"Cast-off" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unexceptionably genteel book ever written, being the principal favourite. It makes the young Jew ashamed of the young Jewess; it makes her ashamed of the young Jew. The young Jew marries an opera dancer, or if the dancer will not have him, as is frequently the case, the cast-off Miss of the Honourable Spencer So-and-so. It makes the young Jewess accept the honourable offer of a cashiered lieutenant of the Bengal Native Infantry; or if such a person does not come forward, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... beer-money and oatmeal water is made for them gratis, some will, of course, imbibe it, especially if they see that thereby they may obtain little favours from their employer by yielding to his fad. By drinking the crotchet perhaps they may get a present now and then-food for themselves, cast-off clothes for their families, and so on. For it is a remarkable feature of human natural history, the desire to proselytise. The spectacle of John Bull—jovial John Bull—offering his men a bucket of oatmeal liquor is not a pleasant one. Such a John Bull ought ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... the Colonel; "if only I had known that!" He laughed. "Well, I'll leave you. Six o'clock—what's this?" as he stooped and picked up Maurice's cast-off hussar jacket. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... dare to go near our district lady who sent me to the Orphanage, for fear she should send me back. And I thought of old Sally Blackburn, who used to live next door to us in Westminster, and made a living with buying and selling cast-off clothing and she was good to us,—and when father came in very drunk, she would take us children into her little place to be out of the way. So I hunted her up; and then, Mother Agnes, I did a very wrong thing. She is old and stupid, ...
— Daybreak - A Story for Girls • Florence A. Sitwell
... all the gain they can. The richest amongst them are generally contrabandistas, and in the large towns go from house to house with prohibited goods, especially silk and cotton, and occasionally with tobacco. They likewise purchase cast-off female wearing-apparel, which, when vamped up and embellished, they sometimes contrive to sell as ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... anything else. A man who has soldiered for nearly fourteen years isn't fit for civil life. Now, make your citizen's clothes into a bundle and take them around the corner to a little Jew store you will find there. Mose buys all the recruits' cast-off clothing. He'll not give you much for them, but the little he will give you will keep you in gingerbread as long as you stay in ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... cupboard. She had a few handsome dresses left—survivals of her last phase of splendour, on the Sabrina and in London—but when she had been obliged to part with her maid she had given the woman a generous share of her cast-off apparel. The remaining dresses, though they had lost their freshness, still kept the long unerring lines, the sweep and amplitude of the great artist's stroke, and as she spread them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn rose vividly before her. An association ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... air in a March north-easter. The old seamen look with most amazement, perhaps, on the preparations for amusement,—the juggler's cups and balls, or Harlequin's spangled dress; the quiet landsman wonders at the gigantic ice-saws, at the cast-off canvas boots, the long thick Arctic stockings. It seems almost wrong to go into Mr. Hamilton's wardroom, and see how he arranged his soap-cup and his tooth-brush; and one does not tell of it, if he finds on a blank leaf the secret prayer a sister wrote down for the ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... trader. All manner of men and women came to him; some for a permanent change of costume, some for a night's exchange only. Peasants, grown suddenly and strangely rich, bearing passports and tickets for other lands, came to buy the cast-off finery of the one time nobility. Russian, Japanese, American soldiers and officers came to Wo Cheng for a change, most of them for a single twelve hours, that they might revel in places forbidden to men in uniform. But some came for a permanent ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... store-keeper promised to send the farmer's cast-off garments to the vessel, and Mr. Sherwood was soon introducing his friend to the members ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... in a good humor. The sight of his darling of yesterday, dressed in such magnificence to celebrate the day on which her poor wretched cast-off lover was to blow his brains out, roused such a joy in his heart that it was impossible not to show it in his words. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... seemed much inclined to come to an understanding with us and open up his country to trade and civilisation. He came to call on me in great state, dressed in the handsome uniform of a general of the French Republic, the cast-off garments of some performer at the Cirque Olympique. He had a tricolour plume in his hat, a gold laced coat with lapels turned back on the chest, white breeches, and top boots. He wore the decoration of the Legion of Honour, which he had been given for some service or other he had done our fleet ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... notice them here." (Which was true enough, for in those days the land was strewed with shreds and patches of the war. The drivers and conductors of street cars wore overcoats made out of shoddy army blankets, and the dustmen went about in cast-off infantry caps.) "What troubles me is that I can't wait to start you on ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... swept over her. Ally sometimes sewed for Miss Balch when that brilliant being descended on North Dormer, and no doubt she picked up presents of cast-off clothing: the treasures in the mysterious trunk all came from the people she worked for; there could be no doubt that the white ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... all. I think we are all of us scoundrels and hypocrites. I myself am a degraded old man, and as useless as a cast-off shoe. I abuse myself as much as any one else. I was rich once, and free, and happy at times, but now I am a dependent, an object of charity, a joke to the world. When I am at last exasperated and defy them, ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... The Prime Minister was now the most wonderful person in existence; and a great public testimonial was got up for him in the shape of a wreath cut out of a single ruby; the colonies got up a millennial exhibition in his honour, at which the chief exhibits were his cast-off clothes, a lock of his hair, a bad sixpence he had passed, and other relics. He was invited everywhere at once; and it became the fashion for ladies to send him a slice of bread and butter to take a bite out of, and subsequently ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... trunk and barrel, groping about on the top shelves of closets, peering into rag-bags, exasperating the lodgers with her persistence and