"Broom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not think for an instant that this comprehends in full the awfulness of the scene. What has just been mentioned is a large waste of territory swept as clean as if by a gigantic broom. In the other direction some few of the houses still remain, but they are upside down, piled on top of each other, and in many ways so torn asunder that not a single one of them is available for any purpose whatever. It is in this district that the loss of life has been heartrending. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... enough to take a keen pleasure in the novelty of the situation, and ran up-stairs and down with hammer and broom, laughing and joking over the settlement of every picture and piece of furniture with contagious good humour. Alec could not understand it. Even his Aunt Eunice was not as downcast as he had pictured her in the night, over the loss of her old home. With patient, steady ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... in a hard, Neill Burgess voice, "guessed" that the adjoining recitation-room needed sweeping and dusting. She handed Booker a broom and dust-cloth, motioned to the room, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... sub-prioress, Dorothea Stettin, visits Sidonia and extols her virtue—Item, of Sidonia's quarrel with the dairy-woman, and how she beats the sheriff himself, Eggert Sparling, with a broom-stick. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... didn't lie awake lookin' for de mornin', did you? You ain't sick, nor sufferin' any way?" exclaimed Chloe, in a tone of mingled concern and inquiry, as she hastily set down her broom, and came toward the bed, with a look of loving anxiety ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... they chew betelnut and smoke tobacco, and although intoxicants are forbidden, they tap the toddy palm and drink of its easily fermented juice. Where metal finds its way into domestic utensils it is usually in the form of tin water-bottles and ewers. Every native possesses a sweeping broom, sleeping mats, coarse or fine, and bamboo or grass baskets. Most families use an iron pan for cooking, with a half cocoa-nut shell for a ladle. A large nut shell filled with palm-oil, and containing a pith wick, is the ordinary ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... deadly shock. More than an hour long they contended with varying success. Musketeers, pikemen, arquebusmen, swordmen, charged, sabred, or shot each other from the various hollows or heights of vantage, plunging knee-deep in the sand, torn and impeded by the prickly broom-plant which grew profusely over the whole surface, and fighting breast to breast and hand to hand in a vast series of individual encounters. Thrice were the Spaniards repulsed in what for a moment seemed absolute ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... glad he's got home, anyway," she remarked, aloud, to herself as she hung her dish-cloth tidily over the upturned dish-pan and took up her broom. "I 'ain't felt noways easy 'bout her sence she left, though I do suppose there ain't any sense to it. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two men approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of a cheese and hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began to strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it wholly; that too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder and surprise and rapture which broke from the man who had not ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... there is, outside the village, an inn for strangers, for they are not permitted to lodge inside. In front of some houses I remarked either a grass plot or an arrangement of colored sand and shells, sometimes little painted wooden statues, sometimes hedges oddly cut. Even the vessels and broom-handles were painted various colors, and cared for like the remainder of the establishment; the inhabitants carrying their love of cleanliness so far as to compel those who entered to take off their shoes, and replace them with slippers, which stood at the door for ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... most of it cheap but some of it of high grade. So far, ambition has in few cases gone beyond utilization of the native woods, some of which are surprisingly beautiful. Many small establishments in different States make such special products as spokes, shuttle blocks, pails, broom handles, containers for fruits and vegetables, and the like, but the total value of these products is small compared with the value of the crude lumber which is sent out of ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... to the winged dashboard, black, crimson, purple, or blue, which trails in the snow in company with their tails and the heavy tassels of the fur-edged cloth robe. The horses, the wide-spreading reddish beard of the coachman, parted in the middle like a well-worn whisk broom, the hair, eyelashes, and furs of the occupants of the sledge, all are frosted with rime until each filament seems to have been turned ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... At every other door is seen the lady of the house at work with pail, broom, scrubbing-brush, rags, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... charming