Oddson, and this is my miraculous friend, the world-renowned author, vagrant, and naturalist, Mr. ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the new State officials be entrusted with the unhampered control of civil affairs, and this was more than enough to revive the bulldozing methods that had characterized the beginning of Hamilton's administration. Oppressive legislation in the shape of certain apprentice and vagrant laws quickly followed, developing a policy of gross injustice toward the colored people on the part of the courts, and a reign of lawlessness and disorder ensued which, throughout the remote districts of the State at least, continued till Congress, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... a sudden a wretched bitch waddled out from the woods into his path. It was a vagrant bitch, as thin as a skeleton, and so big in the belly that she walked with difficulty. Her dugs dragged along the snow, for she was in pup. They came from opposite directions, two lonely creatures, who are paddling their own canoes in America, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... simmering in my mind, set me wishing to go aboard one of these ideal houses of lounging, I had plenty to choose from, as I coasted one after another, and the dogs bayed at me for a vagrant. At last I saw a nice old man and his wife looking at me with some interest, so I gave them good-day and pulled up alongside. I began with a remark upon their dog, which had somewhat the look of a pointer; thence I slid into a compliment on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would not be kind, I think it would be easier. You ought to give me up, you know, and let me go to jail. I'm a drunkard and a vagrant, and worse—but—you ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... little old Woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant, as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... The Zenians have a strange way of being right about such things; their high-strung, sensitive natures seem capable of responding to those delicate, vagrant forces which even now are only incompletely ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... that kind of service we have treated about above, and knowing that error and human inventions in religion will not offer themselves, but with wiped lips, and a countenance as demure as may be, and also being persuaded that this opinion of Mr. K. is vagrant, yea a mere alien as to the scriptures, I being an officer, have apprehended it, and put it in the stocks, and there will keep it, till I see by what authority it has leave to pass and repass as it lists, among the godly ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... time Dorothea was asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I lay eggs and hatch them out, You seek the flowers most sweet and fragrant; And, sipping honey, stroll about, At best a good for nothing vagrant." ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... old. Single. Had two sisters in Brooklyn who were poor. In this country eighteen years. Had no regular trade but worked in hotels as porter. Out of work five months. Worked on a farm a good deal in Ireland. Looked like a vagrant. ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... evening Wilhelm returned home, and, as was inevitable, told Frau Muller the news, she nearly fainted, and had to sit down. She was struck dumb for some time, and then only found strength to utter low groans. Her lodger turned out of Berlin like a vagrant. A householder too! Such a respectable, fine young gentleman, whom she had watched over like the apple of her eye for seven years—dreadful—dreadful. But it was all the fault of the low wretches ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... mean?" asked the sheriff, who knew that persons like him had opportunities of hearing and knowing more about local circumstances, in consequence of their vagrant life, than any other ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... therefore escaped, though very narrowly. [49] With Castelmaine was allied one of the most favoured of his wife's hundred lovers, Henry Jermyn, whom James had lately created a peer by the title of Lord Dover. Jermyn had been distinguished more than twenty years before by his vagrant amours and his desperate duels. He was now ruined by play, and was eager to retrieve his fallen fortunes by means of lucrative posts from which the laws excluded him. [50] To the same party belonged an intriguing pushing Irishman named White, who had been ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Max's vagrant mind wandered away from the service to the picture of his mother over his brother's littered desk, to the Street, to K., to the girl who had refused to marry him because she did not trust him, to Carlotta last of all. He turned a little and ran his ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of seclusion in prison will ever confer these qualities upon them. Imprisonment, to be followed by liberty, however rigorous it is made, is accordingly no solution of the difficulty; the only effective way of dealing with the incorrigible vagrant, drunkard, and thief, is by some system of permanent seclusion in a penal colony. All men are not fitted for freedom, and so long as society acts on the supposition that they are, it will never get ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... a fairy pageant clear cut against rosy skies and watched by him from the stony bases of inaccessible cliffs—and yet it was familiar, goodly, his old accustomed company. This face—and that—and that! how he startled from it laughter or indifference or vagrant thought. There were low exclamations, a woman's slight scream, pause, confusion, and from the rear an authoritative voice demanding reason for the delay. Past him, staring and murmuring, swept the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... other place, unless by the most accustomed road, forty lashes; the same for travelling in the night without a pass; the same for being found in another negro's kitchen, or quarters; and every negro found in company with such vagrant, receives ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... wrote unceasingly. Many fragments he covered and deposited, an irregular heap, at his right hand. At his left an adolescent mound of cigarette stumps grew steadily larger. A cloud of tobacco smoke over his head, driven here and there by vagrant currents of air, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... man was, the more precarious his grip on life, the greater his significance in the eyes of Doctor Bicknell. He would as readily forsake a poet laureate suffering from a common accident for a nameless, mangled vagrant who defied every law of life by refusing to die, as would a child forsake a Punch and Judy ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... again!" cried the colonel; "my two wards embracing and fondling a vagrant, vagabond peddler, before my eyes! Is this