importunity. She was collecting junks, bits of iron, stone jugs, glass bottles, old sacks, and cast-off garments. It was one of her perquisites. She sold the junk to Zerkow, the rags-bottles-sacks man, who lived in a filthy den in the alley just back of the flat, and who sometimes paid her as much as three cents a pound. The stone jugs, however, were worth a ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... cynical courtier to his neighbour, "I hope thou admirest the magnanimity of our sovereign, who deems he is performing a most generous action in presenting Manuel with his cast-off mistress, who has tried to poison him, and with whom he has been at his wits' end what to do, and in dowering her at the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... to smoking in bed and was burned out of house and home in consequence. Then it was that his kind-hearted fellow citizens donated, for the furnishing of his new residence, all the cast-off bits of furniture and odds and ends from their garrets. "Charity," observed Captain Josiah Dimick at the time, "begins at home with us Bayporters, and it generally begins up attic, that ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... aunt," replied she; "I preferred to live with Mademoiselle Angelique. She is a lady, a beauty, who dresses to surpass any picture in the book of modes from Paris, which I often looked at on her dressing-table. She allowed me to imitate them, or wear her cast-off dresses, which were better than any other ladies' new ones. I have one of them on. Look, aunt!" Fanchon spread out very complacently the skirt of a ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sweet and beautiful that she could strain it to her heart forever, it is laid away in the envious concealment of the grave? Can the wife, or the husband, help mourning, when the partner and counsellor is gone,-when home is made very desolate because the familiar voice sounds not there, and the cast-off garment of the departed is strangely vacant, and the familiar face has vanished, never more to return? Can the child fail to lament, when the father, the mother,-the being who nurtured him in infancy, who pillowed his head in sickness, who prayed for him with tears on his ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... notwithstanding their rouge, by their badly-shaven beards, and by their voices and gait.[1431] No difficulty has been found in obtaining men and women among the prostitutes of the Palais-Royal and the military deserters who serve them as bullies. It is probable that the former lent their lovers the cast-off dresses they had to spare. At night all will meet again at the common rendezvous, on the benches of the National Assembly, where they are quite as much at home as in their own houses.[1432]—In any event, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the dragon brightening up, "I like bananas. People often throw the skins away here. I prefer them to orange peel. I live on such things, you must know, the cast-off refuse of humanity," he said, becoming ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... got near the schooner the boat cast-off, Senhor Silva saying that he would go on board, and ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... mandarin coats, and all the better products of needle, silk and floss, of which the Chinese have been masters for centuries, than the city of the court. The population consists largely of great officials and their families, whose cast-off clothing, toned down by the use of years, often without a blemish or a spot, finds its way into the hands of dealers. The finest furs,—seal, otter, squirrel, sable and ermine,—are brought from Siberia, Manchuria and elsewhere, for the officials and the court, and can be secured for less ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... kind word, and see that they have good and wholesome food, clean and comfortable quarters. Once in a while give them a holiday, or an evening off, a cash remembrance at Christmas, and from time to time some part of your wardrobe or cast-off clothing. They are just like children, and must be treated with the rigor and mild discipline which a schoolmaster uses toward his pupils. In all their movements they should be noiseless and as automatic ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... that speech, excepting the last flourish, from my master: but since he has used it like his cast-off clothes, 'tis mine by custom. (Aloud.) Will you not answer? I love you, madam, have loved you long; and, by my soul! ne'er said so much before to any woman breathing. [Nina turns round and lifts her veil, Antonio turns away.] (Aside.) By all that's intolerable, my ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... there was Betty with all the farming men, and a cleared field, and a heavily laden cart; one man at the top of the great pile ready to catch the fragrant hay which the others threw up to him with their pitchforks; a little heap of cast-off clothes in a corner of the field (for the heat, even at seven o'clock, was insufferable), a few cans and baskets, and Rover lying by them panting, and keeping watch. Plenty of loud, hearty, cheerful talking; but no minister, no Phillis, no Mr Holdsworth. Betty saw me first, and ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... usher, and reprobation as to the Squire's; assuring them, that provided they took his advice, and followed the plan which he would afterwards impart to them in confidence at the proper time, he could almost take it upon himself to say, that in a short time, no tyrannical usher, or cast-off tutor of the Squire, should venture to show his face, with or without tawse or ferule, within the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Cleverly indeed is this work performed, the hemp being well wrapped round the stems and then brought again into the outer framework. Occasionally bits of cloth, thread pieces, vegetable fibres, &c. are introduced. On one occasion I got a nest with a cast-off snake-skin neatly worked ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... street seemed full of Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl in ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... time I notice frequently, on the asphodels in the paddock and on those of the neighbouring hills, certain indications that the eggs have recently hatched out. There are certain cast-off articles of clothing, certain rags and tatters, left on the threshold of the egg-chamber by the new-born grubs as they leave it and hurry in search of a new lodging. We shall see in a moment what these ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... because she had been the mistress of the fat Molina. He had in his youth at Marseilles, in the Jewish quarter of the town, sold old clothes to the Piedmontese and sailors in port. Now it was his delight to behold the Parisians of the Boulevard or the clubs buy as sentimental rags the cast-off garments of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... near her bed, Cordelia saw the broad, white plains illumined with brilliant sunshine and the girls exercising on the glittering crust of snow occasioned by the thaw. The little girls were sliding down hill on boards and broken shovels, cast-off dripping-pans