spot; shaded by a little orchard they worked and sang the ropemaker's song, with a lingering, dragging melody. And then, after passing a little wood, the island itself came into view. It was covered with gorse, like a series of Oriental carpets dotted with the gold of the broom in bloom, woven with rose heather, and red heather, and purple heather. The bright green foliage of the wild roses "appeared" like arabesques. The sky, hanging low, bluish green, without a cloud, seemed as a silken film stretched to filter the heat of the sun. At ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... along, when the sound of another horse coming made me look round; and there I saw a dreadful sight,—a wild horse, tearing over the ground, with fiery eyes and streaming tail. On his back sat a crazy man, beating him with a broom; a crazy woman was behind him, with her bonnet on wrong side before, holding one crazy child in her lap, while another stood on the horse; a third was hanging on by one foot, and all were howling at the top of their voices as they rushed by. I scrambled ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... on more rapidly and the old man resumed his sweeping, muttering crossly into his long, white beard. As she came down the other side of the street half an hour later, she was watching Schulte from the corner of her eye. He was leaning on his broom, watching her. Seeing that she was going to pass without stopping he called to her and went slowly across the street. "You would make good tenants," he said. "I had to sue Bischoff. You can have it for forty—if you'll pay for the changes you ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... nor will he be made a cuckold by him. At the door there stood as guards two knights completely armed and with swords drawn. Behind them there stood four men-at-arms, each armed with an axe the sort with which you could split a cow down the back as easily as a root of juniper or broom. The knight hesitated at the door, and thought: "God, what can I do? I am engaged in no less an affair than the quest of Queen Guinevere. I ought not to have the heart of a hare, when for her sake I have engaged in such a quest. If cowardice puts its heart in me, and if I follow ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... women: the female Insurrectionary Force, according to Camille, resembles the English Naval one; there is a universal 'Press of women.' Robust Dames of the Halle, slim Mantua-makers, assiduous, risen with the dawn; ancient Virginity tripping to matins; the Housemaid, with early broom; all must go. Rouse ye, O women; the laggard men will not act; they ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... places the same day in the coach for Callander, in the Highlands. In a short time we came into a country of hillocks and pastures brown and barren, half covered with ferns, the breckan of the Scotch, where the broom flowered gaudily by the road-side, and harebells now in bloom, in little companies, were swinging, heavy with the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... eye.—Tyler. [Footnote: Weighty thoughts tersely expressed, like (7), (8), and (10) in this Lesson, are called Epigrams. What quality do you think they impart to one's style?] 8. The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun.— Longfellow. 9. Things mean, the Thistle, the Leek, the Broom of the Plantagenets, become noble by association.—F. W. Robertson. 10. Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the night.— Beecher. 11. In that calm Syrian afternoon, memory, a pensive Ruth, went gleaning the silent ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the servant, who behind you stands, Has fouled the beaker with his greasy hands. Brooms, dish-cloths, saw-dust, what a mite they cost! Neglect them though, your reputation's lost. What? sweep with dirty broom a floor inlaid, Spread unwashed cloths o'er tapestry and brocade, Forgetting, sure, the less such things entail Of care and cost, the more the shame to fail, Worse than fall short in luxuries, which one sees At no man's table but your ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Destiny: Hear thee my prayer! Grant that life's secret for e'er shall be kept. Wiser than mine is thy will; I dare Not dust where thy broom ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... despised Tomkins. "Why, if that man knows a Kendal frieze from a piece of black satin, it's all you can look for. Never bred up to the business, he wasn't. And his wife's a poor good-for-nought that wouldn't know which end of the broom to sweep with, and his daughters idle, gossiping hussies that'll drive their husbands wild one o' these days. Don't talk ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... been a wild week. The storm wind swept with its broom of rain; it lashed us and splashed us, thrashed noses and ears, whistled through our clothing, penetrated the pores of our skin. And in the deluge—sights that made us shudder—gaunt skeleton churches, cracked walls, smoking ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... ancient as itself, seem to lie almost below the feet of the spectator. Opposite him rise the purple peaks of Eildon, the traditional scene of Thomas the