"Peddling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last impudent page began rolling like a pig upon my mbugued or carpeted floor, till I stormed and swore I would turn him out unless he chose to behave more respectfully before my majesty, for I was no peddling merchant, as he had been accustomed to see, and would not stand it; moreover, I would not leave my hut at the summons of the king or anybody else, until I chose ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... career of restless movement and frequent persecution. And they have kept, too, their indolent, and not too creditable habits. Early in the twelfth century an Austrian monk described them as 'Ishmaelites and braziers, who go peddling through the wide world, having neither house, nor home, cheating the people with their tricks, and deceiving mankind, but not openly.' That description would hold good at the present day. The Gipsies are still a lazy, thieving set of rogues, who get their living by robbing hen-roosts, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... in the air or perched upon the roofs, unable to find one square foot of the familiar flagstones, where they were used to strut and peck. Stalls lined the stone pathways and choked the spaces between the buildings. Merchants were peddling objects of piety, sacred images, charms and rosaries; and there were flowers for the women's hair, and toys for the children, and cakes and biscuits, biiru (beer) and ramune (lemonade) and a distressing sickly ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... to receive it. Venders of guava jelly, rude pottery, and straw mats hastily spread out their merchandise on the muddy ground and began to dilate loudly on their merits. A scantily clad man held aloft a rare leopard skin, which he vigorously offered for two pesos gold. Slatternly women, peddling queer delectables of uncertain composition, waved their thin, bare arms and shrilly advertised their wares. Black, naked children bobbed excitedly about; and gaunt dogs and shrieking pigs scampered recklessly through ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... ominous of what must follow, and soon thereafter you see this great and gallant gentleman arrested on a trumped-up charge of high treason, bullied, vituperated, and insulted by venal, peddling lawyers, and, finally, although his wit and sincerity had shattered every fragment of evidence brought against him, sentenced to death. Thus far James went; but he hesitated to go further, hesitated to carry out the sentence. Sir Walter had too many friends ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... a case for generosity, but Dan didn't seem to see that. It's unlucky for me in a way he's not larger-minded. He's content with justice—what he calls justice. But justice depends on the mind that's got to do it. There's no finality about it, and what Daniel calls justice, I call beastly peddling, ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... how would like to be a reporter, if you have got nothing better to do? The manager of a news agency downtown asked me to-day to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn't much—$10 a week to start with. But it is better than peddling books, I know,' ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... the utmost cruelty; because it is leaving them the great work to do, and a debt upon their backs, from which they derive no advantage. Such a thought is unworthy of a man of honor, and is the true characteristic of a narrow heart and a peddling politician. ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... each rejection she withdrew unabashed, outwardly unperturbed, seeming to take stately leave. Only her persistence showed how anxious she was to earn money; neither on her features nor in her voice appeared the least sign of peddling solicitude. I shall always remember that tall, hard-visaged woman, as she passed with firm step and nobly balanced figure about the streets of Catanzaro. To pity her would have been an insult. The glimpse ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... on the farm which he has never left is said in the country to have had no chance, and boys and men of that condition look upon work on a railroad or drudgery in a city as opportunity. Poor country-boys of Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had to their peddling-trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast are now the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times. "To have some chance" is their word. And the phrase, "to know the world," or to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... instead of ornamenting your conversation with cant terms, and miserable slang, picked up from the lowest refuse of our population, both east and west, you had cultivated your mind, and enriched it with quotations from classical writers, you would have been more like an Attache, and less like a peddling clockmaker than you are." ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... peddling wagon which gathers eggs and other produce directly from the farm, prevail east and south of a line drawn from Galveston to Chicago through Texarkana, Ark., Springfield, Mo., and St. Louis. North and west of this line the huckster is ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... village, with a splash-dash noise of whips and wheels and hoofs, was enough to make the money spring right out of one's pocket. Mercy on me! Didn't he make the dry-goods fly! Everybody bought something of him, and I must say that everybody liked him. In the peddling line he was a sort of P. T. Barnum, only he didn't know how to stick to his trade as Barnum has. He drove his four horses; he made money like everything; he outgrew Brattleborough, which was his native place, and soon got above ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... ashes of the Brownes' past history, and recalled with great zest the times when Mrs. Browne had worked in the kitchen at Grey's Park, while poor Mr. Browne was charged with every possible second-class occupation, from mending brass kettles down to peddling clothes-pins. ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... got well enough to travel, I set my face toward the east, and journeyed on foot through the northern coal regions of Pennsylvania by slow stages, caring little whither I went, and earning just enough by peddling flat-irons to pay my way. It was spring when I started; the autumn tints were on the leaves when I brought up in New York at last, as nearly restored as youth and the long tramp had power to do. But the restless energy ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Northern merchants were in favor of it—it 'would conciliate the South.' Northern ministers in all the churches of commerce baptized it, defended it out of the Old Testament, or the New Testament. The Senator of Boston gave it his mighty aid,—he went through the land a huckster of Slavery, peddling Atheism: the Representative of Boston gave it his vote. Their constituents sustained both! All the great cities of the North executed the bill. The leading Journals of Boston advised the merchants to withhold all commercial intercourse from Towns which ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... about all day, peddling with his basket, and he reached home about the same time as did his brother, the organ grinder, ...
— The Story of a Candy Rabbit • Laura Lee Hope