treason, Mr. Griffith? Or what means the extraordinary visit of this ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... could fancy those gloomy eyes at the head of the table watched them with a sort of envy, I think there must be something fatal to gaiety in the mere responsibilities of wealth; I am sure that there is something corrupting in the labours of its acquisition. I think I had rather be a vagrant, with a crust in my knapsack, a blue sky above me, and the adventurous road before me, than look upon the world with a pair of eyes so laughterless as his who was ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... is possible to imagine a more ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first chapter there is a ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... functions has no connection with the working of freedom, any further than it may have been a struggle to get rid in some measure of the surveillance of the mother country in order to coerce the labourer so far as possible by vagrant laws, &c. The immediate pretext was the passing of a law by the imperial Parliament for the regulation of prisons, which the House of Assembly declared a violation of that principle of their charter which forbids the mother-country to lay a tax on them without their consent, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the brother of Ingjald, the Sheepisles' Priest, came to Bjorn isles for fishing. [Sidenote: Thorolf's quarrel] He took ship as one of the crew with a man called Thorolf. He was a Broadfirth man, and was well-nigh a penniless vagrant, and yet a brisk sort of a man. Hall was there for some time, and palmed himself off as being much above other men. It happened one evening when they were come to land, Hall and Thorolf, and began to divide the catch, that Hall wished both to choose ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous
... are not without your grievances; we sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you. In the rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... is strewn with these human cocoons. The reclining friend breaks the silence with a word or two of Cree in an undertone to the steersman, a screech-owl cries, from high overhead drops down that sound which never fails to stir vagrant blood—the "unseen flight of strong hosts prophesying as they go." It is the wild geese feeling the old spring fret even as we feel it. In imagination I pierce the distance and see the red panting throat of that long-necked voyageur as he turns to shout back ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the student is often poor. With a will resolute to overcome difficulties, Rome may however at last be reached. Thus Francois Perrier, an early French painter, in his eager desire to visit the Eternal City, consented to act as guide to a blind vagrant. After long wanderings he reached the Vatican, studied and became famous. Not less enthusiasm was displayed by Jacques Callot in his determination to visit Rome. Though opposed by his father in his wish to ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... wealth and pow'r, Some pompous palace, or some blissful bow'r, Aghast you start, and scarce, with aching sight, Sustain th' approaching fire's tremendous light; Swift from pursuing horrours take your way, And leave your little ALL to flames a prey; [dd]Then through the world a wretched vagrant roam; For where can starving merit find a home? In vain your mournful narrative disclose, While all neglect, and most insult your woes. [ee]Should heav'n's just bolts Orgilio's wealth confound, [J]And spread his flaming palace on the ground, Swift o'er the land the dismal rumour ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... found herself out on the street her step was so light on the pavement that she was rather like a rose petal blown fluttering along by soft vagrant puffs of spring air. Under her flopping hat her eyes and lips and cheeks were so happy that more than one passer-by turned head over ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in the scroll you prepared for my lamented kinsman, eh? They are, for the most part, deep red, dark scarlet—that list of fair dames! She doesn't belong to them—yet! No title, man; not even a society lady. A stroller, which is next door to a vagrant." ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... in the discussion of philosophy! Do you remember it? But that is now far away. Will that happy time ever return? Shall we one day meet again? Here my life is restless, uncertain, precarious, and, what is worse, indolent, illiterate, and vagrant. I do no work, I live in idleness, I ramble about; I do not read, I no longer study; my books are forsaken; now and then I glance over a few metaphysical works, and after a days walk through dirty, filthy, crowded ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Family.' And they all laughed; and that little joke, you know, won my heart,—I don't hear many jokes from Mr. Arbuton;—and so I said what a blessed life a painter's must be, for it would give you a right to be a vagrant, and you could wander through the world, seeing everything that was lovely and funny, and nobody could blame you; and I wondered everybody who had the chance didn't learn to sketch. Mr. Arbuton took it seriously, and said people had to have something more than the chance to learn before they ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... She married Rabbi Isaschar Suesskind Oppenheimer, also a singer and musician, and together the couple wandered from city to city, and from palace to castle, discoursing sweet melodies. The lady's morals suffered from this vagrant life, and the Jewish community of Frankfort stood aghast at her amours. Jewish women are usually remarkably virtuous, and Michaele's evil ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... their election unawares, and infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives. Not consciously and strongly to will the right, not resolutely and with coercion of the vagrant self to will to take God for our aim, is to choose the low, the wrong. Perhaps none, or very few of us, would deliberately say 'I choose Mammon, having carefully compared the claims of the opposite systems of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Milton, Johnson records his own experience. 'Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.' Johnson's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... due partly to the increased supply of silver from the Spanish-American mines, were not infrequently disastrous to those who were already living close to the margin of subsistence. As never before country roads and the streets of towns were encumbered with the vagrant poor, and the jails and almshouses were filling up, as a result of Elizabethan legislation, with petty thieves, "rogues ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Jentham had certainly been the guest of the gipsies on Sunday evening but had returned to Beorminster shortly after nine o'clock. He