Rhymer's interview with the Queen of Faerie; behind are the blasted peel which the seer of Ercildoune himself inhabited, "the Broom of the Cowdenknowes," the pastoral valley of the Leader, and the bleak wilderness of Lammermoor. To the eastward, the desolate grandeur of Hume Castle breaks the horizon, as the eye travels towards the range of the Cheviot. A few miles westward, Melrose, "like some tall rock with lichens ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... worthy host wouldn't exchange that particular hubble-bubble with its everlasting contrariness for the most perfectly drawing nargileh in Turkey: like certain devotees of the weed among ourselves, who never seem to be happier than when running a broom-straw down the stem of a pipe that chronically refuses to draw, so Kirkor-agha Vartarian finds his chief amusement in thus tinkering from one week's end to another with his nargileh. At the supper table mine host and his brother both lavish attentions ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... passed, the head teacher said to me, "The adjoining recitation room needs sweeping. Take the broom and sweep it." ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... there'll be such a cloudburst that the Germans will think it's raining ships. Niagara Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard. Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who tried to sweep the tide back with a broom." ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... mingles with the gloom On empty stage and twilit aisle, She comes with rag and pan and broom ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... see a whisk broom hangin' up in a handy place, and it had a printed liebill on it, "This whisk broom free." And as my parmetty dress had got kinder dusty a slidin' and wobblin' as I had slode and wobbled, I went to brush off my skirt with it, when all of a sudden somebody or sunthin' ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... of my house!" And suiting the action to the word, Licorice caught up a broom which stood in the corner, and proceeded to apply it with good will. Bruno retreated, as was but ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... complain of anything that was. If her life spelled unrelieved drudgery she accepted it as the station to which it had pleased God to call her, and conceived that complaint would be a form of blasphemy. Now as she wielded her broom, her angular shoulders ached with rheumatism, and, in a voice as creaking as her joints, she sang, "For the Master said there is work to do!" Such was Aunt Hannah's creed, and it pleased her while she moiled over the work to announce ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... and shaking of clothes, and a combined cleaning of the shack. Sam made a broom out of willow branches; Jack cut some poles, out of which he designed to make ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... a large field and was deep enough to hide a horse, but Washington filled it up with trees, stumps, stones, old rails, brush and dirt, so that scarcely a trace of it was left. In places one comes upon old fields that have been allowed to revert to broom sedge, scrub oak and scrub pine. One is astonished at the amount that has never been cleared at all. Only by the most careful husbandry could such an estate be kept productive. It never could be made to yield ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... and is accompanied by a number of criticisms. Lamb advises Mr. Lloyd to complete the Odyssey, adding that he would prize it for its Homeric plainness and truths above the confederate jumble of Pope, Broom and Fenton which goes under Pope's name and is far inferior to his Iliad. Among the criticisms is one on Mr. Lloyd's use of the word "patriotic," in which Lamb says that it strikes his ears as being ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... girl all to-morrow. Pray do!" I became all attention—again the voice fell upon my ear. It was low and plaintive—the air was familiar to me—my whole soul became entranced—the tear-drop swam in my eyes—it was one of Scotland's sweetest ditties—"The Broom o' the Cowdenknowes." No one who has not heard, unexpected, in a foreign land the songs he loved in his youth, can appreciate the thrill of pleasing ecstasy that carries the mind, as it were, out of the body, when the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... winter months. When I asked about his work at the custom-house, which had been his chief occupation three years before, he answered evasively. By little and little, however, he threw off his reserve and told, at first with studied flippancy and then with frank bitterness, how "the new Republican broom swept clean," and how he had lost his job because of his loyalty to the Democratic party. He dwelt on the civil-service reform of President Cleveland, charging the Republicans with "offensive partisanship," a Cleveland ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... leaned forward to reach for the turkey-wing hanging beside the tongs. There had always been a turkey-wing beside her Grandmother Ware's fireplace. That is why Mary insisted on using one now instead of a modern hearth-broom. It suggested so pleasantly the housewifely thrift and cleanliness of an earlier generation which she loved to copy. She had prepared this wing herself, stretching and drying it under a heavy weight, and binding the quill ends into a handle ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... BROUGHAM, (broom,) HENRY, Lord, philosopher, law-reformer, statesman, orator, and critic, was born in 1779, at Edinburgh, where he was educated at the High School and University. He united with Jeffrey and Horner in establishing the "Edinburgh Review," ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... truth is no small achievement in a man of letters. Literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind, and fortunate is the man who wields it. Unhappily, while Mr. Gosse is daring in portraiture, he is the reverse in comment. In comment, as his writings on the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of the times. He can ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... screened from view by bushes in the low ground between us and the river. Much tall grass, woods, and broom-sedge covered the unwooded space between the opposing lines; rarely could a man be seen. Our men stood in the dry ditch and fired above the bank, which formed a natural breastwork. At my place, on the left of Company A, a large tree was growing upon the bank. I was ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... saw nothing for a time but fans and feathers of browning fern, dark shags of ling, and podded spurs of broom and furze, and wisps of grass. With great relief (of which I felt ashamed while even breathing it), I thought that the man was afraid to tell the rest of his story, and had fled; but ere my cowardice had much time for self-congratulation a tall figure rose from the ground, and fear compelled ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the dining room. It came awkward to me at first, but, after the madam told me how, I soon learned to do it satisfactorily. Then I had to wait on the table, sweep the large yard every morning with a brush broom and go for the mail once a week. I used to get very tired, for I was young and consequently not strong. Aside from these things which came regularly, I had to help the madam in warping the cloth. I dreaded this work, for I always got my ears boxed if I did ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... country with rock mounds sparsely overgrown with tufts of grass, and here and there are patches of boggy land, not real bog, but damp places where grow little clumps of rushes, and here and there among the rocks sorely- afflicted shrubs of broom, and the yellow-flowered shrub I have mentioned before, and quantities of very sticky heather, feeling when you catch hold of it as if it had been covered with syrup. One might fancy the entire race of shrubs was dying out; for one you see partially alive there are twenty skeletons which ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the clean floor or nice carpet. These little things really worried her; I could see they did. She never said any thing; but she would get up, take up the hat, brush the table with her handkerchief, and hang the hat in its right place, or send the house-girl with the broom after ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... wax thy bow, And scrape a ditty, jig, or so. Now don't wax wrathy, but excuse My calling you old Goody Muse; Because "Old Goody" is a name Applied to every college dame. Aloft in pendent dignity, Astride her magic broom, And wrapt in dazzling majesty, See! ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... minutes there and then went directly back to his room to browse over his recitations for the day. Once Tom found him there hunched up in a corner of the window-seat while the chambermaid, viewing his presence distastefully, draped the furniture with bedding and did her best with broom and duster to discourage him from a repetition of the outrage. Between ten and eleven on three days a week Steve put in an hour of study in the room. On other days he managed to snatch two half-hour periods in the library between recitations. ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... odours, early and late, Hypericum all bloom, so thick a swarm Of flowers, like flies clothing her slender rods, That scarce a loaf appears, mezereon too, Though leafless, well attired, and thick beset With blushing wreaths, investing every spray, Althaea with the purple eye, the broom Yellow and bright, as bullion unalloy'd, Her blossoms, and luxuriant above all The jasmine, throwing wide her elegant sweets, The deep dark green of whose unvarnish'd leaf Makes more conspicuous, and illumines more, The bright profusion of ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... BROOM.—This signifies that there is need for you to be careful in the choice of your friends, and to avoid rushing into an intimacy which you might later have cause ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... were of equal length except her own, and all were alike, not one full, strong, hard, the other soft, flabby, wrinkled, growing out of a knot at the hip. A whole psychological period apparently lay between that conclusion and—a broom-handle walking-stick; but the broomstick came, as it was bound to come,—thank heaven!—from that premise, and what with stretching one limb to make it longer, and doubling up the other to make it shorter, she invented that form of locomotion which is still carrying her ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... have to practice fighting no more with broom sticks and cans and etc. because Sargent James told us tonight that the rifles was comeing so I said to my boys that I hoped they was good shots so we could make a sucker out of the other squads and I told them if they was all as good a shot as me I wouldn't ...