... to sign mysterious documents which made him sole proprietor of the house, but had left him with the feeling that he had done an extremely acute stroke of business. Mr. Montague had dabbled in many professions in his time, from street peddling upward, but what he was ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... any action which gives increased currency to the delusion, certainly cherished by some moderate Gladstonians, that Home Rule can be identified with or cut down to extended local self-government,[136] will be fatal to the cause of Unionism. The concession to Ireland of a petty, paltry, peddling legislature, which dare hardly call itself a Parliament, and is officially designated say as a national council, combined with some faint imitation of a Cabinet, called say a committee, would disappoint and irritate Home Rulers; it would cheat their hopes, but it would afford them the means ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... morality, duty, now seemed to him to have no truth, nor reason. Their jealous despotism was smashed against Nature. Human nature, healthy, strong, free, that alone was virtue: to hell with all the rest! It provoked pitying laughter to see the little peddling rules of prudence and policy which the world adorns with the name of morality, while it pretends to inclose all life within them. A preposterous mole-hill, an ant-like people! Life sees to it that they are brought to reason. Life does but pass, and ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... track, and found it to be the cabin of the daughter of the pleasant people with whom I had spent the previous night. Her husband had gone to the Plains, yet she, with two infant children, was living there in perfect security. Two pedlars, who were peddling their way down from the mines, came in for a night's shelter soon after I arrived—ill-looking fellows enough. They admired Birdie in a suspicious fashion, and offered to "swop" their pack horse ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... two years and you're still here, going around telling other men to go to the front. Go there yourself, and get a taste of it. When you've put in fourteen months in hell like I did, you won't go around peddling the brand of hot air you've shot into me, ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Italian singer, was skipping rope on the pavement below the window, and a robin was calling lustily to its mate in a nearby horse-chestnut tree, and a vender was peddling his wares down the street in a voice that sounded like a slow-pealing bell, poor Keineth felt as if she could never be really happy again! That night Daddy and Keineth went uptown for dinner. In one of the hotels they met Mr. Lee. Keineth's heart was ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... him by the collar with a Herculean gripe, uttered, in the voice of Crabshaw, "It wan't for nothing that I dreamed of Newgate, sirrah; but I'd have thee to know, an arrant squire is not to be robbed by such a peddling thief as thee—here I'll howld thee vast, an the devil were in thy doublet—help! ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... gendarmes along with us. Probably this was a mistake. Unless one is traveling in Peru on some easily understood matter, such as prospecting for mines or representing one of the great importing and commission houses, or actually peddling goods, one cannot help arousing the natural suspicions of a people to whom traveling on muleback for pleasure is unthinkable, and scientific exploration for its own sake is incomprehensible. Of course, if the explorers arrive accompanied by a gendarme it is perfectly evident that ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... guess we've got about the same idea of it; it's my opinion he is paid by somebody, and that somebody is Van Dorn, or whoever's backing him. I don't put much stock in this machinery business of his; he don't act like a fellow that needs to go peddling machines about the country, and I notice he don't seem in any great rush about putting it up, now he's got here; he ain't one of the kind that has to rustle for a living, like you and me. I think he's just out here getting pointers on the mines for that ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... kept the men of the Antrims going on canteen delicacies and their officers in a constant bubble of joy. He swallowed their tall stories without a gulp; they pulled one leg and he offered the other; he fell headlong into every silly trap they set for him. Also they achieved merit in other messes by peddling yarns of his wonderful innocence and ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... militia districts, appoints officers to fill all vacancies in the county. He audits the accounts of all county officers, makes rules and regulations for the relief of the poor. He issues marriage licenses, pays pensions to Confederate veterans, licenses and regulates peddling, and collects special taxes assessed by the State. He is elected for a ...
— Elements of Civil Government • Alexander L. Peterman
... contemptible, and rather smelly Oneidas who came to the back door on summer mornings, in calico, and ragged overalls, with baskets of huckleberries on their arm, their pride gone, a broken and conquered people. She saw them wild, free, sovereign, and there were no greasy, berry-peddling Oneidas among them. They were Sioux, and Pottawatomies (that last had the real Indian sound), and Winnebagos, and Menomonees, and Outagamis. She made them taciturn, and beady-eyed, and lithe, and fleet, and every other adjectival ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... about my own age, to get them each a grammar, but did not tell me. I felt a little slighted but made up my mind I would have a grammar also. Father refusing to buy it for me, I made small cakes of maple sugar in the spring and, peddling them in the village, got money enough to buy the grammar and other books. The teacher was a little taken aback when I produced my book as the others did theirs, but he put me in the class and I kept along with the rest of them, but without any idea that the study had any practical bearing ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... the item from a man who didn't know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders for enlarged pictures. That was not so bad, but it turned out that the pedlar was a woman, and she came with a rawhide and camped in the office for two days waiting for Jimmy, ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... blacksmith's bill was so much for shoes; after which there was a long gossip about the horses of a gentleman who had come down and rented a place for the season. The gardener sometimes had an interview about the quantity of apples that might be sold from the orchard, and twenty other peddling details, in which the squire delighted. As for the butler, time at last had brought him to bear with patience the inquisition about the waste corks and ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... given him a place at the speaker's table. He was the skipper of our fleet, had an extra master's certificate entitling him to command even the Mauretania. Many yarns were invented to explain his being with us. It was as if "John D." should be found peddling hair-oil. ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the inevitable compelled submission. The whole, amounting to twelve light mule packs (it had been fifteen fairly heavy ones after our purchases at Fort Laramie), was still a goodly bulk to look at. The nine peddling dividends, when seen singly, were not quite ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... "here is Common-sense in the shape of a half-witted peddling fellow, blundering into Arcadia, in the shape of a haunted cottage, a woman, and a man. Straightway our Pedler, being Common-sense, misjudges us—as, indeed, would every other common-sense individual the world over; for Arcadia, being of itself abstract and immaterial, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... followed so diligently. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee," he calls himself; and again, "I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received." Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest itinerants, with shilling ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... commanding a small army of the same class of agents to go forth into all the world and preach the gospel of tree planting and—sell trees. Others have sold and continue to sell trees to peddlers without limit, for cash, and of any and all varieties called for, while they denounced the system of peddling in unmeasured terms. Now it is just as possible for a tree peddler to be an honest man as it is for the man who grows trees to sell to be honest. I do not say that all men belonging to either class are honest. It would be equally absurd to say ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... friends! But oftenest it was my mother who turned away her head. She took to using the side streets to avoid the pitiful eyes of the kind, and the scornful eyes of the haughty. Both were turned on her as she trudged from store to store, and from house to house, peddling tea or other ware; and both were hard to bear. Many a winter morning she arose in the dark, to tramp three or four miles in the gripping cold, through the dragging snow, with a pound of tea for a distant customer; and her profit was perhaps twenty ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... this year, and the fallow truck patches were fairly clamoring for his attention. Yet he was reluctant to abandon his winter pursuit of pelts and to return to the sterner and less thrilling labor of ploughing and planting and peddling vegetables. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... poor devil Cuckoldry, who was then in the court at Paris very eagerly soliciting a peddling suit at law for one of his vassals and tenants. Within some few days thereafter, I have forgot how many, when he got full notice of the trick which in his absence was done unto him, he instantly desisted from prosecuting ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the minister asked, "that so fine a young fellow as you are is content to be peddling goods through the country, when so well fitted by nature for better things? You should be a soldier, and a good one. For so young a man, I have never seen a ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... husband has been in the Insane Asylum for nearly two years, finds it hard to support her family by peddling. Calling one day, I found her going out without any shoes on her feet, and her health very poor. I bought her a pair of shoes, for which she was very thankful, and pointed her to Christ as her true friend in time of need. She reads the Bible, and believes ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... he taps." Stout sober boots, saying: "As soon as you can, old friend. Remember we've work to do." Flat-footed old boots, rusty and limp, mumbling: "We haven't much time, Mr. Chumbley. Just a patch, that is all, we haven't much further to go." And old Joe, still peddling his pack, with the help of the same old jokes. And Tom Pinfold, still puzzled and scratching his head, the rejected fish still hanging by its tail from his expostulating hand; one might almost have imagined it the same fish. Grown-up ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... her experiments on the frock, the bonnet, and the hoop petticoat bought for her in London and sent like the proverbial pig in a poke, had taken to watching the Yankee peddling sloop, which, having lain for an hour at Patterson's on the Virginia shore, was now heading for the Browne place. It was pretty to see the sloop heel over under a beam wind and shoot steadily forward, while the waves dashed fair against her weather ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... treachery, and he groaned that there was too much vinegar in life. But he determined to fight for his story, and he did. Long after Pet had turned her attention to other reputations, Prissy was still peddling his yarn. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... if plane-peddling is palling on you, and bust into the lab. I'm leaving another note there for you, old son, and after you read it you can let your conscience ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... the maestro's noise, and came to the door of his chamber, which opens into the little sitting-room, to inquire what the matter might be. Nino asked if the maestro were peddling cabbages, that he should ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... words, so far as the English Church is concerned, you propose to reduce us within our own borders to a peddling confusion of sects, held together by the mere physical link of our buildings and our endowments!" said the Bishop, as he ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mind and body. They fight the barbarous customs of foot binding and the killing and selling of girl babies. Until recent years it was not unusual to meet the village "baby peddler" with from two to six tiny infants peddling his "goods" from village to village. Not many years ago such a man appeared before the mission compound at Ngu-cheng (Fukien) with four babies in his basket. Three of these had expired from exposure and the kerosene oil which had been poured down their throats ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... Saints you spoke of in a former letter. But when I go to London I must look out for a volume. I have begun to read Thucydides, which I never read before, and which does very well to hammer at for an hour in a day: though I can't say I care much for the Greeks and their peddling quarrels; one must go to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... hot from his brain, won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in the interest of a great railroad. When the editor wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the transportation was transferable. It was not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the return of the poem. Back it came, with the editor's regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to The Hornet, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... dwindling to a peddling chamber-chaplain, Who hunts for crabs and ballads in maids' sleeves, I, who have shuffled kingdoms. Oh! 'tis easy To beget great deeds; but in the rearing of them— The threading in cold blood each mean detail, And furzebrake of half-pertinent ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... Skipper, who is as sensitive to climate as a lily of the hot-house, prattles lovingly during the summer months of selling ice-creams to the Eskimos, and during the winter months of peddling roast chestnuts in Timbuctoo. MacTavish and the Babe propose, under the euphonious noms de commerce of Vavaseur and Montmorency, to open pawn-shops among ex-munition-workers, and thereby accumulate old masters, grand ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... from illness, who always has a frightened air, and who never laughs; and one with red hair, who has a useless arm, and wears it suspended from his neck; his father has gone away to America, and his mother goes about peddling pot-herbs. And there is another curious type,—my neighbor on the left,—Stardi—small and thickset, with no neck,—a gruff fellow, who speaks to no one, and seems not to understand much, but stands attending to the master without winking, his brow corrugated with wrinkles, and his teeth ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... he to do for a living? He must give up religion and politics, and take to some other pursuit. Loafing or living on his neighbors was now impossible, as he was in disgrace with many; and besides, he had a wife and family to support. Peddling was so common, that nothing could now be made in that line; and besides, it took some capital to start with—a thing that was out of the ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... aristocracy, and seldom ask them what they did in the old country so long as they behave themselves decently in this one. Twice recently, as mentioned in these columns, the successor to an English property of some value was discovered, in the one case peddling oranges, and in the other digging a rancher's ditches, while now we have another instance in the Somasco valley. It appears that long ago there was a family quarrel at Carnaby, England, and though we do not know what it was all about, the owner of what we understand ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... We passed Cabul merchants peddling their dried fruit on shaggy-haired camels; to these succeeded, in more lonesome portions of the road, small groups of Korkas, wretched remnants of one of the autochthonal families of Central India—even lower ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... bought a ticket for himself, and went with me!! Mr. Alcott spent an evening with us a week or more ago, and was very interesting; telling, at my request, about his youth, and peddling, etc. There were six ladies and six gentlemen present last Monday evening. They assembled at Mr. Stone's. Miss Hannah Hodges, Mrs. J. C. Lee, and two ladies whom I did not know, besides Mrs. Stone and myself; ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... "The devil's in the peddling tub-coopering carl!" muttered Caleb, in all the envy of astonishment; "it's a shame to see the like o' them gusting their gabs at sic a rate. But if some o' that gude cheer does not find its way to Wolf's Crag this night, my name is ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Elijah afforded the worthy poor. Frequently he brought them great wealth. Rabbi Kahana was so needy that he had to support himself by peddling with household utensils. Once a lady of high standing endeavored to force him to commit an immoral act, and Kahana, preferring death to iniquity, threw himself from a loft. Though Elijah was at a distance of four hundred parasangs, he hastened to the post in time ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... here his voice slid into a tenor with pent-up emotion—"maybe the contemptible rapscallion will try to get that." The colonel had risen and was pacing the floor. "What a damn disreputable business your commerce is, anyway! John, I can't afford to lose that property—or I'd be a pauper, sir, a pauper peddling organs and sewing-machines and maybe teaching singing-school." The colonel's face caught a rift of sunshine as he added, "You know I did that once before I was ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... she went on, "to the top of it, because I heard tell there was a cure for sore eyes in the bit lake on the top. Not that I put much store in such cures, but there's no use letting anything by. I got a pair of specs from a peddling man of Ballymena," said she, "but they don't seem to do me much good. I'm queer and afeared about my eyes, hinny. It would be a hard thing for me to go blind and none about the wee ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... on earth can equal the malice of an old squaw," said Phoebe, breaking into the silence which followed. "I'd hope she don't go around peddling that story—not that anyone would ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... they were! Nearly all poor like himself; nearly all having worked their way to the university: some from farms, some by teaching distant country or mountain schools; some by the peddling of books—out of unknown byways, from the hedges and ditches of life, they had assembled: ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... at the eleventh hour, came upon magnificent Carteret, now seemingly for the first time in its full force, That he Carteret was not the master; that there was a bewildered Parliament at home, a poor peddling Duke of Newcastle leader of the same, with his Lords of the Regency, who could fatally put a negative on all this, unless they were first gained over. On the morrow, July 15th, Carteret, instead of signing, as expected, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... programme, "Why are we New Englanders so unpopular?" Why those phrases, always kept in stock by provincial orators and editors, "the mean Yankees," "the stingy Yankees," "the close-fisted Yankees," "the tin-peddling Yankees," and, above all, the terse and condensed collocation, "those d——d—those blessed Yankees," the blessing being comprised between two d's, as though conferred by a benevolent doctor of divinity. [Laughter.] I remember in the olden time, in the years beyond the flood, when the Presidential ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... the hen and then since there was no hurry about the potatoes she fell to dreaming again. It was very peaceful on the shady porch with that whirlwind of a Judy gone for several hours on one of her crazy peddling jaunts. What a girl she was for plunging! Again the mother wondered where she came from and for the ten thousandth time agreed with herself that it must be the blood of the Norse sailor cropping out in ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... William Dudley Pelley was making money on the Jew-and-Catholic scare and that others like Edward H. Hunter of the Industrial Defense Association were talking with the German Consul General about getting money from Germany for propaganda, he got busy peddling "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," long discredited as forgeries. Armed with these, Jung's high pressure salesmen scoured the country, collecting shekels from Christian businessmen and getting their forty ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... sometimes hearing ominous announcements of the terrible Dulbahantas, sent to frighten me by the Abban, and sometimes amusing myself in other and various ways. The Dulbahantas could not conceive my motive for wishing to travel in their land; no peddling Arab, even, had ever ventured there, so why should I desire to go? Fortunately I had a good deal of employment with my gun; for, besides gazelles, antelopes, a lynx, florikans, and partridges, I shot many very beautiful little honey-birds, as well as other small birds. Of these former ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... work except with the whip, but that's no reason for using it on those who will. When I get a critter that hogs my good oats and then won't show them in his gait, I get rid of him. He may be all right for a fellow who's doing a peddling business, but I need a little more ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... 'he said he was when he come in; and me and ma didn't think it likely an author person would have his son out book-peddling, so we asservated back that he wasn't; and him and ma has been having a high-grade talking match all day in the front parlor to convince each other otherwise than what ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... cut a load of Christmas trees—I think there were some three hundred in the load. Then I drove the wagon to Tucson and after delivering Wheeler his especial tree and receiving the stipulated five dollars for it, commenced peddling ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... regret that a few honest men have suffered themselves to be duped by their shameful artifices. It commenced with Mr. Thompson of Milton, who during the summer past has been very industrious in serving up and peddling little doses of slander against Mr. Baldwin, Mr. Bunce, and others. This man has been a real political scold, ever since he found himself capable of throwing a little confusion into the ranks of the county; He is the first male Xantippe ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... Then I began to have doubts. I said if half those seeds sprouted and did half as well as the catalogue promised, the level behind the barn would fall a prey to Murphy and become just a heap of melons. Elizabeth suggested that I add another acre and devote my summer vacation to peddling them. ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... weeks of their experience on the road went far to realize their expectations. The bulldog, which had been bought in partnership, proved a conquering hero. Through the long summer days the boys tramped over the country, peddling their wares, and by night they conducted sundry unlawful encounters wherever an opponent ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... stunned by the blow. His withdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a son had proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station. The life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises, petty studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements. A powerful and grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome. Urban at this juncture pressed Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke of Urbino devolved his lordships to the Holy See. He survived ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Chief Justice. It is true that a man may brutalize himself by a contemplation of theological cruelties, until decent parents are ashamed to have their children listen to his libels on the Father of All. It is true that a physician may become such a drug-peddling routinist, that sensible mothers see through him, and know enough to throw his trash out of the window as soon as he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... to a foreign land from the punishment due to their misdeeds. Their manner of life in Lisbon is worthy of such a goodly assemblage of amis reunis. The generality of them pretend to work in gold and silver, and keep small peddling shops; they, however, principally depend for their livelihood on an extensive traffic in stolen goods which they carry on. It is said that there is honour amongst thieves, but this is certainly not the case with the Jews ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... little shrewdness. When he had laid a little money together he bought a still, and distilled essences of peppermint, wintergreen, and other sweet-smelling herbs and roots, and when a store was accumulated he filled a basket and departed on a peddling expedition, returning with money in his purse and a handkerchief or ribbon for Armida. Once he bought her a stuff gown, which she came near ruining by weeping over it, it was such ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... my mother strove to support herself and me by peddling pea mush or doing odds and ends of jobs. She had to struggle hard for our scanty livelihood and her trials and loneliness came home to me ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... of the Jews in France until their final expulsion (1394). In Germany the Jews were not so much hated as despised. They were servi camerae, serfs of the state, and as such had to pay oppressive taxes. Besides, they were limited to the meanest trades and to usury and peddling. They were shut up in their narrow Jewries, huddled in wretched cabins, which clustered about the dilapidated synagogue in a shamefaced way. What strange homes! What gigantic misery, what boundless suffering ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... possible means; when they themselves are