and ash-pans—everything, indeed, that could be seized on for coasting. A group of large and middle-sized girls were walking over the mission pasture, stretching for a mile on every side. Another band of girls ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... impressed with the ingenuous and solemn manner of the traveler, and all but the father found immediate relief in his declaration. Some of the cast-off clothes of the captain, which had been removed with the goods from the city, were produced; and young Wharton, released from the uneasiness of his disguise, began at last to enjoy a visit which had been undertaken at so much personal risk to himself. Mr. Wharton retiring to his ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... sorry for a married man, Harvey," said he, "as I do for a half-starved dog. I'm always going out of my way to feed some of these cast-off dogs around town, so why shouldn't I do the same for a poor devil of a husband? I'll make you comfortable until you get into Davis', but don't you ever let on to these damned women that you're a failure, or that you're strapped, or that that measly little wife of yours gave you the sack. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... North Carolina the legislature declared the tariff law unconstitutional. At the commencement of the University of Georgia the orator of the occasion appeared in a suit of white cotton cloth, while his valet wore the cast-off suit of shining broadcloth. The "Tariff of Abominations," passed in 1828, was producing revolutionary results in all the region where tobacco, cotton, and rice were grown, and this was the governing section ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... I at that time, and I resolved to get into the first empty shell I could find where I might hide. There was soon an opportunity. A heap of cast-off shells presented itself, and I popped into an enormous crab cover, where I waited for my unknown companion to ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... to call on him. I went to his office in a lemon grove on a hill at the edge of the town; and there I had a surprise. I expected to see one of the usual cinnamon-colored natives in congress gaiters and one of Pizzaro's cast-off hats. What I saw was an elegant gentleman of a slightly claybank complexion sitting in an upholstered leather chair, sipping a highball and reading Mrs. Humphry Ward. I had smuggled into my brain a few words of Spanish ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... that it would be of any possible assistance to Dinah in her arrangements. He might as well have provided them for a squirrel or a magpie. The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old shoes, ribbons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of vertu, wherein her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... he said; "there are tears enough in this world, and we need not deposit a few more in the heart of man. These," said he, showing the verses, "are the cast-off, useless feathers of my soul; it has moulted since then, and spread its bolder wings for eternity!" He then continued to burn and destroy, while I looked out of the broken window at ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... life; and Cytherea's groves grow not a flower that can compare with the laurels which fame places on the brow of the conqueror. It is well for me that I am ten years your senior, else I should have been obliged to come behind you, Eugene, and pick up your cast-off leaves." ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... It was impossible, was it not, to take a child who had lived in a den of iniquity in among my own children? And I considered myself very kind and good, because he was a care, not to me, but to the servants in the kitchen, and because not I but the cook fed him, and because I gave him some cast-off clothing to wear. The boy staid a week. During that week I said a few words to him as I passed on two occasions and in the course of my strolls, I went to a shoemaker of my acquaintance, and proposed that he should take the lad as an apprentice. A peasant who was visiting ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... he said. "You dear, kind, good fellow, consider for a moment, and you will see that it can't be. What would be said of her and of me, if you made Susan rich with your money, and if I married her? The poor innocent would be called your cast-off mistress. People would say: 'He has behaved liberally to her, and his needy friend has taken ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... no lumbering vehicles, laden with heavy merchandise, tear up the soil into ruts. No cab-drivers cast sarcastic remarks at you from their high perch. The only annoyance comes from the cast-off nail of a horse-shoe or the sharp splinter of a macadamised stone. The air is as fresh as on Creation's morn. Up hill and down again one can hurry on without ever touching the brake. For the first ten miles, the stately bulk of Tinto dominates the landscape. What a splendid ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... shale; carapace, plastron; cockle, conch, periwinkle, cowrie, whelk, mitre shell, abilone shell; exuviae (cast-off); conchite (fossil). Associated Words: conchology, conchologist, malacology, testaceous, cockled, mollusk, conchiferous, conchiform conchometer, conchometry, crustacean, exuvial, exuviate, exuviation, Loricata, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... in faded blue denim which had evidently been refashioned from cast-off wearing apparel of their sires, followed after him, hand in hand, as if the advent of a stranger on the Rattler grounds was an event of interest, and he found himself facing a squat, red, white-bordered, one-storied building, over whose door a white-and-black sign told ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... only taken fork in hand for the sake of a little gentle exercise. One unhappy Jacques Bonhomme made hot and toilsome hay in thick brown clothes, plainly manufactured from a defunct Brother's gown; for, to judge from appearances, a cast-off gown is a thing unknown. It was good to see a Brother, in horn spectacles of mediaeval cut, tenderly chopping a log for firewood, and peering at it through his spectacles after each stroke, as a man examines ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... off the old one and swallows it. This fact has been doubted; but why should It be deemed incredible? Are there not parallel cases in the human family? GOLDSMITH tells us that he once lived for a fortnight on his coat and waistcoat; and every pawnbroker knows that a cast-off suit often furnishes the material for a family dinner. Why should not a frog sustain life with his Pants as ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... a small dug-out; but I came back in a large riverboat, down to the gunwales with the results of my thrown feet. Of course I kept all the money I had collected, though I paid the boat-hire; also I took my pick of the underwear, socks, cast-off clothes, shirts, "kicks," and "sky-pieces"; and when Company M had taken all it wanted there was still a respectable heap that was turned over to Company L. Alas, I was young and prodigal in those days! ...
— The Road • Jack London
... uncultivated or neglected, any amount of expenditure in building will fail to give that completeness and perfection of character which every homestead should command. Thus the tawdry erections in imitation of a cast-off feudalism in Europe, or a copying of the massive piles of more recent date abroad, although in miniature, both in extent and cost, is the sheerest affectation, in which no sensible man should ever indulge. It is out of all keeping, or propriety with other things, as we in this country have them, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... over his shoulders. It was not strange that he looked pale and haggard; for he had passed through three judicial ordeals since the last sunset, besides being scourged with the flagellum horrible and exposed to the rude buffeting of the midnight guard. He had been clothed in the cast-off purple of the Roman procurator and wore a derisive crown of thorns. But, as he issued from the Hall of Judgment, such was his commanding presence that the multitude was hushed and separated to ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... time a prairie mouse busied herself all fall storing away a cache of beans. Every morning she was out early with her empty cast-off snake skin, which she filled with ground beans and dragged home with ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... attitude of society in former times, and discards the idea that one must accept evil, dam it in, and hide it as if it were some necessary sewer; for the only course for a free community to pursue is to foresee evil and grapple with it, and destroy it in the bud. To diminish the number of cast-off children one must seek out the mothers, encourage them, succor them, and give them the means to be mothers in fact as well as in name. At that moment, however, Mathieu did not reason; it was his heart that was ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... bringing the flash and heavy, dull report of the old, cast-off military muskets which the Malays were using; and as these weapons flashed, the defenders of the various buildings seized the opportunity to return the fire, guessing at the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... are merely incidental to the main aim of their lives, to the one object that has brought them stampeding to Canada as to a new gold field, namely, quick way to wealth; and the only quick way to wealth was by the fur trade. In the wilderness of the Up Country wander some two or three thousand cast-off wood rovers of the old French fur trade. As the prodigals come down the Ottawa, down the Detroit, down the St. Lawrence, the English and Scotch merchants of Montreal and Quebec meet them. Mighty names those ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the elastic sides wriggled like living vermin, and ankles covered with vermicelli dipped in ink; then the most impossibly threadbare and discoloured coats, made, as it seemed, of old billiard cloths, of tarpaulin worn to the canvas, of cast-off awnings; overcoats of cast iron, the surface worn off the back-seam and sleeves—glaucous waistcoats, sprigged with flowers and furnished with buttons of dry brawn-parings; and all this was as nothing; what was prodigious, beyond ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... has entered shortly after MRS. KRAUSE. She is small, slightly deformed and gotten up in her mistress's cast-off garments. While MRS. KRAUSE is speaking she looks up at her with a certain devout attention. She is about fifty-five years old. Every time she exhales her breath she utters a gentle moan, which is regularly audible, even when she ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... of science, undoubtedly, evolution has won the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old time prejudices and slow conservatism, clinging to its creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the cast-off shell of oyster or clam, still resist it. The great body of the Christian laity looks askance on it. And even in progressive America, one of the largest and most liberal of American denominations has recently formally tried and condemned one of its clergy for ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... were not likely to be suspected of unlawful dealings, or at least were able to make a colourable pretext of Honest Trade to such Constables and Market Conners who had a right to question them about their barterings. From the Fishmongers we took sometimes money and sometimes rich apparel—the cast-off clothes, indeed, of the Nobility, birthday suits or the like, which were not good enough for the Players of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn, forsooth, to strut about in on their tragedy-boards, and which they had therefore bestowed upon ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... nothing of these happenings, had just finished exercising his men on the smooth green in front of the Castle of Crichton, and had dismissed them, when a gaberlunzie or privileged beggar, a long lank rascal with a mat of tangled hair, and clad in a cast-off leathern suit which erstwhile some knight had worn under his mail, leaped suddenly from the shelter of a hedge. Instinctively Sholto laid his ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... good grace, and maintained his genial character to the last, being always well received at all the noble houses where he formerly visited. Sir Bernard Burke writes that Cheslyn "at dinner-parties, at which every portion of his dress was the cast-off clothes of his grander friends, always looked and was the gentleman; he made no secret of his poverty or of the generous hands that had 'rigged him out.' 'This coat,' he has been heard to say, 'was Radcliffe's; these pants, Granby's; this waistcoat, Scarborough's.' His cheerfulness never ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... hours. Early one morning its mournful cries aroused the household, and exactly a week, to the very hour, after its mistress's death, the poor terrier expired beside the bed, its head and paws still resting on the cast-off shoes. This story shows how keenly some animals feel the loss of those who have treated ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... which the Warrens lived was across the road from the schoolhouse, and Mrs. Warren's voice was penetrating. Lem was accepted throughout his school-life at the home estimate. The ugly, overgrown boy, clad in cast-off, misfit clothing was allowed to play with the other children only on condition that he perform all the hard, uninteresting parts of any game. Inside the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... been moored here for an hour when he got on board and at once offered to sell me a figurehead he happens to have in his yard somewhere. He got Smith, my mate, to talk to me about it. 'Mr. Smith,' says I, 'don't you know me better than that? Am I the sort that would pick up with another man's cast-off figurehead?' And after all these years too! The way some of ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... not be happy with her here, among these forgotten hills, these widely scattered homesteads? Could I not be happy dissevered eternally from billiard-room and kursaal, race-ground and dancing-rooms? Yes, completely and unreservedly happy—happy as a village curate with seventy pounds a year and a cast-off coat, supplied by the charity of a land too poor to pay its pastors the wage of a decent butler—happy as a struggling farmer, though the clay soil of my scanty acres were never so sour and stubborn, my landlord never ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... &c (repetition) 104; supererogation &c (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum [Lat.], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity^; triviality &c (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum [Lat.], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. litter, rubbish, junk, lumber, odds and ends, cast-off clothes; button top; shoddy; rags, orts^, trash, refuse, sweepings, scourings, offscourings^, waste, rubble, debris, detritus; stubble, leavings; broken meat; dregs &c (dirt) 653; weeds, tares; rubbish ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... exhibited in obeying Elizabeth's moderate and reasonable requests. They mistook Mrs. Mellen's quiet manners for pride, and held her in slight favor in consequence; so dazzled by Elsie's manner, that when she gave them a cast-off garment or a worthless ornament, it seemed a much greater boon than the real kindness Elizabeth invariably displayed when they were ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... they were just moving off across the fields carrying shovels instead of rifles. Looking after them, beyond the belt of timber, one could see other parties like theirs on the distant slopes to the left, and here and there smoke. Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a wheelbarrow filled with cast-off arms. With the boyish good nature which never seems to desert these little men in red and blue, they stopped and offered us a few clips of German cartridges. They were burying their own men, they said, burning the Germans. The dead had been lying here for nearly a fortnight now while ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... chunky, he was not at all the picturesque figure which fancy has painted of his class. Instead of the red toque, which artists place on the heads of habitants, he wore a cloth cap with ear flaps coming down to be tied under his chin. His jacket was an ill-fitting garment, the cast-off coat of some well-to-do man, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above brightly beaded moccasins. When I paused, Paul fixed his eyes on an invisible spot in the snow and ruminated. Then he hitched the baggy trousers up, pulled the red scarf, that held them to his ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... wheels, 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
... wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best drew of some happier child, a gay little garment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that appeared, when they had crawled ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... said Tommy, entering, and depositing his bag on the counter, "have you got any cast-off clothes ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... not know, my dear Colette, that we destroy nothing in the house. We have upstairs, under the roof, a large room for cast-off things which we call "the lumber-room." Everything which is no longer used is thrown there. I often go up there, and gaze around me. Then I find once more a heap of nothings that I had ceased to think about, and that recalled a heap of things to my mind. They are not those beloved articles of furniture ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... ten years, whose mother was sold out yesterday, and who tonight cried herself to sleep when nobody was looking at her. Here, a worn old negress, whose thin arms and callous fingers tell of hard toil, waiting to be sold tomorrow, as a cast-off article, for what can be got for her; and some forty or fifty others, with heads variously enveloped in blankets or articles of clothing, lie stretched around them. But, in a corner, sitting apart ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... panting, she perceived that Katharina, worthy once more of her name of "water-wagtail," had flown past her and was chasing the little girl at a pace that she shuddered to contemplate. Mary soon saw that no one but Katharina was in pursuit; she moderated her pace, and awaited her cast-off friend under the shade of a tall shrub. In a moment Katharina was facing her; with a heightened color she seized both her hands ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... explore the mysteries of that dark garret. There perhaps he saw the cat, with "eyne of burning coal, crouching 'fore the mouse's hole." Doubtless in this old garret were wonderful mysteries to him, curious stores of old cast-off goods and furniture, and rats, and mice, and cobwebs. I fancied the indignation of some belligerent grandmother or aunt, who finds Willie up there watching a mouse hole, with the cat, and has him down straightway, grumbling that Mary did ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... ever keep me at home after this?" she said, as Phyllis and Nell stood surveying her dressed in one of their cast-off frocks, of a rose-coloured tint which suited her brunette complexion. "I shall be getting into your pockets the next time, and tumbling out in the ball-room ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... is a very easy thing to sit in one's study and demolish an opponent, who after all is generally no opponent at all, but only a man of straw, dressed up for the occasion with a few purposely-tattered shreds of the adversary's cast-off garments. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... possible, even more friendly, for aside from really fancying Helen, she took a perverse kind of pleasure in annoying Juno, who wondered "what she or Bell could see to like in that awkward country girl, whom she knew had on one of Katy's cast-off collars, and her wardrobe was the most ordinary she ever saw; fitch furs, think of that!" and Juno gave a little pull at the fastenings of her rich ermine collar, showing so well over her ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... me was a frowsy, seedy fellow, named Masthead—not larger, apparently, than a boy of sixteen years, though it was difficult to say from the outside how much of him was editor and how much cast-off clothing; for in the matter of apparel he had acted upon his favorite professional maxim, and "sunk the individual;" his attire—eminently eclectic, and in a sense international—quite overcame him at all points. However, as my friend ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... overlanders' camp, Where the serpents are in millions, all of the most deadly stamp, Wanders, daily, William Johnson, down among those poisonous hordes, Shooting every stray goanna, calls them 'black and yaller frauds'. And King Billy, of the Mooki, cadging for the cast-off coat, Somehow seems to dodge the subject of the ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... awaited him in a little wood close by. The good man was overjoyed to be of use, and started at once for the nearest town, where he soon discovered a shop where the court lackeys were accustomed to sell their masters' cast-off clothes. The princess dressed herself at once in the disguise he had brought, which was of rich material and covered with precious stones; and, putting her own garments into a bag, which her servant hung over his shoulders, they both ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... my leave. Rashid was waiting in my cast-off clothes, a new fez of civilian shape upon his head. He held my stirrup, and then jumped on to a raw-boned beast which had been 'borrowed' for him by his friends, so he informed me. It might be worth my while to buy ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... has been in being imploy'd about her Person; and indeed she is very seldom out of Humour for a Woman of her Quality: But here lies my Complaint, Sir; To bear with me is all the Encouragement she is pleased to bestow upon me; for she gives her cast-off Cloaths from me to others: some she is pleased to bestow in the House to those that neither wants nor wears them, and some to Hangers-on, that frequents the House daily, who comes dressed out in them. This, Sir, is a very mortifying Sight to me, who am a little ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of a few yards between the car and the engine, Fuller threw the switch and leaped for the cab. Murphy caught his arms and pulled him aboard. The Texas plunged backward down the track, racing the cast-off train as it rolled upon the siding. For a moment it seemed that they would collide at the north switch where the side-track re-entered the main line. Fuller, leaning from the cab, glanced apprehensively at the ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... it was seen that Dickey and Mopsey had not been wasting their time, for there was such a collection of cast-off uniforms and weapons as would have furnished a much larger company than theirs with outfits. The two who had gathered this remarkable collection together were standing over it in conscious pride; but Mopsey did not give them much opportunity ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... the overbearing minister of nature, who snaps you with unphilosophical as the clergyman once frightened you with infidel, is still a recognized member of society, wants taming, and will get it. He wears the priest's cast-off {195} clothes, dyed to escape detection: the better sort of philosophers would gladly set ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... mud-pies in a gutter, than in his splendid raiment and well-furnished nursery; an uninteresting nursery, where there were no cupboards full of broken wagons and head-less horses, flat-nosed dolls and armless grenadiers, the cast-off playthings of a flock of brothers and sisters—a very chaos of rapture for the fingers of infancy! Only a few expensive toys from a fashionable purveyor—things that went by machinery, darting forward a little way with convulsive jerks and unearthly ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... roaming about you run across an old cast-off suit of Mr. Black Snake, or of any other member of the Snake family, I wish you would remember me and let me know. Will you, ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... temporary help would be hers. Madame Dalmas called herself a French-woman, and signed herself "Antoinette," but she was really an English Jewess of low extraction, whose true name was Sarah Solomons. Her "profession" was to purchase—and sell—the cast-off apparel of ladies of fashion; and few of the sisterhood have carried the art of double cheating to so great a proficiency. With always a roll of bank notes in her old leathern pocket-book, and always a dirty canvas bag full of bright sovereigns in her pocket, she had ever the subtle temptation ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... softly for sheer shame?—we have given, not all, but most of us, what is practically the loose change in our trousers' pocket; not actually, of course; sometimes even that. We have spent more on everything else. We have made up boxes of cast-off clothes and old shoes for—Jesus! This has been a large part of our answer. Is it any wonder the hot blood sends the color climbing into our cheeks at the thought, and that we instinctively seek for some explanation that will soften the hard ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... sitting on a stone wall, and it must have been a brave crow that would have ventured within a mile of that ridiculous bundle of rags. The face was effectually concealed by a huge hat as is the case with most scarecrows, and all the cast-off clothing of Everdoze for centuries back seemed combined here in ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... given in time of accident, it is productive of great amusement at race meets and exhibitions, and never fails to excite admiration and wonder in the onlooker. Of course, this can be practised with an old or cast-off suit. ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... taking last, affectionate peeps at themselves in the long mirrors. Annesley took a last peep at herself also, not an affectionate but an anxious one. Compared with these visions, was she (in Mrs. Ellsworth's cast-off clothes, made over in odd moments by the wearer) so dowdy and second-hand that—that—a stranger would ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... author has a passion for circumstantiality, and, like the average Russian, such a desire for accuracy as even a German could not rival. To what the reader already knows concerning the personages in hand it is therefore necessary to add that Petrushka usually wore a cast-off brown jacket of a size too large for him, as also that he had (according to the custom of individuals of his calling) a pair of thick lips and a very prominent nose. In temperament he was taciturn rather ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... came into Tode's head with that suit of new clothes with which he presently arrayed himself. Not particularly new, either. Tom Roberts was in college, and they were his cast-off attire, worn before he, too, in his way became a butterfly; and he would not have been seen in them—no, nor have had it enter into the mind of one of his college mates that he ever had been seen in them, for a considerable sum ...
— Three People • Pansy
... still when they reached the top. Even in the half-light it could be seen that their clothes were ill-fitting, frayed, and torn. They wore cast-off hats. The tall man, whose face was clean-cut and made a pretence of being smooth-shaven, had a pliable one; the other was capped by a ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... and the splash of waters, and the mists streaming along the ravines. He told her—or rather he made her understand, for his language was simple—how at sudden outer influences his whole being fired, and from so trivial a thing as a cast-off horseshoe on the highway he was compelled to picture the rider, and set him upon the saddle and go riding with him to the King of Erin's court that is in the story of the third son of Easadh Ruadh in the winter tale. How the joy of the swallow ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... 6, 8.] where the roots of all individuality meet, the spirit rises up again [Smaragdine tablet, 10.] released from the caput mortuum, which is blacked on the floor of the hermetic receptacle. The residuum is represented by the cast-off raiment of the novice. Laboriously now, he toils forward in the darkness; the heights draw him on; escaping hell he will attain to heaven. His ascent up the holy mountain is hindered by a violent storm; he is thrown into ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... toilet was over, the valets and porter belonging to the wardrobe were called in, and they carried all away in a heap, in the taffety wrappers, to the tirewoman's wardrobe, where all were folded up again, hung up, examined, and cleaned with so much regularity and care that even the cast-off clothes scarcely looked as if they had been worn. The tirewoman's wardrobe consisted of three large rooms surrounded with closets, some furnished with drawers and others with shelves; there were also large tables in ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... tremendous purple. It springs upon you, as you turn from Old Street, and envelops you. There are high, black tenement houses. There are low cottages and fumbling passages. There are mellow fried-fish shops at every few yards. There are dirty beer-houses and a few public-houses. There are numerous cast-off clothing salons. And there are screeching Cockney women, raw and raffish, brutalized children, and men who would survive in the fiercest jungle. Also there is the Britannia Theatre and Hotel. The old Brit.! It stands, with Sadler's ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... on them. It was a very simple matter. A foreign family, finding themselves in straitened circumstances, were desirous of parting with various things, consisting for the most part in articles of female attire. They were anxious, therefore, to meet with a dealer in cast-off clothes, and this was one of Elizabeth's callings. She had a large connection, because she was very honest and always stuck to her price: there was no higgling to be done with her. She was a woman of few words and very shy and reserved. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... we find her bound hand and foot; a chain-shot fastened to her foot, and a sentry menacing her with his bayonet. The next volume shows us the Prince President in the act of being measured by his military tailor, while he offers money to his cast-off mistress Liberte, her mother (France) looking indignantly on. Immediately behind, a priest (in allusion to the support which the Papal party were receiving from this "eldest son of the Church") helps himself ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother's heels, equipped in a pair of father's cast-off galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with, one hand, as a fine lady does ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the Jews, and there must have been a great demand for them among the belles of Mayence, for I remember a ball there at which the Empress might have seen all the ladies of a quadrille party dressed in her cast-off clothes.—I even saw German Princesses wearing them" (Memoires ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Claude said of her, "but I hate to see a woman go around looking as if her clothes would drop off if it rained on her. And on Sundays, when she dresses up, she looks like a boy rigged out in some girl's cast-off duds." ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... poor this and that, after you set them on by rejecting them. They run about like blind, mad oxen till they bump their stupid heads against somebody that will have them. I shouldn't wonder if I got a second-hand husband one day, taking up with some cast-off ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... wearing Kedzie's cast-off clothes or from disguising as Jim's wife, but her downcast eyes revealed her bare shoulders and arms and her delicate evening gown. They had been exquisitely appropriate to night and night lights, but they were ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... fellow was resplendent in a battered silk hat and a tattered army coat; another was well dressed in a pair of cast-off boots and one of grandma's ragged aprons. Georgia and I tried to help to sort the things as they should be worn, but our efforts were in vain. Wrong hands would reach around and get the articles, and both sexes interchanged suits with apparent satisfaction. Grandma got quite ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... pass and down into that very region of the Dolomites. He made his living by stopping at the stronghold-castles of those times and entertaining the powerful of the earth by singing his poems set to music of his own making. Sometimes he got a suit of cast-off clothes in payment; sometimes only bed and board for a time. But he kept on singing his little poems and making more of them as he grew rich in experience of men and things; for he never grew rich in gold—money ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... her. Her fears turned out to be groundless; the kind-hearted German kept Yakov with him, let him study with his other pupils, fed him (dessert, however, was not offered him except on Sundays), and rigged him out in clothes cut out of the cast-off morning-gowns—usually snuff-coloured—of his mother, an old Livonian lady, still alert and active in spite of her great age. Owing to all these circumstances, and owing generally to Yakov's inferior position in the school, his schoolfellows treated him in rather a casual fashion, looked down upon ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to go a long way in the labourer's cottage; and with regard to clothes—it is doubtful if anything new is bought, in many families, from year's end to year's end. At "rummage sales," for a few pence, the women are now able to pick up surprising bargains in cast-off garments, which they adapt as best they can for their own or their children's wear. Economies like this, however, still hardly suffice to explain how the scanty resources are really spread out. Apart from a few cases of palpable destitution, it is not obvious ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... battered and brown with age and dirt, was worn slouchingly on his head, so as almost to hide his features, which were further concealed by a handkerchief tied under his chin, and a black patch over one of his eyes. A tattered cloak, the cast-off finery of a dandy of the palmy days of the old Knights of Malta, covered his shoulders, as did, in part, his legs, a pair of blue cloth trousers, through which his knees obtruded, and which were fringed with torn stripes at the feet. Such of his features as ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Indian is named Andrew. He can talk a little. He says the land portage from Fort McPherson to Fort LaPierre is lined with cast-off stuff that people have tried to carry and couldn't. It is a starving country and a starving march. So is this a starving journey by water. When we went ashore it was in a rousing gale of wind. Uncle Dick baked some bannocks in our old way, leaning the frying-pan against a stick driven down before ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... a cast-off mansion of gentility. There are a score of things about it to remind you that it was once a home, and to set you to speculating on the ways of the grim fate that has changed it into a place of torment. Whole volumes have been written on the subject, and all agree that is simply what I have described ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... her waist, but, if such a thing could be, in her finger-ends. All that she touches falls at once into harmony and proportion. Her eye for color and form is intuitive: let her arrange a garret, with nothing but boxes, barrels, and cast-off furniture in it, and ten to one she makes it seem the most attractive place in the house. It is a veritable "gift of good faerie," this tact of beautifying and arranging, that some women have; and, on the present occasion, it has a real, material value, that can be estimated in dollars and cents. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that would make a dog in America go mad. The dog biscuit that are fed to American dogs would pass as a delicate confection on the menu of any steamboat we struck, and I had rather lie down in a barn yard with a wet dog for a pillow and a cast-off blanket from a smallpox hospital for a bed, than to occupy the bridal chamber ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... breasts hardly fill out your clinging bodices, all askew, and how your hips are not yet grown to support your skirts properly—draggle-tails! I see you taking the morning's milk from the hearty milkman, or going an errand in your apron and a coat too small for you, or in your mistress's or mother's cast-off jacket, out at the seams, puffy-sleeved, years behind the fashion and awry at the shoulders because it is too big. I see your floppety hat which you cannot pin down tightly to your hair, because there isn't enough ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... weakness of all provincial habits to mistake graces for grace, flourishes for elegance, and exaggeration for merit, Annette soon acquired a reputation in her circle, as a woman of more than usual claims to distinction. Her attire was in the height of the fashion, being of Eve's cast-off clothes, and of the best materials, and attire is also a point that is not without its influence on those who are unaccustomed ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the cast-off eccentricities of the fashions of six years ago, and had drifted from the Rue de la Paix to this obscure Serbian shop which was selling them as serious articles of clothing. Jo tried them on, and one of the nurses became ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... the saloon. And now in the light it could be perceived that he bore the stamp of many years of vagabondage. He had none of the tidiness of the calculating and shrewd professional tramp. His wardrobe represented the cast-off specimens of half a dozen fashions and eras. Two factories had combined their efforts in providing shoes for his feet. As you gazed at him there passed through your mind vague impressions of mummies, wax figures, Russian exiles, and men lost on desert islands. His face was ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... the older man, and stood still. He looked so gentle, and yet so weary and weak, as he clung to the arm of his younger companion. They were not dressed like Italians, nor like any style of persons in particular, for their costume was evidently made up of cast-off garments that had seen better days. Their faces, though, were dark and thin, and there was a southern fire in the eyes of the younger man as he said at once in tolerable Swedish, "Pietro here is tired. He cannot get any further, miss. I told ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... our life, is a complex fluid. It contains the materials out of which the tissues are made, and also the debris which results from the destruction of the same tissues,—the worn-out cells of brain and muscle,—the cast-off clothes of emotion, thought, and power. It is a common carrier, conveying unceasingly to every gland and tissue, to every nerve and organ, the fibrin and albumen which repair their constant waste, thus supplying their daily bread; and as unceasingly conveying away from every gland and ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... Mr. Travis decided to call upon the lady of his heart and demand an explanation. After some rehearsal of what he wanted to say, Ambrose betook himself to the tenement in which the Tate family dwelt. At sight of her cast-off swain, Miss Aphrodite showed the whites of her eyes and narrowed her lips to a thin straight line—perhaps an inch and a half ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... long look from head to foot The dress was a poor enough velveteen and had a cast-off air, but it clung to her figure finely, and its sleeves were picturesque with puffs at the shoulder and slashings of white,—indeed the moonlight made her all black and white; her eyes, which were tawny brown by day, were black ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... teach us something—simplicity in ceremonies. For when Miss Kemp went to see the palace of the King all the decoration she saw there was a simple table and chair. A Tibetan kitchen was a very popular slide. In that country they apparently use a golf-bag to brew tea in, and cast-off bicycle wheels for plates. There prevails in Tibet some element of democracy, for Miss Kemp's cook was also a J.P., a Civil Servant, and held other such offices of fame. One of her assistants was a positive marvel—a human carpet-sweeper. If the floor was ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... with which the baron had performed it, one might suppose that he was not practising such arts of disguise for the first time, but was well-trained in them. With perfect calmness and deliberation he now put the cast-off articles into the parcels, hid them in the pockets of his clothes, and, after unscrewing the gold crutch-handle from his cane and replacing it by a plain ivory head, he drew up the little curtains and looked out with a keen, watchful gaze. ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... paying that debt as long as he had breath. Thus he wrought me up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers on one side represented in lively figures, and indeed, heightened by my imagination of being turned out to the wide world a mere cast-off whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such, with little to provide for myself, with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world, out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay. All this terrified ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... and corselets and helmets. But as helmets, corselets and even kilts wore out or lost their freshness more slowly than tunics, there were many imitation kilts and corselets of sheepskin painted, and many cheap, light helmets of willow-wood, covered with dogskin. But all these had genuine plumes, as cast-off plumes were even more plentiful ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... lack of cultivation were evident from the stains on the backs of her unshapely hands; from her broad, flat, finger-nails; and from her large ungainly feet, quite out of harmony with the pair of stylish boots she was wearing—cast-off articles, doubtless, of the lady. She was pretty, nevertheless, with a fresh exuberance of youth. Her large, gray, credulous eyes were those of a stupid but playful lamb; her hair, straight, and a very light blond, hung loosely here and there over ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in "full fig." With one officer, Colonel William Levy, since a member of Congress from Louisiana, I made my appearance on a hand-car, the motive power of which was two negroes. Descendants of the ancient race of Abraham, dealers in cast-off raiment, would have scorned to bargain for our rusty suits of Confederate gray. General Canby met me with much urbanity. We retired to a room, and in a few moments agreed upon a truce, terminable after forty-eight ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... good dose of fishing, to be taken as suited the day. So I betook me down a by-street, where the aerial carp promised the thickest, and, selecting a house well placed for a view, asked permission to mount upon the roof. It chanced to be a cast-off clothing shop, along whose front some fine, if aged, garments were hung to catch the public eye. The camera and I were inducted up the ascent by the owner, while my boots, of course, waited dog-like ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... of these people was very simple. Many of them had nothing more than a pair of short trousers on, with a dirty old turban, and even the place of this was sometimes supplied by a coloured rag, or a cast-off sailor's cap. The Malays wore long cloths wound round their bodies, with one end hanging over their shoulder. The Chinese preserved intact their usual costume and mode of life; and the coloured servants of the ship's officers were the only ones who were occasionally ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... fulfilment on a faulty map reference or a landmark which had been carelessly removed by an H.E. shell. One of the most intransigeant of this kind whom I remember could always, however, be softened by souvenirs; a cast-off Uhlan's lance or the rifle of a Bosch sniper went far to console him for the barrenness of a patrol report. I feel sure he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... "and this is the sum and substance of her offence! And all these witnesses," pointing to a group, who had pushed themselves forward, "have been brought into this honourable court, to affix the ownership of the high and mighty noble Duke and Duchess to these cast-off, worn-out clothes! And here comes this fine gentleman to swear to the robber of that," holding up the garment, "which he himself would not accept as a gift! Shame, say I; and I am certain every one of your hearts, Gentlemen of the Jury, reechoes my indignant feeling! Shame, say I, on everyone ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... found congenial fellowship in American spiritualism. Of late we hear less of spirit-rappings and far more of Theosophy. But this is only the same crude system with other names, and rendered more respectable by the cast-off garments of old Indian philosophy. There is a disposition in the more intellectual circles to assume a degree of disdain toward the crudeness of spiritualism and its vulgar familiarity with departed spirits, who must ever be disturbed by its beck and call; but it ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... criticism,—that, if we make blunders in our seamanship, even though professedly land-lubbers, some awful Knickerbocker stands by with the Marine Dictionary in hand to pounce upon us. But for the poor little innocents at home any cast-off rags of knowledge are good enough. We hand down to them the worn-out platitudes of history which we have carefully eschewed. We humbug their inexperience with the same nursery fables beneath whose leonine hide our matured vision detects the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