— Treat 'em Rough - Letters from Jack the Kaiser Killer • Ring W. Lardner
... legal broom 's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that 's the reason he himself 's so dirty; The endless soot bestows a tint far deeper Than can be hid by altering his shirt; he Retains the sable stains of the dark ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... only way to reform is to put a good honest Democratic president in in 1884; then turn on the hose and give him a good hickory broom and tell him ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... and cattle and yellow broom-flowers, and fishing boats with lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrise towards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the eyes and the ears in all living perceptions until the poison of other-worldliness wells up suddenly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic full of echoes of ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... when proceeding to the sabbath, could get out by a door or window, were she to try ever so much. Their general mode of ingress was by the keyhole, and of egress by the chimney, up which they flew, broom and all, with the greatest ease. To prevent the absence of the witches from being noticed by their neighbours, some inferior demon was commanded to assume their shapes and lie in their beds, feigning illness, until the sabbath ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... ye all,—Hendrick, Hilda, Broom, Katy, Huygens and Lucretia. And thy cousins,—Wolfert, Diedrich, Mayken, Voost and Katrina. Good children ye have been, in the main, since I last accosted ye. Diedrich was rude at the Haarlem fair last fall; but he ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... broom falls from her hands, And is it dust that fills her eyes?— Shall go with him to golden lands And ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... persuaded to leave off unaccountably thrashing our generals; and when Purcell wrote "Come if you Dare," and many another martial ditty, the time had not long passed when Van Tromp sailed up the Thames with a broom at his mast-head. All the same, "Come if you Dare" is a fine song; "Fairest Isles, all Isles excelling," is one of Purcell's loveliest thoughts, and the words are more boastful than ferocious; "Saint George, the Patron of our Isle," is brilliant and the words are innocuous. ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... been treated by several biographers to a private view of the poet, with wild gesticulations, agonising in the composition of this poem; but where his wife did not venture to intrude, we surely need not seek to desecrate. 'I stept aside with the bairns among the broom,' says Bonnie Jean; not, we should imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. He has been again burlesqued for us rending himself in rhyme, and stretched on straw groaning elegiacs to Mary in heaven. All this ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... would be in our stockings next morning. The thermometer in that latitude was often twenty degrees below zero, yet, bright and early, we would run downstairs in our bare feet over the cold floors to carry stockings, broom, etc., to the nursery. The gorgeous presents that St. Nicholas now distributes show that he, too, has been growing up with the country. The boys and girls of 1897 will laugh when they hear of the contents of our ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... not appear to be a man over 30 years of age, and a large proportion were from 15 to perhaps 22 or 23. They had all the look of veterans, worn, stain'd, impassive, and a certain unbent, lounging gait, carrying in addition to their regular arms and knapsacks, frequently a frying-pan, broom, &c. They were all of pleasant physiognomy; no refinement, nor blanch'd with intellect, but as my eye pick'd them, moving along, rank by rank, there did not seem to be a single repulsive, brutal or ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... but a siltzer bottle? Did ye iver have to lay on ye'er stummick with ye'er nose burrid in th' Lord knows what while things was whistlin' over ye that, if they iver stopped whistlin', 'd make ye'er backbone look like a broom? Did ye iver see a man that ye'd slept with th' night before cough, an' go out with his hands ahead iv his face? Did ye iver have to wipe ye'er most intimate frinds off ye'er clothes, whin ye wint home at night? Where was he durin' th' war?' ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... a broom; Master, I knew, was teaching me the secret of balanced living. The soul must stretch over the cosmogonic abysses, while the body performs its daily duties. When we set out later for a stroll, I was still entranced in unspeakable rapture. I saw our bodies ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... withered grass stood out upon the hill-top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then a black shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozen particles before it. The sound was that of a broom sweeping—sweeping. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... required. Each carries a wand, to the upper end of which is fastened an evergreen wreath surrounding a large, gilt letter. Ranged in order the letters will spell the word "Merry Christmas." The verse for each is sung to the air, "Buy a Broom." The children enter only one at a time, using a polka step, boys and girls alternately. While singing they take steps and wave wand in time to music. At third line of each stanza the boys bow and the girls make a courtesy, right and left. The chorus at the end ...
— Christmas Entertainments • Alice Maude Kellogg
... slowly converging toward a point fifteen thousand miles off-planet and over the sunset line. The Space Scourge bore the device of a mailed fist clutching a comet by the head; it looked more like a whisk broom than a scourge. The Lamia bore a coiled snake with the head, arms and bust of a woman. Valkanhayn and Spasso were taking their time about screening back, and he began to wonder if they weren't maneuvering the Nemesis into a cross-fire ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... over to the San Andres to-night to take a big hunt manana. Not me. That horse was a blind. They pottered round tryin' to find some trace of Foy—blind fools!—till I met up with 'em. I'd done gathered in that mizzable red-headed Joe Cowan on a give-out horse, claim-in' he'd been chousin' after broom-tails. He'd planted Foy's horse, I reckon. But it can't be proved, so I let him go. He'll have to walk in; that's ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... inventor, with a laugh. "You keep away from Rad. You'll get to disputing again and interrupt me, and I have business on hand. Here, wait a minute. I'll find something for you to do," he went on, opening the door to disclose the immense man standing outside, a broom in his hand ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... cockpit half full of water and your clam bait afloat so much the merrier. Thus you are baptized into the sect of the deep sea rovers and the leap of the mysterious green dancers into your boat is the coming of Neptune himself. Henceforth his trident is at your mast head, a broom wherewith to sweep the seas as Van Tromp did. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... with colored ribbins. How dressy they will make me look. I shall lace my sandals on with yeller and red baby ribbin, them colors are so becomin' and make my complexion look fairer. We shall jest coin money out of my bazar, and I shall write to Ury to put in a piece of broom corn, and mebby we shall make jewelry; we could make some good mournin' jewelry out of coal ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... beautiful. Nowhere in America is there a lovelier picture than these meadow-lands, seen from the top of this mountain which overhangs them. The mountain is only about twenty-five hundred feet high: therefore, one loses no smallest shade of color in the view; even the difference between the green of broom-corn and clover records itself to the eye looking down from the mountain-top. As far as one can see to northward the valley stretches in bands and belts and spaces of varied tints of green. The river winds through it in doubling curves, ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... paint, and with cheeks like a blush—rose in bloom, 'As 'er lamps all a-larf on yer face, and a giggle goes round the whole room, 'Tisn't nice to sit square on a chair, with a feller a-sharpening 'is wit On your nob, and a rumpling your 'air till it's like a birch-broom in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... Beneath this cask lay a heap of coke and coal, and a coal-heaver's shovel leaned against the wall, at the service of any one who loved a cheerful hearth. The floor and walls did not differ much in colour, the former being of a dusky hue, that knew of no other purifier save the birchen broom; and the latter, a dirty red—a daub long since and clumsily made. A cuckoo-clock ticked on one side of an old cupboard, and before the window was spread a large deal table, at which sat the landlord playing ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... shovel and broom of twigs was sweeping up the market litter in the square. Nick wondered if his own mother's back would be so bent ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... be needin' a portable bath-tub something desperate. I wisht I had one. The last good wash I took was in Crystal Lake the other side of the Bear-tooth Mountain. When I was done I stood out till the sun dried me, then brushed the mud off with a whisk-broom." ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... "I've written to her to come to our house and stay a week. I want her to come and see my broom-corn room. I'll bet she'll be interested in it, and I'm going to give her six brooms to take home with her. But did you know ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... knows how to handle a broom and he has made a very clean sweep," and he pointed complacently to the heaped-up ruins of the Temple before them. "But how much ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... dizzy with sheer delight as she and Prince whirled through the last dance of the evening. Harrington was throwing in inconceivable flourishes, while Malemute Kid, utterly abandoned, had seized the broom and was executing mad gyrations on ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... cat on his lap, and in a chair tipped back against the wall, with a broom splint between his teeth, sat reading the ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... distended nostrils. And one eye was of a piercing mottled grey, and the other was as black as jet, deep sunk in her head. And her teeth were long and yellow, more yellow were they than the flower of the broom. And her stomach rose from the breast bone, higher than her chin. And her back was in the shape of a crook, and her legs were large and bony. And her figure was very thin and spare, except her feet and her legs, which were of huge size. And she greeted Arthur and all his household, ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... but little of the danger she underwent, when she ran forth with nothing but that long broom-handle to drive off a troop of chacmas. She only thought of the loss her kind master was sustaining; and down the ladder she hurried, and ran straight out to ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... you are willing to learn I'll take care that you have the chance. And, as a starter, you may get a broom and sweep up all this litter. But don't heave it overboard, or you'll have the dock people after you. Sweep it all together and put it into that empty barrel until we get out of dock and can heave it ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... the scraps of leather that had gathered through the week. Then he set the heavy iron lasts on their shelves, where they looked like a row of amputated feet. The shining knives and irons lay in order, ready to hand. A light cloud of dust from the broom made him sneeze, and he strewed another handful of wet tea-leaves on the floor. These he saved carefully from day to day to lay the dust before sweeping. When the bench and the shop were swept clean, he looked round with ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... greyhound, in order that I might get her exactly such another. Don't you think my memory will return well stored, if it is littered with defunct lapdogs. She is so devout, that I did not dare send her word, that I am not possessed of a twig of Jacob's broom, with which he streaked cattle ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... solitary. Alone the sturdy hunter beat the woods all day, on the track of panthers, bears, and deer; alone, all day, his pretty daughter kept the house against perils without and despondency within,—the gun and the broom alike ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... underneath, with here and there, over them, sketches with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had been an artist in his way,—his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on the ceiling with the smoke of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all, except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... dumped a wastebasket of varied rubbish into the open fire, leaned a broom against the mantel, readjusted the towel that protected her gray hair from the dust—hair on week days exposed with never a qualm to all manner of dust—cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an especial and piquant blight ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... chasing each other through her veins. Several disappointing clicks had preceded it—one which merely revealed a new baker's boy who hadn't troubled to discover whether the Cottage boasted a back-door or not, and another heralding the entry of Billy Brewster, armed with a stout broom and prepared to sweep the flagged path clean of the minutest particle of dust. So that Ann had at last been reluctantly compelled to fall back on the same explanation which had served her once before—that Eliot must have been detained ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... empty and could sit up, Uncle Brownwood got a pail, and a dipper, and a brush-broom, and cleaned him on the outside, and then rubbed him dry with an old towel, and put him to bed, though not until after he had scrubbed up the cave so they could live ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... did not consider—did not feel, while he climbed with careful footsteps up the rugged path to Dinas, lighted only by the moon, whose beams were continually obscured by the flying clouds. Pushing his way between the furze and broom bushes, he was careful to let no stray branch catch Valmai's face or hair, and as he reached the farm-yard in the rear of the house, he was delighted to feel a strong and swift ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... mamma's little housemaid, don't you see? They couldn't get along so well if it were not for me; For every Friday morning I take my little broom, And sweep and sweep the pretty rugs that lie in mamma's room. And then I sweep the door-steps off, and do not leave a crumb, And wipe the dishes, too, and oh, it is the bestest fun! And then, when mamma starts to bake, she says that maybe I Can make all by my very self a cunning ...