had stated that he was going back to The Derby Winner, and as it was his custom to come and go when he pleased, the Romany had not taken much notice of his departure. A vagrant like Jentham was quite ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... over the apartment, but the shyer boy dared not seat himself upon any of those handsome satin-covered chairs. He slunk behind Molly, casting his eyes down and nervously twirling his cap. For, little vagrant though he was, his street life had already taught him that it was the correct thing for lads and men to bare the head in the presence ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... for giddy pleasure calls, And shows the marbles, tops, and balls, What's learning to the charms of play? The indulgent tutor must give way. A heedless, wilful dunce, and wild, The parents' fondness spoil'd the child; The youth in vagrant courses ran; Now abject, stooping, old, and wan, Their fondling is ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... edifying—whether this young man had been prepared by previous errors of example and education—or whether he fell into mischief because he had nothing else to do in these Black Islands; certain it is, that from the operation of some or all of these causes conjointly, he deteriorated sadly. He took to "vagrant courses," in which the muse forbears to ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... to Egypt and Syria, and killing him there. In this way they did much toward ridding European society of its most turbulent elements; while at the same time they gave fresh development to the spirit of romantic adventure, and connected it with something better than vagrant freebooting.[321] By renewing the long-suspended intercourse between the minds of western Europe and the Greek culture of Constantinople, they served as a mighty stimulus to intellectual curiosity, and had a large share in bringing about that great thirteenth century renaissance which is ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... dream, no mirage of a vagrant brain like that sea-picture, or that wild vision at Beauseincourt, but sober, and sad, and strange reality. I understood my position from that moment, geographically as well as physically. I was a prisoner in the house of Basil Bainrothe (while he, perchance, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... with a band of wandering Algonquins had convinced the Jesuits that their schemes of mission-conquest could not bear much fruit if they were confined to the vagrant tribes of the north. Farther west in the peninsula of the great lakes lived Indians of fixed habits and domicile, and otherwise further advanced towards civilisation than the improvident hunting tribes round about Quebec. Of these the most notable were ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... like a bunch of China-asters?), or, if new grocers were to fill their windows with mountains of currants and sugar, made seductive by contrast and tickets,—what security was there for Grimworth, that a vagrant spirit in shopping, once introduced, would not in the end carry the most important families to the larger market town of Cattleton, where, business being done on a system of small profits and quick returns, the fashions were of the freshest, and goods of all kinds might be ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... business to escort from earth youthful souls who have been baptized in the Church, and who are friendless and vagrant, having inhabited while on earth such parts of New York City as the Five Points and Water street, and having neither kindred nor connection to ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... doing quite the wrong thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... though, I fear; Offset it with tobacco! Next, I'll find Hedge-roses, star-dust, and a vagrant's mind; His mother's heart now let me breathe upon; When west winds blow, I'll whisper in her ear: "Apocalypse awaits him; ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... Emoluments of high officials. The Schurman Commission. 561 The Taft Commission. The "Philippines for the Filipinos" doctrine. 563 The Philippine Civil Service. Civil government established. 565 Constabulary. Secret Police. The Vagrant Act. 567 Army strength. Military Division. Scout ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... specimen is becoming very rare. The old family servant who, born and reared in the dwelling of his master, identified himself with the welfare of those whom it was his lot to serve, is giving place in every direction to that vagrant class which has sprung up within the last thirty years, and whose members roam through the country unfettered by principles, and uninfluenced by attachments. For it is one of the curses of slavery, that its victims ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... it? is not quite so bad, for then the hooting of a vagrant owl, or it may be the distant howl of a prowling timber wolf, that gray skulker of the pine lands, is apt to break the monotony; but even in the midst of summer there is lacking the hum of insects and the bustle of woods life—at best one hears the ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... There was a capatas, or overseer, and seven or eight paid peones, the others being all agregados—that is, supernumeraries without pay, or, to put it plainly, vagabonds who attach themselves like vagrant dogs to establishments of this kind, lured by the abundance of flesh, and who occasionally assist the regular peones at their work, and also do a little gambling and stealing to keep themselves in small change. At break ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... with ingratitude, for they do not depredate very flagrantly on his estate; but because their pilferings and misdeeds occasion loud murmurs in the village. I can readily understand the old gentleman's humour on this point; I have a great toleration for all kinds of vagrant, sunshiny existence, and must confess I take a pleasure in observing the ways of gipsies. The English, who are accustomed to them from childhood, and often suffer from their petty depredations, consider them as mere nuisances; ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... employment in a human-hair factory, failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway. I was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did. But I remember well a basement window at the down-town Delmonico's, the silent appearance of my ravenous face ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... service, we were scarcely conscious of the large, white dumplings that bulged before us, with a delicious sticky sweet sauce, trickling down their dropsical sides. We plied our spoons with languid interest around their outer edges, as calves nibble around a straw stack. Our vagrant minds scoured the Spanish Main with ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
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