forced by heavy toil to earn kopeks,—and we shall be amazed that all these people should remain working people, and that they do not all of them take to an easier method of getting gain,—by trading, peddling, acting as middlemen, begging, vice, rascality, and even robbery. Why, we, the participants in that never-ceasing orgy which goes on in town, can become so accustomed to our life, that it seems to us perfectly natural to dwell ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... battles, when their generation was gone, when Tories and jobbers could not be distinguished from the really meritorious, the agents came here and attempted to intimidate public men." He alluded to pension agents as men who prowl about and make fortunes by peddling in the pretended patriotism and ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... like to have fun poked at him. For some time he refused to take the offer seriously, and even when his host insisted that he would enjoy the lark, he expostulated: "Why, the idea is ridiculous! You—Calvin Gray, the financier, peddling jewelry? Ha! Outside of the fact that you wouldn't, couldn't do it, it's not the safest thing in the world to carry a small fortune in stones through the ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the F.F.V., with another curse or two thrown in by way of emphasis. 'You may be some cursed Yankee, peddling buttons, and afraid to fight; but ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... neighbors. He was 'most starved and nearly froze. He was living with an old janitor woman, and she was sending him out on the streets to sell papers! Think of that, Jim Fox! A little boy, five years old, peddling papers to pay your bills with! Them folks found him one morning ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... chuff!" said the mercer; "but for shame, it were a good deed to ease him of his wares—a set of peddling knaves, who stroll through the land, and hurt the established trader. There are good fellows in Berkshire yet, mine host—your pedlar may be met ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... pulled at his collar and tie as if they choked him. "The Quirt has made no trouble," he said. "Of course, if they begin throwing fences across our stock trails and peddling gossip, that is another story. I expect you to protect our interests, of course. And I have never made a practice of dictating to you. In this case"—he sent a sharp glance at Al—"it seems to me your interests are involved more than ours. As to Fred Thurman, ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... man who put your superior where he is. He'd still be peddling papers if I hadn't ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault
... themselves up to expect more and were disappointed. Some protested against peddling little measures—like Pinchas they were for high, heroic deeds. Joseph Strelitski, student and cigar commission agent, jumped to his feet and cried passionately in German: "Everywhere Israel groans and travails—must we indeed wait and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... couldn't afford to lose many five hundred dollar bills," and he laughed frankly. "That's about as much as I make in a year—I mean, altogether," he said, quickly, lest the girls get an exaggerated notion of the peddling business. "I can't make that clear, though I hope to some ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... of the minister, at the public expense, beyond what the Act contemplates;" so the Bishop of Australia was assured by official authority in 1836. But enough of these miserable instances of state-peddling in ecclesiastical establishments. "There is no semblance," to use Mr. Gladstone's words, "in any part of these arrangements, of a true and sound conception of the conscientious functions of government in matters of religion."[218] May we venture to hope ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... the river they went about peddling pop-corn. The man sent the boys all over the city, but he himself went ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... the dock they were followed by a very persistent Armenian who apparently was unshaken in his determination to sell certain articles he was peddling. ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... and indeed which had guided us in all preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate manifestation. We have wandered very far, and must endeavour to return and connect ourselves therewith again! It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the godlike vanishing from this England; conviction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... they can't translate from a living mouth, much more from a dead one; but I know my Niccolo better. I have kissed his lips a thousand times, and I know the poor boy meant, 'Scorn and eternal distrust of such peddling conspirators as these!' I can deal with traitors, but these flash-in-the-pan plotters—these shaking, jelly-bodied patriots!—trust to them again? Rather draw lots for another fifteen to bare their breasts and bandage their eyes, and march out in the grey ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used. How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate, whether we had better know them,—had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity! Have we no culture, no refinement,—but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... you're looking to hear, down there. But I tell you this was straight. Don't you suppose Shepler knows what he's about?—there's a boy that won't be peddling shoe-laces and gum-drops off one of these neat little bosom-trays—not for eighty-five or ninety-thousand years yet—and Relpin, even if he was drunk, knows Shepler's deals like you know Skiplap. They'll bear the stocks all they can while they're buying up. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Consolidated ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... saw another instance of probity. An old man was peddling dolls and toy fans. Two small American children and one gave the old man a franc and three copper coins, and both started away; but they were called back, and the franc and one of the coppers were restored to them. Hence it is plain that in Italy, parties connected with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Tournefort has his eye on them. I dare say they'll contrive to steal a few things, but they would never dare lay hands on valuable jewellery. To begin with, they could never dispose of it. Imagine a va-nu-pieds peddling a ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the fact hat he tore himself clear of all those peddling and pitiful compromises, those half humorous concessions, those lazy conventionalisms, with which most people cover their brains as if with wool, and ballast their imagination as if ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... excellences of it within those limitations are unmistakable. He had no tricks—the worst curse of art at all times, and the commonest in these days of what pretends to be art. He had no splash of so-called "style"; no acrobatic contortions of thought or what does duty for thought; no pottering and peddling of the psychological kind, which would fain make up for a faulty product by ostentatiously parading the processes of production. Had he once got free—as more than once it seemed that he might—from the fatal conventionalities of his unconventionalism, from ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... colliers were reckless with their cash, far readier to commit themselves to buying than the cannier country bodies round. Lord! there was money in the scheme. No sooner thought of than put in practice. Wilson gave up the cloth-peddling after five or six years—he had other fish to fry by that time—but while he was at it he made money hand over fist ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... and Surajah set to work to perfect their disguises. They had, before, appeared simply as two young traders, well to do, and of a class above the ordinary peddling merchant. They now fitted on the ample beards that had been made at Tripataly. These were attached so firmly to their faces, by an adhesive wax, that they could not be pulled off without the use of a good deal of force. With the same stuff, small patches of hair ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... said Vuyning, with a laugh, "that my ancestors picked up the knack while they were peddling clothes from house to house a couple of hundred years ago. I'm ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... mere, common; ordinary &c (habitual) 613; inconsiderable, so-so, insignificant, inappreciable. trifling, trivial; slight, slender, light, flimsy, frothy, idle; puerile &c (foolish) 499; airy, shallow; weak &c 160; powerless &c 158; frivolous, petty, niggling; piddling, peddling; fribble^, inane, ridiculous, farcical; finical, finikin^; fiddle-faddle, fingle-fangle^, namby-pamby, wishy-washy, milk and water. poor, paltry, pitiful; contemptible &c (contempt) 930; sorry, mean, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... it is too long to be quoted here, and it seems that I have already monopolized the conversation much longer than I expected or desired. Moreover, to quote Rogers to an Englishman would be equivalent to 'carrying coal to Newcastle,' or peddling 'owls ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... were engaged in this task, rabbais, or peddling merchants, some Provencals and some Catalans came to sell them goods, which they carried in coffin-shaped vehicles pushed before them. They had wares, mostly small articles from Spain and France and the West ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Mr. Dunham's, and tell him I'll go to work distributing those circulars in the morning," said Ralph to himself. "And after that job is done, if nothing more definite turns up, I'll try peddling those goods to the small stationery ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield
... the office studied her signature earnestly but it told them nothing of that which they most wished to know—her business. She might be selling books upon the instalment plan: she might be peddling skin-food warranted to restore their weather-beaten complexions to the texture of a baby's: she might be a new inmate for the dance hall. Anything was possible ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... comes very clearly out of these considerations: that whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it should not be any peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain show, and among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... return to the vessel that evening there was quite an excitement on board. Among the passengers was a party of three who had been quite successful in Sacramento in the bottling of soda and summer beer, and peddling it out through the city. They had picked up by chance an old acquaintance from Waterford who belonged to an aristocratic family there, and by his habits of dissipation was a mortification to them. So when ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... traverse. There were men on foot, running hither and thither, talking shrilly and in all the tongues of Syria; men on horseback screaming to men on camels; men struggling doubtfully with fractious cows and frightened sheep; men peddling bread and wine; and among the mass a herd of boys apparently in chase of a herd of dogs. Everybody and everything seemed to be in motion at the same time. Possibly the fair spectator was too weary to be long attracted by the scene; in a little while ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... meantime the peddling of tickets was a regular occupation on election day. Canvassers invaded homes and places of business, and even surrounded the voting place. It was the custom in many parts of the country for the ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... peddlers of Ralph Darrell's smuggled goods, Connell had learned much concerning that section of country, and the various operations conducted within its limits. He had at one time seriously contemplated going into the peddling business himself, and had made so many inquiries in regard to its details that he was even familiar with "Darrell's Folly," though it was a ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... Jackson's situation was wretched. His wife was in ill health, and he was unable to earn, by his rattan-work and peddling, sufficient food for the family. He was back in his rent, and the oldest boy, a lad of eleven, had started to ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... orient himself in Bassett's story. A doctor. The devil's irony of it! Some poor hack, losing sleep and bringing babies. Peddling pills. Leading what Bassett had called a life of usefulness! That was a career for you, a ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... come and kiss me and see that I had not kicked the quilt off before she lay down for her short sleep. I remember once or twice waking up and feeling her tears on my face, while she whispered "My poor baby!" or other loving and motherly words over me. When John Rucker went off on his peddling trips she would take me out of the factory for a few days and send me to school. The teachers understood the case, and did all they could to help me in spite of my irregular attendance; so that I learned to read after a fashion, and as for arithmetic, I seemed to ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... ginger, cayenne, and ground-nuts are to be grown. Copal and bees'-wax would form articles of extensive export; but the people are satisfied with maize and roots, especially the cassava, which to Sa Leone is a curse as great as the potato has proved to Ireland. Petty peddling has ever been, and still is, the 'civilised African's' forte. He willingly condemns himself to spend life between his wretched little booth and his Ebenezer, to waste the week and keep the Sabbath holy by the 'holloaing ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Reverend Mother welcomes back Her wisest Scholars, those who understood The deeper teaching of her mystic tome, And offered their fresh lives to make it good: No lore of Greece or Rome, No science peddling with the names of things, 20 Or reading stars to find inglorious fates, Can lift our life with wings Far from Death's idle gulf that for the many waits, And lengthen out our dates With that clear fame whose memory sings In manly hearts to come, and nerves them and dilates: Nor such ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... listened I freely admitted to myself that I had undervalued him; that he was no crude Belleville orator, no sentimental bathos-peddling reformer, no sansculotte with brains ablaze, squalling for indiscriminate slaughter and pillage; he was a cool student in crime, taking no chances that he was not forced to take, a calm, adroit, methodical observer, who had established a theory ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... says, has the Supreme Quack for his God. No one ever acted without some dim, though perhaps foolish enough, half-belief that the world was at his back; whether he plots good or evil he always has God as an accomplice. And this is why character cannot be really bettered by any peddling process. Moralists and preachers are right in insisting on the need of a new life, that is, of a new principle, as the basis of any real improvement; and such a principle necessarily carries in it a new attitude towards men, and a new interpretation of the moral agent himself ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... he said, inhaling deeply; "the guy in charge isn't exactly a free information bureau. When it comes to peddling the bull con he's there, but when you try to pry off a few slabs of cold hard fact it's his ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... any such project tooth and nail. I have not been striving these thirty years to get Science clear of their schoolmastering sham-literary peddling to give up the game without a fight. I hope my Lords will ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... you, Mr. Mann? I want to ask you something. Will you note these three names? The Reverend Vincent Lock, a peddling glazier who is known as 'Waxy,' and a Miss Paines. Have you got them? I wish you would let ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... throughout Europe, endeavoring to sell his discovery to princes and men of learning. Purchasers had to agree strictly to maintain the secret. Professor Williams speaks of this conduct as follows: "These were the acts of a charlatan peddling some secret quack nostrum."[93] Mr. Quick says, "He would also found a school in which all arts and sciences should be rapidly learned and advanced; he would introduce, and peacefully maintain throughout the continent, a uniform speech, a uniform government, and, more wonderful ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... amount of brain, though not necessarily of the highest quality; while it certainly betokens a good deal of dash and impudence. Carl Perousse, one of the most prominent among the political notabilities of Europe, had begun his career by small peddling transactions in iron and timber manufactures; he came of a very plebeian stock, and had received only a desultory sort of education, picked up here and there in cheap provincial schools. But he had a ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... fled from Austrian rule, and came to Spain, probably peddling mousetraps and santi ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... who make up the human panorama of the street under your window are types of character peculiar to Wales. One such is the peddling fisher-woman who strolls by with a basketful of bright pink prawns, which she holds out to you temptingly, looking up. The fisher-women of Tenby wear a costume differing in some respects from that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... the one big thing that drives me up here every time, in spite of myself? It's the thought of—dad. How do you suppose I feel to think of dad peddling peas and beans and potatoes ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... wealthy, however; far from it. They had but a single relative—a maiden aunt—and with her they made their home when they were not at school or off on peddling trips with a van and team ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... water and other essences." The Note Books tell us that, at North Adams in 1838, the author foregathered with a surgeon-dentist, who was also a preacher of the Baptist persuasion: and that, on the stage-coach between Worcester and Northampton, they took up an essence-vender who was peddling anise-seed, cloves, red-cedar, wormwood, opodeldoc, hair-oil, and Cologne water. Do you imagine that the essence-peddler is extinct? No, you may meet his covered wagon to-day on lonely roads between the ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... glory, the wheels began to move and we again worried our tortuous way up the North River. 'Ah,' said the melancholy-looking man who had been long gazing in silence at the sad waves below, 'alas, here I am, friendless and alone in this wretched country, peddling beeswax and eggs for hog and hominy, chills and fever; but I was once a schoolmaster with $1,200 a year, down in Connecticut; wine and women did it. But,' said he, 'I'll be rich yet—I've got it—I've discovered perpetual motion, and the world will ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... through in spite of the warning-signs. Between two paragraphs, to be plain, in the one of which we are told how the two Syrians established themselves as merchants in New York, in the other, how and wherefor they shouldered the peddling-box and took to the road, there is a crossed paragraph containing a most significant revelation. It seems that after giving the matter some serious thought, our Scribe came to the conclusion that it is not proper to incriminate his illustrious Master. But here is a confession which ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the rate of a million a year immigrants are pouring in upon us, and no wonder they come, when they read of the marvelous fortunes made in the new world; of Mackay a penniless boy in the old world, worth fifty millions at middle life in America; A.T. Stewart peddling lace at twenty, a merchant prince at fifty; Carnegie a poor Scotch lad at eighteen, a half billionaire at seventy. These with many more such results on a smaller scale, rainbow the sky that spans the ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... The book was partially rewritten by Holbach and then touched up by Naigeon, who, according to a manuscript note by his brother, "atheised it as much as possible." It was sold with great secrecy and at a high price— a reward which the colporters demanded for the risk they ran in peddling seditious literature. The book was a violent attack on the spirit of domination which characterized the Christian priesthood at ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... demoralised by long inactivity, had been approached by both sides. The regiment held a meeting to decide what action to take. Resolved, that the regiment remain neutral, and continue its present activities-which consisted in peddling ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... complete it only when youth is long past. Yet there are several in Matsue, men and women, who have made this tremendous pilgrimage, seeing all Japan, and supporting themselves not merely by begging, but by some kinds of itinerant peddling. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... old man! You sure are a sport. Nothing like selling something that doesn't even exist! I see you years hence on Wall Street, peddling nebulous gold ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... uncle Ro been a true son of peddling, he would have charged a dollar extra on each of the nineteen, and made eleven dollars ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... across country, peddling the stock of goods he had on hand. Once on his return he brought with him a piece of machine-made cloth which a merchant of Noerdlingen had given him. "Look, Marian, see what sort of stuff it is," he said, and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... look the herd over before it starts out. Now, Dupree is a good cowman, but he's got a wife already. And Camp, the financial man of the firm, made his money peddling Yankee clocks. Now, you don't suppose for a moment I'd let you marry him and carry you away from Las Palomas. Marry an old clock peddler?—not if he had a million! The idea! If they come down here and I ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... I've had to save you. You are interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to believe. Never mind. I'll carry my ideas out yet—I will return. I'll show you what can be done. You with your little peddling notions—you are interfering with me. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... savage was more than a match for Newport. He affected great dignity; it was unworthy such great werowances to dicker; it was not agreeable to his greatness in a peddling manner to trade for trifles; let the great Newport lay down his commodities all together, and Powhatan would take what he wished, and recompense him with a proper return. Smith, who knew the Indians and their ostentation, told Newport that the intention was to cheat him, but his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... sidetrack at Watertown Junction it created considerable curiosity. People who have ever passed Watertown Junction have noticed the fine old gentleman who comes into the car with a large square basket, peddling popcorn. He is one of the most innocent and confiding men in the world. He is honest, and he believes that ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... in the Netherlands, rakishly forlorn, his breastplate full of rusty dents, his wild hair worn by his steel cap, swaggering along on a sorry hack with an old belt full of pistolets, and his long sword thumping Rosinante's ribs. Then a peddling chapman, with a dust-white pack and a cunning Hebrew look, limped by, sulkily doffing his greasy hat. Two sturdy Midland journeymen, in search of southern handicraft, trudged down with tool-bags over their shoulders and stout oak staves in hand. Of wretched beggars and tattered ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... the road, a poet with a pedler's load I mostly sing a hearty song, and take a chew and hike along, a-handing out my samples fine of Cheero Brand of sweet sunshine, and peddling optimistic pokes and stable lines of japes and jokes to Lyceums and other folks, to Rotarys, Kiwanis' Clubs, and feel I ain't like other dubs. And then old Major Silas Satan, a brainy cuss who's always waitin', he gives his tail a lively quirk, and gets in quick his dirty work. He fills me up ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... man's face again clouded. A few years ago, he had been peddling his manuscripts with the heart-sickness of unsuccessful middle age. To-day, men coupled his name with those of Kipling and De Maupassant. One of his antipathies was meeting people who sought to lionize him. Lescott read the expression, ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... out of their tents. Daniel S. Dickinson, no longer peddling his griefs in private ears, declared "there was no doubt of the President's triumphant election;"[1017] the tone of Bryant and the Evening Post changed; Beecher renewed hope through the Independent and preached a political sermon every Sunday ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... this petty trade I never could imagine. He apparently had plenty of money, and had the entree of the best houses in the city,—taking care, however, I suppose, to drive no bargains within the enchanted circle of the Upper Ten. I