— A Jolly Jingle-Book • Various
... mistake—you should never have made a fortune. Rather you should have been a nice foreman with a meek little wife in four-dollar hats and a large portion of offspring. You should have lived in a model bungalow with even a broom closet in the kitchen and leaded windows at one side. You would have been a socialist and headed labour-union picnics. But as my husband and my father's assistant and all that—you are as impossible as that Faithful woman would be if she tried to be ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... "A new broom sweeps clean, but 'tis the auld wan as is good for corners," said Uncle Chirgwin, when with his nieces he sat beside the kitchen fire that night and discussed the events ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... saw in St. James's Park, about three or four feet high, with a covering of something between feathers and hair, of a dark brown colour, without wings, but in the place thereof two or three little branches coming down like sprigs of Spanish broom, long great legs, with feet only of three claws, and without a tail; I must make this description of it, and so may make others understand me. But when I am told that the name of it is CASSUARIS, I may then use that word to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... the speckless landlady, a cheerful creature in black cap and white apron, her bodice laced with ornamental green and red ribbons. She gave a cry of joy, and flew to meet him, broom in hand. "Welcome home, Heer Spinoza! How glad the little ones will be when they get back from school! There's a pack of knaves been slandering thee right and left; some of them tried to pump Henri, but we sent them away with fleas in their ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and the farms of the countryside, Loveday descended lower still—she became a "faggot." Thus from one born to wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough material for it. Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever terms, fit the due warning ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... broom rest. She is thin and inconspicuous. Her jacket hangs from her shoulders as from a valise. Her face is like cardboard, stiff and without expression. She looks at us and hesitates, then grudgingly leads the way into a very ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the woods, and the time comes for others besides the squire's guests to take their education in hand, and teach pheasants at least that they are no native British birds. These are a wild set, living scattered about the wild country; turf-cutters, broom-makers, squatters, with indefinite occupations, and nameless habits, a race hated of keepers and constables. These have increased and flourished of late years; and, notwithstanding the imprisonments and transportations which deprive them periodically ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... busied herself about the suite, clearing away the breakfast, sponging off the oilcloth table-spread, making the bed, pottering about with a broom or duster or cleaning rag. Towards ten o'clock she opened the windows to air the rooms, then put on her drab jacket, her little round turban with its red wing, took the butcher's and grocer's books from the knife basket in the drawer of the kitchen table, and descended to ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... looked uncouth and predatory, like a pair of seals that I once saw swimming far up the river Ristigouche in chase of fish. From the bow of each canoe the landing-net stuck out as a symbol of destruction—after the fashion of the Dutch admiral who nailed a broom to his masthead. But it would have been impossible to sweep the trout out of that little river by any fair method of angling, for there were millions of them; not large, but lively, and brilliant, and fat; they leaped in every ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... there's any other way for them to get acquainted,' retorted his wife. 'Pawliney can't be spared to go trapesing up to Boston. Her head's as full of nonsense now as an egg is of meat, an' she wouldn't know a broom from a clothes-wringer after she'd been philandering round a couple of months with people that are never satisfied unless they're peeking into something they ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... with your work," says she hoarsely, and all impatient. "What was I doing by the water? I wanted twigs for a broom. Have you had ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... woven cloth, a white bodice and kirtle, a yellow silk turban wound low over her brown curls, and long coral pendants in her ears. Her ears had been pierced against a piece of cork by her great-aunt when she was seven years old. In those germless days she had worn bits of broom-straw, plucked from the common sweeping-broom, in the lobes until the holes were healed and ready ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather |
