Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Merchant   Listen
noun
Merchant  n.  
1.
One who traffics on a large scale, especially with foreign countries; a trafficker; a trader. "Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad."
2.
A trading vessel; a merchantman. (Obs.)
3.
One who keeps a store or shop for the sale of goods; a shopkeeper. (U. S. & Scot.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Merchant" Quotes from Famous Books



... Flowers;" Campbell's "Lochiel's Warning;" and the trial scene from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. All these became favorite reading exercises ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail

... a note all its own. If the farmer and country merchant, who had passed through the abstract stage of political aspiration with the Jeffersonian democratic movement, were now, with Jackson, reaching out for the material advantages which political power might yield, the ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... disastrous results. Business with these men is in general quite a "go-a-head" sort of affair, and not being accompanied with method, in many cases leads to an embarrassed state of circumstances. Thus it frequently happens, that on investigation, the assets of a merchant who has stopped payment and is a supposed bankrupt, realize more than enough to pay the creditors, and the party finds to his agreeable surprise, that his position is not so bad ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... smirched lest he be caught in the deception—Pan who stamps his foot and shakes the thicket—whose habit is to sing with reedy voice of the green willows that dip in sunny waters. Although he now clatters his tins and baskets and cries out like a merchant, his thoughts run to the black earth and the shady hollows and ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... wrote regularly to Aunt Susan once a month, and every fall I sent her a box of game, which I told her I had shot in the woods near our boarding-house, but which actually I had bought of a commission merchant ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... sorry I cannot aid you there," De Lacy answered; "being neither a merchant nor a robber, I have ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott

... violence. If the peasants, who need land to maintain their families, may not cultivate the land about their houses, but one man, a Russian, English, Austrian, or any other great landowner, possesses land enough to maintain a thousand families, though he does not cultivate it himself, and if a merchant profiting by the misery of the cultivators, taking corn from them at a third of its value, can keep this corn in his granaries with perfect security while men are starving all around him, and sell ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... sat by the side of an odd old man, a retired tobacco merchant of great wealth, who was ready for conversation with all newcomers, and who seemed to feel that I was not doing my full share as an entertainer for the masses. He also had the unusual habit of speaking his thoughts aloud, whether complimentary or otherwise, ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn

... in the beginning of April 1808. Before I received any despatch from our Government I learned that Murat's presence in Madrid, far from producing a good effect, had only increased the disorder. I obtained this information from a merchant of Lubeck who came to Hamburg on purpose to show me a letter he had received from his correspondent in Madrid. In this letter Spain was said to be a prey which Murat wished to appropriate to himself; and all that afterwards came to my knowledge ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... arrangement by which Otterbourne could be separated from Hursley and have a Vicar of its own, the difference of income being made up to the Vicar of Hursley. This was done by the aid of a munificent lady, Mrs. Gibbs, the widow of one of the great merchant princes, whose wealth was always treated as a trust from God. She became the patron of the living, and the advowson ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the administration any person feels as a grievance, is attributed to the tyranny, or at least to the negligence, of that all-powerful body. Private individuals pester it with their wrongs and claims. A merchant appeals to it from the Courts of Rio Janeiro or St. Petersburg. A historical painter complains to it that his department of art finds no encouragement. Anciently the Parliament resembled a member of opposition, from whom no ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... alive. In the theory of that graceful art in which he was now embarking, our spirited leather-merchant was beyond all reproach. But, happily for the investor, forgery is an affair of practice. And as Morris sat surrounded by examples of his uncle's signature and of his own incompetence, insidious depression ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... received by Christendom in a corresponding spirit of liberal appreciation. One proof of that may be read in the invidious statement, supported by no facts or names, which I have just cited. Were this even true, a London merchant is not therefore a Londoner, or even a Briton. Germans, Swiss, Frenchmen, &c., are settled there as merchants, in crowds. No nation, however, is compromised by any act of her citizens acting as separate and uncountenanced ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... Christy was sure that he had seen him before. A couple of minutes of earnest cudgelling of his brain assured him that he had seen the stranger in Nassau; that he was one of the many who wanted to purchase the Bellevite, ostensibly for a merchant vessel, but really for the ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... present interest is concerned, the movement dates from 1844 when a young Persian merchant announced himself as the Bab. If we are to find a parallel in Christianity he was a kind of John the Baptist, preparing the way for a greater who should come after him, but the parallel ends quickly, for since the Mohammedan Messiah did not appear, his ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... received with the greatest kindness and hospitality by the inhabitants of Saint John's. Nettleship, Tom, and I were lodged together in the house of a merchant, whose wife and daughters, pitying our condition, did everything they could to restore us to health. Certainly we were very unlike the gay midshipmen we appeared when we sailed from Jamaica. Both the young ladies were very nice girls; but Tom ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston

... been amused by the airs of a naval captain and his wife, who are just come here. They complained that the merchant-service officers spoke FAMILIARLY to their children on board. Quel audace! When I think of the excellent, modest, manly young fellows who talked very familiarly and pleasantly to me on board the St. Lawrence, I long to reprimand these ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon

... city, which, half destroyed by the dreadful conflagration of 1842, had risen grander and more majestic from its ashes. {11} I took up my quarters with a cousin, who is married to the Wurtemburg consul, the merchant Schmidt, in whose house I spent a most agreeable and happy week. My cousin-in-law was polite enough to escort me every where himself, and to shew me ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... between persons, there is inevitably a circuit of exchange of influence. The realm of the social is the realm constituted by such exchange. It extends from the producing of the baby by the mother, and the simultaneous producing of the mother by the baby, to the producing of merchant and soldier by the world-powers, and the producing of the world-powers by ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... me, ye merchant daughters, did ye see So fayre a creature in your town before? Her goodlie eyes, like sapphyres shining bright; Her forehead, ivory white; Her lips like cherries, charming men ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... wringing her hands and weeping. Her face was distorted with pain; for her grief was blended with rage and humiliation. How contemptuously all these people treated her—Smith, the church-warden, a grocer, and Harris, the coal-merchant. Their cringing respect to her had always been amusing in its servility; but now she was as dust beneath their feet. They turned their backs, and ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... tow-horses and railroads carried little freight; the crops of the West lay in the farmers' granaries and the fabrics of the Eastern loom and varied products of mechanical industry crowded the warehouses; even the ragpicker in the streets suspended his humble occupation, for the merchant, unable to transport rags, refused to buy them of the gatherer. The investment of national wealth in horses being so enormous, any means that adds to the efficiency of the horse greatly enhances ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell

... New England ancestry it would be hard to find. The founder of the family came over from England soon after the Mayflower landed. Buck was named after Governor Dudley of the Plymouth Colony. He was born at Hartford, March 10, 1839. His father was a prosperous shipping merchant, one of whose boats, during the Civil War, towed the Monitor from New York to Fortress Monroe on the momentous voyage that destroyed the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... know the tramp at once, and can immediately distinguish him from the bona-fide 'harvester,' in quest of honest employment. The tramp, indeed, is the sturdy idler of the roads—a cousin-german of the 'beach-comber,' who is the plague of consuls and aversion of merchant skippers. In almost every port of any size the harbour is beset by a gang of idle fellows, whose pretence is that they are anxious to sign articles for a voyage, but who are, in reality, living from hand to ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for. Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes, in some measure, a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... equanimity with which reverses were accepted by the members of our gallant Amateur Army, and intend composing an ode in their honour, to be sung in camp to the accompaniment of bullets, bagpipes, and brass bands! (more alliteration for the Midlothian Maltese Marriage Merchant), the refrain of which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various

... passengers was a stout, good-looking man, a New York merchant. He had a large family at home waiting his return from a Western journey. He shuddered as he thought how near he had been to never meeting ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... forward. He saw that the launch was one belonging to some liner or merchant ship in the harbor. Three or four men belonging in that launch had leaped to the rescue of Mr. Green Hat. Dave, with one ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock

... in contrast to the rest, which is the case with a person who has lately removed a thick beard. This is Euthemio Trikaliss, under which name he appears in the way-book. He is the owner of the cargo, but the ship itself belongs to a merchant of ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... joys of motoring, would tear madly down the street in a luxurious limousine, his spurred boots resting on the broadcloth cushions, while the ci-devant owner of the car, who might be a banker or a merchant prince, would jump for the side-walk to escape being run down. With the declaration of war and the taking over of all automobiles by the military, all speed laws were flung to ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell

... the nickname of the headmistress—the Sultana. This Oakwood House School in which Rosalie now found herself was one of those very big old houses with a spacious, walled-in garden that probably was occupied in the Fifties somewhere, when St. John's Wood was out in the country, by a wealthy old City merchant who rode in to business two or three times a week, never dreaming that one day London was going to stretch miles beyond St. John's Wood, and his imposing residence go dropping down the scale of fashion eventually to become a school ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... the situation in which we stand, with an immense revenue, an enormous debt, mighty establishments, Government itself a great banker and a great merchant, I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the Representatives, but the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these Representatives ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... uttered no word against the thieves and made no plea. He tried his fortunes here and in Haiti, where, during his short, restless sojourn, my own father was born. Eventually, grandfather became chief steward on the passenger boat between New York and New Haven; later he was a small merchant in Springfield; and finally he retired and ended his days at New Bedford. Always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He was not a "Negro"; he was a man! Yet the current was too strong even for him. Then even more than now a colored man had colored friends or none ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... continent of North America.—At the time that Columbus set out on his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, John Cabot, an Italian merchant, was living in the city of Bristol,[2] England. When the news reached that city that Columbus had discovered the West Indies, Cabot begged Henry the Seventh, king of England, to let him see if he could not find a shorter way to the Indies ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery

... where Talent toil'd, Encountering fate with perseverance vain; The Merchant's hopes, when War's dire arm despoil'd, Or tempests ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... picture,"—indicating the one I have last described,—"attracted your attention, and that you were prevented from questioning me about it only by delicacy. That is my father's likeness. He was of English birth, the younger son of a rich Liverpool merchant. An impulsive, romantic, adventurous boy, seized early with a passion for seeing the world, his unimaginative, worldly-wise father, practical and severe, kept him within narrow, fretting bounds, and imposed harsh restraints upon him. When he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... Kiangsi on the banks of the River Kan, which flows almost due north to the Poyang lake and so into the Yangtsekiang, is situate the town of Kanchow, on the outskirts of which dwelt a merchant named Chin Pao-ting with his ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... employment. For every body sees the gains which are made by A's tradesmen, servants, and others, while his money is spending. B's savings, on the contrary, pass into the hands of the person whose stock he purchased, who with it pays a debt he owed to some banker, who lends it again to some merchant or manufacturer; and the capital being laid out in hiring spinners and weavers, or carriers and the crews of merchant vessels, not only gives immediate employment to at least as much industry as A employs during the whole of his career, but coming ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... merchant, one of the kind that goes about with a huge pack on his back, had found his way to the Ashdales, and on seeing Glory Goldie in all the glow and freshness of her youth he had taken from his pack a piece of dress ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof

... or into boats alongside, substituting the same weight of water as the salt taken out, so that the cargo should pass muster at the Liverpool Custom House. The duty was payable at the works, and the cargo was re-weighed in Liverpool. If found over weight, the merchant had to pay extra duty; and if short weight, he had to make up the deficiency in salt. The trade required a large capital, and was, therefore, in few hands. One house is known to have paid as much as 30,000 pounds for duty in six weeks. My grandfather ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... of 1880 merchants in the Free State had a bad time of it. The Boers were, of course, very much excited, and the English merchant was looked upon scornfully and contemptuously. One Boer had already drawn up a memorandum of what he considered should be the modus operandi in dealing with the storekeepers. Two or three were to be hanged, and the others ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann

... surprised me not a little, to see a man in such a shabby, shaggy old jacket addressed so respectfully; but I had been quite as much surprised when I heard the chief mate call him Mr. Rigs during the scene on the quarter-deck; as if this Mr. Rigs was a great merchant living in a marble house in Lafayette Place. But I was not very long in finding out, that at sea all officers are Misters, and would take it for an insult if any seaman presumed to omit calling them so. And it is also one of their ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... is a retired wine merchant driven out-of-doors by illness, a most courteous and sensitive soul, with a talent for letter-writing that is alone worth all the plumbago blossoms that he cut away last year. The following letter was written to J—— while Garibaldi was in charge of our hill-top, ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... he had to return home to fetch money. By this time had learned his lesson. When a third stranger questioned him about the object of his journey, he answered: "If it please God, I intend to buy oxen." The stranger wished him success, and the wish was fulfilled. To the merchant's surprise, when a pair of fine cattle were offered him, and their price exceeded the sum of money he had about his person, he found the two purses he had lost on his first and second trips. Later he sold the same pair of oxen to the king for a considerable price, and ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... little boy, not much bigger than Tom Thumb. He's a little merchant, as true as the world, and has a box strapped on his back. Now he wants ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern

... miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... merchant came To Travancore, and could not speak our talk; And, it chanced, he was brought before the throne Just when the king was weary of sweet pleasures. So, to better his tongue, a rope was bent Beneath his oxters, up he was hauled, and fire Let singe the soles of his feet, until his legs Wriggled ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... marries a cousin of hers, a merchant of Haro, and has three children, two boys and a girl. The girl enters a nunnery, one of the boys dies in the Carlist war and the other goes into ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... did not see how it was possible to get it safe to the north side of France, I could not withstand the temptation of buying a cask, for which I was to pay twelve guineas, and did pay one as earnest, to a very sensible, and I believe honest and opulent wine merchant, who, however, made me a present of two bottles when I came away, almost worth my guinea; it is three livres a bottle on the spot; and he shewed me orders he had received from men of fashion in England, for ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse

... drunk a great deal of light into its little stems and button-heads, will, under certain circumstances, give it out again as a reddish purple dye, very grateful to the eyes of men. By bringing the excellent secret of this dye, called oricello, from the Levant to Florence, a certain merchant, who lived nearly a hundred years before our Bernardo's time, won for himself and his descendants much wealth, and the pleasantly-suggestive surname of Oricellari, or Roccellari, which on ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... and invited every one we could think of, and the next night Ruth and I took our checks, we each received an extra one for Thanksgiving, and gave a moving picture party. We made the man who owns the place reserve the seats, and we saw 'The Merchant of Venice.' It was beautifully done, and every one who saw it was delighted. Then we invited several girls to Morton House for Thanksgiving ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower

... the damage inflicted by submarines of the Central Powers on the merchant fleets of the Entente Allies during July, 1916, was not officially announced until August 16, 1916. On that day an official statement was published in Berlin to the effect that German and Austrian submarines and mines ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... told the assembled people, to mourn no misadventure, no misfortune; this dead soldier was not pitiable. He was no victim of a tear-compelling fate. No broken shaft typified his career. He was rather one who had done well for himself, a wise young merchant of his blood, who having seen a way to barter his life at incredible advantage, at no less a rate indeed than a man's for a nation's, had not let slip ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... hour later the little army emerged from a hillside forest, and saw below them a small merchant town. The rude wooden houses straggled along the edge of a great frozen lake, whose snow-powdered surface stretched for miles and miles in an unbroken sheet of dazzling whiteness. Between the shores ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston

... ethnic Nepalese organizations leading militant antigovernment campaign; Indian merchant community; United ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... want to intrude, sar," said the ex-merchant in slaves, "but I come to tell you what you'd orter know. Th' news of th' fire, last night, hev set ev'rybody wild. They're lookin' to you, sar, to sw'ar out a warrant for Joe Lorey an' set ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey

... the counter and feast their eyes on "The Lion Hunt," "The Death of the Good Man and the Sinner," "The Ladder of Life," not to mention a half dozen miracle-workers with Saint Anthony in the place of honor; and a cartoon showing the lean merchant who trusts, and the fat one who sells for cash, with the customary legend: "If you want credit, come ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... fur the Indian may catch and sell, he is always poor. He is paid in trade, not in cash; and when the merchant has bought the Indian's catch of fur he straightway spreads out before him an alluring display of goods specially manufactured for native trade. Here are brilliant cotton velvets and sateens and tinselled muslins and gay ribbons that take the eye of his women folk; here are trays of ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... here meant is—that the principle, contended for, by no means precludes the carrying on such pursuits as require a large stock. But, as he, who had ten talents, used them as a servant, and brought the interest to his Master, so the Christian Merchant lives and labours as a servant purchased by his Lord, and considers his gains, as designed for his Master's service, not his private emolument. If he so arts, whatever his station may be, he has given up ...
— Christian Devotedness • Anthony Norris Groves

... received to his great surprise practically the same estimate. He could not understand it. He had estimated the current market prices according to the Montgomery paper, yet the prices in Toomsville were fifty to a hundred and fifty per cent higher. The merchant to whom ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... was well arranged. Only a merchant who knew his business thoroughly—both his wares and his customers—could have thus displayed cooked chickens, hams and tongues, the imported sausages and fish, the jelly-inclosed paste of chicken livers, the bottles and jars of pickled or spiced meats and vegetables ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips

... we say of those fetes which are so multiplied amongst us? Are they not evidently pernicious to society? Are not all days the same to the Eternal? Are there gala days in heaven? Can God be honored by the business of an artisan or a merchant, who, in place of earning bread on which his family may subsist, squanders away his time in the church, and afterwards goes to spend his money in the public house? It is necessary, the priests will tell you, for man to have repose. But will he not seek ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach

... The merchant marine of Athens produced her prosperity, and gave her the naval power to which Greece was indebted for her independence. Her fleets, united with those of the islands, were, under Themistocles, the terror of the Persians and the rulers of the East. They never made grand descents, because their ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini

... the mortal hatred of Catherine de Medicis, had become the admiral of a piratical fleet in the Calvinist interest, so far winked at the Queen Elizabeth that it had its head-quarters in the Channel Islands, and thence was a most formidable foe to merchant vessels on the northern and eastern coasts of France; and often indulged in descents on the coast, when the sailors—being in general the scum of the nation—were apt to comport themselves more like American buccaneers than like champions ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... rumour—credit it, if you can!—that my Aunt Caroline intends to espouse a Mr. Adam Rouffignac, a foreigner and a wine merchant; I suppose (since he is reputed rich) to arm herself with money to pay her lawyers. What his object can be, poor man, I am unable to conjecture. It is a strange world. While her ugly mother mates at the age of fifty, Diana—who ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... immediately, for he intended to sail to Tripoli, to which city he belonged. Yusuf also determined to make for Biserta, and they all embarked with as much speed as they use when they discover galleys to give them chase or merchant craft to plunder. They had reason for this haste, for the weather seemed to be changing, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... complete that he might have passed for a native. On the other hand, in Italian, Zanoni was equally at ease. Glyndon found that it was the same in languages less usually learned by foreigners. A painter from Sweden, who had conversed with him, was positive that he was a Swede; and a merchant from Constantinople, who had sold some of his goods to Zanoni, professed his conviction that none but a Turk, or at least a native of the East, could have so thoroughly mastered the soft Oriental intonations. Yet ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... that I am, that for the onely desire to see a game of triall of weapons, am fallen into these miseries and wretched snares of misfortune. For in my returne from Macedonie, wheras I sould all my wares, and played the Merchant by the space of ten months, a little before that I came to Larissa, I turned out of the way, to view the scituation of the countrey there, and behold in the bottom of a deep valley I was suddenly environed with a company of theeves, who robbed ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius

... pumps had been made to gain upon the leak; and as the exact place of it could not be discovered, there was no hope of stopping it within. At this crisis, Mr. Monkhouse, one of the midshipmen, came to Lieutenant Cook, and proposed an expedient he had once seen used on board a merchant ship, which had sprung a leak that admitted more than four feet water in an hour, and which by this means had been safely brought from Virginia to London. To Mr. Monkhouse, therefore, the care of the expedient, which is called forthering the ship, was, with proper assistance, committed; ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... younger merchant, had all the alert vivacity of the pushing American. He had the distinguished honour of sitting opposite me at the small table. Blair and Waters occupied the same room, No. 27. The one had crossed the Atlantic more than fifty times, ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr

... quickly tired of the work, changed their mind and broke their engagements. As the trade grew, some islands were entirely depopulated, and it became necessary to visit others, where the natives refused to engage themselves. The trade was in jeopardy; but the captains of merchant vessels, who found it very lucrative, were determined that the supply of hands should not run short. So when they met with no volunteers, they used to cajole the islanders on board ship under pretence of trade and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... trouble and vexation, and of much expence of canvas, ruined by their giving way. I wish also, that I did not think there is room for remarking, that the cordage and canvas, and, indeed, all the other stores made use of in the navy, are not of equal goodness with those, in general, used in the merchant service. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... side. Before his plans were matured the China offer came, and turned his thoughts in a different channel. On his arrival at Aden, on the way back, he found that the late Sir William Mackinnon, a truly great English patriot of the type of the merchant adventurers of the Elizabethan age, had sent instructions that the ships of the British India Steam Packet Company were at his disposal to convey him whereever he liked, and for a moment the thought occurred to him to turn ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... last, was caught between the eyot and Putney in 1812, though the rent of the fishery used to be paid in salmon, when it was worked by the good Cavalier merchant, Sir Nicholas Crispe. The close-time for the fishery was observed regularly at the beginning of the century, the fishing commencing on January 1st, and ending on September 4th. There are those who believe that with the increased purification of the Thames, the next generation may ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... Lovegrove. He is a merchant, retired with a fortune amassed by the old-fashioned, slow processes of trade, and regards the mercantile life of the present day only as so much greed and gambling Christianly baptized.... Lu is my ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... curious, tonic in character, round in the mouth, a favorite with the Court of Spain, at nineteen-and-sixpence a dozen, bottles included—Vide Prospectus of the period. The profits of myself and partners were small; we were in advance of the tastes of the age, and in debt to the bottle merchant. Being at my wits' end for want of money, and seeing what audiences Mathews drew, the idea occurred to me of starting an imitation of the great Imitator himself, in the shape of an "At Home," given by a woman. The one trifling obstacle in the way was the difficulty of finding ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... Brown,[68] of Liverpool, a very wealthy and distinguished merchant, who lately made a magnificent present of a ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... was chiefly in the line of gossip and conjecture as to why Madame de Launay, who seemed to be distinguished because she was Madame de Launay, should be traveling alone, first class, while the famous soldier shared a stuffy hole in the wall with a Chicago merchant. The few women aboard, nurses, Y.M.C.A. workers, welfare workers on war missions, picked up the talk among the officers and passed their curiosity on to Solange through stewardesses and maids. Every one seemed to think it strange, and Solange acknowledged that it was strange—stranger ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... al Kasim ibn Ali, surnamed Al-Hariri (the silk merchant), 1054 A. D. to 1121 A. D. The Makamat, a collection of witty rhymed tales, is one of the most popular works in the East. The interest clusters round the personality of a clever wag ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... yet established. Caste was practically unknown. Former convicts married, settled down, became respected citizens. Carpenters, bartenders, laborers, mechanics from the East and Middle West, became bankers, Senators, judges, merchant ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... a distiller, or of a spirit-merchant, is considered as objectionable if in the hands ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... with careless indifference, and throughout showed little respect either for himself or for the people he had come to govern. Yet, under his rule, the colony made progress. In his first year he opened the port to ordinary merchant ships; for, previously, as the town was a convict settlement of the most severe type, no free person was allowed to land without special permission. From this time commerce began to spring up; free settlers spread over the country, and cultivated it with such success ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland

... "wailers" and lepers,—this was my first sight of the loathsome leprosy. Our guide had supplied himself with a quantity of small change. Twenty-five cents of our money made about a quart of their small change. A moment later we met the funeral cortege of a rich merchant. First came wailers and then men beating on drums; then sons of the deceased dressed in white (white is their emblem of mourning); then the servants carrying the body on their shoulders. More wailers followed, then came the wives. It made a ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... up since early morning in a nobleman's uniform that had become too tight for him. He was agitated; this extraordinary gathering not only of nobles but also of the merchant-class—les etats generaux (States-General)—evoked in him a whole series of ideas he had long laid aside but which were deeply graven in his soul: thoughts of the Contrat social and the French Revolution. The words that ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... the year 1844, a man of sixty or thereabouts, whom anybody might have credited with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There was a smug expression about the mouth—he looked like a merchant who has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... into fragments by concealed powder. Time passed on, till he reached the age of sixteen years, when spurning the restraints of home, the erring boy left his father's house and became a wanderer, no one knew whither; but it was rumored that reaching a seaport town he had entered a merchant vessel bound upon a whaling voyage for three years. During the last year of his stay at home his conduct had been very rebellious, and his father almost looked upon him as given over to a reprobate mind. After his departure, his father was seldom heard to ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell

... simplicity, a power for individual and general good. "It combines all the fascination of a fairy tale and all the simple truth of human adventure, holding out the same allurement to every being, whether he is a noble, a commoner, a merchant, a literate or illiterate person, a private soldier, a lackey, children of both sexes, beginning at an age when a child begins to love a fairy tale—all might read it or listen to it, without tedium." Every one will draw from it what he most needs. Not less than upon these ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... entrance of a small house just off Chatham Square, he let himself stealthily into a room on the first landing. It was Virat now, and this was where Virat lived—a locality where a stranger took his life in his hand any time! Below stairs was a pseudo tea-merchant's store—kept by a Chinese "hatchet" man. But Lang Chang had not been in evidence when he, Jimmie Dale, had crept up the stairs, for there had been no light in ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... on Hogni or asked of the deed so done, But their shielded ranks they marshalled and through Atli's burg they strode: There they see the merchant's dwelling, the rich man's fair abode, The halls of doom, and the market, the loom and the smithying-booth, The stall for the wares of the outlands, the temples high and smooth: But all is hushed and empty, and no child of ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris

... the ministers of the United States, was on a mission to the courts of Vienna and Berlin, he fell in company with a Mr. John de Neufwille, a merchant of Amsterdam, with whom he held several conversations on the subject of a commercial intercourse between the two nations, the result of which was, that the plan of an eventual commercial treaty was sketched out, as one which might thereafter be concluded between ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall

... picture the enraptured diamond merchant examining this masterpiece of Oriental luxury with awe-struck eye, appraising the size and lustre of each gem, and taking the fullest notes with which to dazzle his countrymen on returning to the more prosaic Europe from what was then indeed the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... they valued him too highly, and because Mr. Morris would never have admitted that the time had come when it was too late to bring a bride home to the western halls of his forefathers. But the rumour went that Minas Cottage would go in the female line to a second cousin, who had married a cloth merchant in Galway city, to whom nor to her husband did Mr. Morris ever speak. There might be something absurd in this, but there was nothing injurious to his neighbours, and nothing that would be likely to ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... meter? How do the lines rhyme? Compare this poem with The Idylls of the King or with The Merchant of Venice in respect to ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely

... now lives a successful merchant, a Jew by birth, and a man of great grace of spirit, who has this superior, spiritual quality which makes his services sought after, and in response to demand he goes all over the State saying the last words ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... centuries before the birth of Christ, was a very interesting man. He made Babylon the most important town of the ancient world, where learned priests administered the laws which their great Ruler had received from the Sun God himself and where the merchant loved to trade because he was ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon

... Corrie burst in upon the sturdy middle-aged merchant, named Ole Thorwald, a Norwegian who had resided much in England, and spoke the English language well, and who prided himself on being entitled to claim descent from the old Norwegian sea-kings. This man was ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne

... Corsairs' galleys (which never drew more than six feet of water) could take refuge. Behind Jerba, the fabled island of the Lotus-Eaters, was an immense inland sea, commanded in the Middle Ages by castles, and affording a refuge for which the rovers had often had cause to be grateful. Merchant vessels were shy of sailing in the dangerous Gulf of the Greater Syrtes with its heavy tides and spreading sandbanks, and even the war-galleys of Venice and Spain were at a disadvantage when manoeuvring in its treacherous eddies against the Corsair ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... soon told. After a long passage, vexed by calms and baffling winds, we made the little port of Tombez in Peru, there to recruit the ship. Payta was not very distant. Our captain sold the tortoise oil to a Tombez merchant; and adding to the silver a contribution from all hands, gave it to our silent passenger, who knew not what ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... when he comes to study them. An airy, poetizing, bantering, lightly brilliant King, supposed to be serious mainly in things of War, how is he moiling and toiling, like an ever-vigilant Land-Steward, like the most industrious City Merchant, hardest-working Merchant's Clerk, to increase his industrial Capital by ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... Bertie; he is worked very hard, and I am afraid his uncle is not very kind to him; I am grieved to see how thin and pale he has grown. Then Mr. Gregory declares Eddie must do something for himself, and suggests his entering a timber-merchant's office, as there is no money to continue his artistic education. Of course, my husband did everything for Eddie; and if there is any income from Riversdale after paying the mortgages, he never heard anything of it. I ventured to ask Mr. Gregory ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... had descended to Willets Starkweather with the money—all from his great-uncle—which had finally put the family upon its feet. When Prince Morrell had left New York under a cloud, his brother-in-law was a struggling merchant himself. ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... and day sooner than not pass, for I must be an officer. You know, mamma, we've settled it all. Honorius is to be a doctor, like papa, and I'm to be a soldier, and Willie is to be a clergyman, and Duncan a sailor, and Seymour a merchant, and Archie a lawyer, and Georgie—somehow we never can settle what Georgie is to be—but something, of course, you know; and then you will have us all, mamma, your seven sons, "seven Campbells," as Willie has ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford

... four years' absence, had he returned to his native country, when he found that his sister, who had just arrived from Australia, where she had been educated, was about to be married to one of the few Europeans in the country—a well-to-do planter and merchant, named Raymond, and that his mother had also married again, and settled in ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke

... household. Here, as elsewhere, honesty is the best policy: the butler should make it his business to understand the proper treatment of the different wines under his charge, which he can easily do from the wine-merchant, and faithfully attend to it; his own reputation will soon compensate for the absence of bribes from unprincipled wine-merchants, if he serves a generous and hospitable master. Nothing spreads more rapidly in society than the reputation of a good wine-cellar, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... was now ready to enter God's great school of practical life to be further fitted for the mission he was to accomplish. In September he went to Cologne and was employed in the house of a wealthy merchant as a private tutor. This was a great change for the quiet youth of country habits. He took great pains to accommodate himself to his surroundings, and to acquire the truly Christian art of becoming all things to all men. In after life, when speaking of this period and its ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft

... in a box at the theatre he was secure from the everlasting importunities of politicians and office-seekers. He could forget himself and his problems while watching the scenes on the mimic stage before him. He enjoyed the renditions of Booth with great zest; yet after witnessing "The Merchant of Venice" he remarked on the way home: "It was a good performance, but I had a thousand times rather read it at home, if it were not for Booth's playing. A farce or a comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home." ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... which is every government where the power is immoderately exerted, a real division is perpetually kindled. The peasant, the soldier, the merchant, the magistrate, and the grandee, have no other conjunction than what arises from the ability of the one to oppress the other without resistance; and if at any time a union happens to be introduced, citizens are not then united, but dead bodies are laid in the grave contiguous ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... which will be proportionate to the public interest in this national undertaking. Out of many who would feel an interest in securing adequate Endowment, the very first donations have come from two of the merchant princes of Bombay, to whom I had ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... St. John's, the capital, which had been most shamefully neglected, and its garrison reduced to 63 men. The Grammont, 22-gun sloop, was unfortunately in harbour at the time, and was also taken. Douglas at once pressed two English merchant vessels into the service, and putting a petty officer in command of one, the William, and his Master in the other, the Bonetta, despatched them to cruise in search of Captain Graves, the reappointed Governor of Newfoundland, who was daily expected from England. ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... Academy, is very wonderful and interesting, but I have no space to go into it here. There is no more curious example, and few more tragical, of a great fortune crumbling from one day to the other, or of the antique superstition that the gods grow jealous of human success. Merchant, millionaire, banker, ship-owner, royal favourite and minister of finance, explorer of the East and monopolist of the glittering trade between that quarter of the globe and his own, great capitalist who had anticipated the brilliant operations of the present time, he expiated his prosperity ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... his visit with Ralph Harcourt to the Greek merchant and his family on the roof of the house, recounted the suspicions he had entertained, the manner in which they were confirmed, and the method by which he had discovered the plot for the rising. He was interrupted several times when he attempted to abbreviate ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty

... girl, who had been radiant with surprise and delight, and who would have liked to throw her arms round the bald-headed merchant's neck, or round that of her old slave, who was even less attractive, or for that matter, would have embraced the world—the triumphant girl became thoughtful; her father would certainly come home ere long, and she could not conceal from herself that he would disapprove of the whole proceeding, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the Pyrenees was wont to bring up to his lair, and right merry were the feastings there. Well I do remember how my father and brothers used to sound their horns as a token that they did not come empty-handed, and then, panting up the steep path, would come a rich merchant, whose ransom filled our purses half a year after, or a Knight, whose glittering armour made ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge

... light housekeeping," said I to a sad-faced, middle-aged woman, who answered my ringing of the bell of a three-story brownstone house in East Thirty-eighth Street. Some prosperous merchant had probably lived there twenty years before, but it had been converted into a nest ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... ALBANO, FRANCESCO (1578-1660), Italian painter, was born at Bologna. His father was a silk merchant, and intended to bring up his son to the same occupation; but Albani was already, at the age of twelve, filled with so strong an inclination for painting, that on the death of his father he devoted himself entirely to art. His first master was Denis ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... over an extent of four miles between the Adriatic and the town, that this place, now half deserted, was once the most populous of Roman fortresses; and that where fields and woods now present themselves to his eyes the fleets of the Empire once rode securely at anchor, and the merchant of Rome disembarked his precious cargoes at ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... second hand clothing store. I stood on the street praying for the Lord to direct me and He said, "Samuelson, Samuelson." I walked around a few blocks and suddenly I looked up over a store and it said, "Samuelson Second Hand Clothing." Going in, the merchant asked if he could help me. I said, "Have you a Prince Albert coat and vest that will fit me." He looked and said, "Just your fit," and walked over to a show case and brought the coat and vest and put it on me. It fit like it was made to order by a tailor. You could not see that ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag

... of Ruskin may explain both the strength and the weakness of his work. His father was a wealthy wine merchant, his mother a devout woman with puritanic ideas of duty. Both parents were of Scottish and, as Ruskin boasted, of plebeian descent. They had but one child, and in training him they used a strange mixture of severity and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... from insects or germs, other things being equal, it will in time be crowded out by its competitor. Worms are eaten by lower vertebrates, and these by higher. An animal's environment, like that of a merchant or manufacturer, is very largely a matter of the ability and methods of its competitors. And man, compelled to live in society, makes that part of the environment by which he is most ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... wretch, whose rolling eyes glanced covetously at the scarab—better than any of his—that I wore at my scarf-knot, and pressed against him to avoid a great black with a tray of brass bowls and platters on his head. Just ahead of me a lemonade-merchant uttered his wailing, minor cry, and as the crowd jostled in the narrow, dirty lane, my eye was caught by a coffee-coloured woman, a big Juno, with flashing teeth and a neck like a bronze tower. Across her shoulders sat a naked baby who held his balance by his two chubby hands buried in ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... and having his head shaven, for he was an hereditary priest of Amon of Thebes and an initiate of Isis, Mother of Mysteries. Also his office was that of Kherheb, or chief magician of Egypt. At first sight there was nothing strange about this man. Indeed, he might well have been a middle-aged merchant by his looks; in body he was short and stout; in face fat and smiling. But in this jovial countenance were set two very strange eyes, grey-hued rather than black. While the rest of the face seemed to smile these eyes ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard

... than fourteen years were to elapse before a daily paper was established. The equinoctial storms sadly worried our fathers. From the imperfect filling in of the streets and wharves, the tides rose high; and then, if we would keep out of sight St. Mark's, the Rialto, and the palaces of merchant princes, Norfolk was another edition of Venice. The canoe was our gondola, and "yo heave oh" were our echoes of Tasso. A bold stream, that would float a vessel of one hundred tons, cut Granby ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... to Canada to aid in building the government sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway. An immediate outcry followed, and in 1885 a head-tax of $50 was imposed on all Chinese immigrants not of the official, merchant, or scholar classes. During the nineties slightly over two thousand {253} a year paid the price of admission to the Promised Land. Then growing prosperity attracted greater swarms. Doubling the tax in 1901 ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... whilst the third sat apart from them in a deep chair, reading a book. The political talk began to interest Otway; he listened, behind his newspaper. The louder of the disputants was a man of about fifty, dressed like a prosperous merchant; his cheeks were flabby, his chin triple or quadruple, his short neck, always very red, grew crimson as he excited himself. He was talking about the development of markets for British wares, and kept repeating the phrase "trade outlets," as if it had a flavour which ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing



Words linked to "Merchant" :   vendor, bargainer, book seller, modiste, vender, trader, salter, poulterer, rug merchant, meatman, law merchant, jeweler, Charles Digby Harrod, retailer, stationer, salt merchant, shopkeeper, shlockmeister, jeweller, seller, schlockmeister, marketer, vintner, bourgeois, merchant vessels, merchant-venturer, bookdealer, haberdasher, clothier, milliner, butcher, tradesman, merchant marine, hatter, grain merchant, retail merchant, wine merchant, trafficker, Charles Henry Harrod, businessperson, porn merchant, merchant ship, stationery seller, grocer, storekeeper, Harrod, baker, dealer, market keeper



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com