came at length to the conclusion that this peddling was but a mask to cover some greater object, and even went so far as to believe my young acquaintance to be implicated in the slave-trade. That, however, was none ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... was felt to be striking rather too keenly at the root of things. For Nicholas Oldfield was looked upon with a respect not so much inspired by his outward circumstances as by his method of taking them. There are, indeed, ways and ways among us who serve the public. When Tom O'Neil went round peddling essences, children saw him from afar, ran to meet him, and, falling on his pack, besought him for "two-three-drops-o'-c'logne" with such fervor that the mothers had to haul them off by main force, in order themselves to approach his redolence; but when the clock-mender appeared, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... rear of this a stable, full of horses, ponies, mules, machos, and donkeys, for there was no lack of guests, who, however, for the most part slept in the stable with their caballerias, being either arrieros or small peddling merchants, who travelled the country with coarse cloth or linen. Opposite to my room in the corridor lodged a wounded officer, who had just arrived from San Sebastian on a galled broken-kneed pony: he was an Estrimenian, and was returning to his own village to be cured. ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... see in any of our mountain gaps, where the land produces nothing but grasshoppers and rocks, and the farmers have to get along by raising chickens to keep down the swarms of grasshoppers, and by peddling huckleberries, and they say, but I never saw them at it, by holding the hind legs of the sheep up to let them get their noses between the rocks ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... waiting game. I would go away on a peddling tour and then come back as boarder. Nothing developed, but I could not get rid of the feeling that my man was somewhere near in ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... this country were generally what their customers called "Yankees"—that is, New-Englanders, or descendants of the puritans, whether born east of the Hudson or not. And, certainly, no class of men were ever better fitted for an occupation, than were those for "peddling." The majority of them were young men, too; for the "Yankee" who lives beyond middle age, without providing snug quarters for the decline of life, is usually not even fit for a peddler. But, though often not advanced in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... in life had been a solid progress, and his boldest speculations seemed securer than the legitimate business of less potent financiers. Beginning business life by peddling gingerbread on a railway train, he had developed such a genius for railway management as some men show for chess or for virtue; and his accumulating property had the momentum of ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... entreaty, "don't be satisfied, don't let yourself be lulled to sleep! While you are young, strong, wealthy, do not cease to do good! Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... in Humphrey Goode, and inquired if there would be anything further, sir? When Rand said there wouldn't, he went down the spiral. Just as Rand had expected, Goode began peddling the same line as Varcek and Dunmore before him. They all came to see him in the gunroom with a common purpose. After easing himself into a chair, and going through some prefatory huffing and puffing, Goode came out with it. Did Rand believe that Lane Fleming had really been murdered, ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... American Red Cross. For there abides the commissioner of the Red Cross for all Europe. At that time he was a spare, well made man in his late thirties,—Major Grayson M. P. Murphy; a West Pointer who left the army fifteen years ago after service in the Philippines, started "broke" in New York peddling insurance, and quit business last June vice-president of the largest trust company in the world, making the climb at considerable speed, but without much noise. He was the quietest man in Paris. He was so quiet that he had to have a muffler cut-out on his own great ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... men who live and grow rich by a traffic in human flesh and blood in the colonies, are conducting at home a campaign in the sacred name of liberty! Don't you see that the whole movement is a movement of hucksters and traders and peddling vassals swollen by wealth into envy of the power that lies in birth alone? The money-changers in Paris who hold the bonds in the national debt, seeing the parlous financial condition of the State, tremble at the thought ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... the organ having been pawned for twenty dollars, Thomas paying ten per cent a month on the money. It was so with everything he undertook. Once he gave me elaborate warning that I must furnish myself with another messenger at once, as he was going to make a fortune peddling oranges and apples. Accordingly, he bought a barrel (!) of each kind of fruit, sold half at reasonable rates, and then, the remainder beginning to decay on his hands, he came to me, offering really fine Havana oranges at ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... after as slick a swindler as has been around these parts in a long time. He done me out of a bunch of money not long ago, and only a little while ago I got word that the same man is peddling stuff in Franklin. I hitched up, as soon as I could, intending to go to Franklin and have him arrested. But this pesky axle had to break, and now I can't go on. It's the only rig I have, too. I heard that the fellow intends to ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... true reason for the status of the Mali caste as a whole. Again Sir C. Elliot wrote in the Hoshangabad Settlement Report: "Garden crops are considered as a kind of fancy agriculture and the true cultivator, the Kisan, looks on them with contempt as little peddling matters; what stirs his ambition is a fine large wheat-field eighty or a hundred acres in extent, as flat as a billiard-table and as black as a Gond." Similarly Mr. Low [160] states that in Balaghat the Panwars, the principal agricultural caste, look down on the Marars as ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... An Indian squaw was peddling baskets at my house, and we traded the shoes to her for two baskets. I kept one and he the other. Not long after that he was burned to death in a forest fire, and when I packed his belongings to send to his mother the little basket was among ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... waist—ready to be expended for clocks and calicoes, horn buttons and wooden combs, knives, and negro-handkerchiefs, whenever their proprietor should determine upon a proper whereabout in which to fix himself. Bunce had grown tired of peddling—the trade was not less uncertain than fatiguing. Besides, travelling so much among the southrons, he had imbibed not a few of their prejudices against his vocation, and, to speak the truth, had grown somewhat ashamed of his present mode of life. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Roman and the Greek. As the Cavalier of the Cromwellian era was a horror to the pharisaical Puritan, and the Puritan in his turn a contempt and an abomination to the reckless, pleasure-hunting Cavalier, so to-day is the 'psalm-singing, clock-peddling Yankee' a foul odor to the fastidious nostrils of the lordly Southerner, and the reckless prodigal, dissipated and soul-selling planter a thorn in the flesh of Puritan morality. The Yankee is to the Southerner ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... course; for the mud was abysmal, and it was often safer to ride in the ditch than on the road. The village, with a tramway through it, stood high and healthy. The best houses were those of the Chinese. The poorer Chinese find peddling employments and trade about the villages, rather than hard work on the estates; while they cultivate on ridges, with minute care, their favourite sweet potato. Round San Fernando, a Chinese will rent from a sugar-planter a bit of land which seems hopelessly ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... but his footsteps left behind Along the byways of life, Where he patiently walked, striving the while To quiet its tumult and strife. But the peddling pilgrim has laid down his pack And gone with his earnings away; How small will they seem, remembering the debt Which the world ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott |
