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Secondhand   Listen
adjective
Secondhand  adj.  
1.
Not original or primary; received from another; as, secondhand information. "They have but a secondhand or implicit knowledge."
2.
Not new; already or previously possessed or used by another; as, a secondhand book, garment.
At second hand. See Hand, n., 10.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Secondhand" Quotes from Famous Books



... what I was told. It was so unkind of her to scorn me just because I happen to be second-hand." And her voice awakened Shelton's pity; it was like a frightened child's. "I don't know what I shall do if I have to form opinions for myself. I was n't brought up to it. I 've always had them nice and secondhand. How am I to go to work? One must believe what other people do; not that I think much of other people, but, you do know what it is—one feels so much more comfortable," and her skirts rustled. "But, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... defrayed by a continuation of the duties on malt, &c; a land-tax at three shillings in the pound; a duty on licences, to be yearly paid by pawnbrokers and dealers in secondhand goods, within the bills of mortality; the sum of one million four hundred thousand pounds advanced by the bank, according to a proposal made for that purpose; five hundred thousand pounds to be issued from the sinking-fund; a duty laid on gum Senegal; and the continuation of divers other occasional ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... he continued, reflectively, "is a typewriter. When I git two er three hunderd ahead perhaps I'll buy one—secondhand." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne

... old and worn. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A set of British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back of the black walnut. To what length, then, of cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence? (I had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, London, from a cart, cheap, because a volume ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... sentiment to admiring devotion; if the lady in peach-coloured velvet and leopard skin had worn a pleasant expression in addition to her other elaborate furnishings, Emmeline at least might have respected and even loved her. As it was, she gave her a horrible reputation, based chiefly on a secondhand knowledge of gilded depravity derived from the conversation of those who were skilled in the art of novelette reading; Bert filled in a few damaging details from ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... friend, sure enough," announced Mr Philp. "He paid off his crew last Toosday, an' took his discharge an' the train down to Plymouth. He've bought a wardrobe there—real wornut—an' 'tis comin' round by sea. There's a plate-chest, too, he thinks you may fancy— price thirty-five shillin secondhand: an' he hopes to reach Troy the day after next, which by the post-mark ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... of which has just appeared in the local journal of Natchitoches. The paper is lying on the bar-room table; and all of them, who can read, have already made themselves acquainted with the particulars of the crime. Those, whose scholarship does not extend so far, have learnt them at secondhand from ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... because he has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all secondhand: and we are practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a door-knocker, without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are gone—where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... the addition of the characteristic preface, which, after the second edition, was dropped. The four small volumes of these early editions, with their large type, their ample spacing, their charming flavour of antiquity, delicacy, and rest—may be met with often enough in secluded corners of secondhand bookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a country house. For their own generation, they represented a distinguished title to fame. Mrs. Inchbald—to use the expression of her biographer—"was ascertained ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... little Abbe, that my faith is not very fervent, but, as my friend, you are magnanimous enough to put up with my lukewarmness, and to leave me alone, and to wait for the future, so you say. But I absolutely disbelieve in the relics of secondhand dealers in piety, and you share my doubts in that respect. Therefore, the loss of that bit of sheep's carcass did not grieve me, and I easily procured a similar fragment, which I carefully fastened inside my jewel-box, and then I ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... hour the work went on, and then Droom dismissed the workers with their pay. The storage van men were there to carry the boxes away. Graydon sat still and saw the offices divested. Secondhand dealers hurried off with the furniture, the pictures and the rugs; an expressman came in for the things that belonged ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... the vestibule of the Palatine temple, waiting for the morning appearance of the Emperor, rhetoricians discussed the meaning of an adverb. In the baths they tested each other's knowledge of Sallust. Grammarians gathered in secondhand bookshops around rare copies of Varro's satires and Fabius's chronicles and hunted for copyist's errors. If one were tired of the streets and went to walk in Agrippa's park, he ran into men quarrelling over a vocative. Even on a holiday ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... invitingly on the table—he eagerly seizes it, and is forthwith furnished with topics of conversation with his family. When he is thoroughly posted up in the news of the day, he sallies forth, and is ready to interchange ideas at secondhand with any acquaintance he may meet. What would become of Paterfamilias, his family, and his friends, if they were deprived of this resource? The whole framework of society would be unhinged, business and pleasure would alike come to a standstill, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... lace; and that my single emerald could be more easily turned into dollars and cents than all the enameled jewelry I owned put together. The feeling of reenforcement that the contents of my trunk gave me did a lot in restoring confidence. The girl next door and I reckoned that their value in secondhand shops would see me through the summer, at least. Surely, I could become established ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty

... and commentators, like Alfarabi and Avicenna. And this helps us to understand why it is that Ibn Daud and Maimonides who not only read Arabic but wrote their philosophical works in Arabic showed the same preference for the secondhand Aristotle. One reason may have been the lack of historical and literary criticism spoken of above, and the other the difficulty of the Arabic translations of Aristotle. Aristotle is hard to translate into any language by reason of his peculiar technical ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... either expensive or new. When he finally found what he wanted, he went in search of clothing, buying a piece at a time, here and there, in widely scattered shops. Some of it was new, some of it was secondhand, all of it fit both the body and the personality of the old man he was supposed to be. Finally, he went ...
— What The Left Hand Was Doing • Gordon Randall Garrett

... aloud to him a text from the Bible, until he knew it by heart; and he had, as he said truly, "a good remembrancer," and never heard a striking sermon but he retained the most important passages, and retailed them secondhand to ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... of the greatest poets; the two are so fused by integrity of fire, whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering is the vainest task of criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and not be compelled to divide his secondhand and enfeebled and excited matter from the successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has said again, "It imposes a law on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived that fatal division. ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell

... eyes sparkled when he saw the watch. He had forgotten about that, but as soon as he saw it he coveted it. He had a cheap silver watch of his own, which he had bought secondhand about three years before. He had thought that he might some day possess a gold watch, but he was not willing to lay out the necessary ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger

... hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor, rudeness, confused misery and want, yet of nobleness and manfulness withal. It is a type of the man's life, this pitching-away of the shoes. An original man;—not a secondhand, borrowing or begging man. Let us stand on our own basis, at any rate! On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that;—on the reality and substance which Nature gives us, not on the semblance, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... out of the kirk. So So, Miss Jeny (says I) hae ye stumped the cow of her tale, or is this the ladies Bowa ye have on your sholders? The brazen faced woman had the impudence to deny the Bowa was yours, and said her sweetheart had bot it for her in a secondhand shop in the Salt Market of Glasgow. But I cut matters short wi' Jeny; I een, as if by your authority, tuke the law in my own hand, and tore the Bowa from her sholders; it was torn a little in the scuffle wi' Jeny and me afore the congregation in the kirk yard, but I carried it off in spite of ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton

... and we should also take the power. Instead of putting our thinking out, as we put our washing, let us do it at home. No man can do another's thinking for him. What is thought in the originator is only acquiescence in the man who takes it at secondhand. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... do not mean to say they actually question the facts to the extent of doubting one's veracity, or else nearly all testimony must go for nothing; but there is in these matters always room for doubting whether the narrator has not been deceived; and, moreover, even if accepted at secondhand, I doubt whether facts so accepted ever become, as it were, assimilated, so as to have any ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... has given me to him and I am to be married within a fortnight. Curse them! curse them all, I say! Oh! I wish I had the pluck to run away, or to kill myself or do something—but I am such an abominable coward—and I shall loathe to live in Arad in a tiny secondhand clothes shop, with that hideous monster for a husband—pointed at by everyone as the girl with a disgraceful story to her credit and sold to a creature whom no one else would have—in order to cover ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... recruiting office is there. I'll give you the address. However, the base is some distance away, so you'll need transportation. I suggest a jeep. You can pick one up secondhand after you arrive. I'll give you sufficient funds. Also, prepare to hang around Las Vegas for a while. It will take at least a ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... calves of those singers?—I mean, the men. Perhaps not—for they' ve got none. They're sticks, not legs. Who can think much of fellows with such legs? Now, the next time you go to the Italian Opera, notice 'em. Ha! ha!—well, that would sound queer, told at secondhand; but, just look at their legs, ma'am, and ask yourself whether there's much chance for a country that stands on legs like those! Let them paint, and carve blocks, and sing. They're not fit for much else, as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sociology too; and it is by his originality in this respect that he passes irresistibly through all the readymade prejudices that are set up to bar his promotion. And the heroine, nice, amiable, benevolent, and anxious to please and behave well, but hopelessly secondhand in her morals and nicenesses, and consequently without any real moral force now that the threat of hell has lost its terrors for her, is left destitute among the failures which are so puzzling to thoughtless people. "I cannot understand why she is so unlucky: she is such ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... at them in order to waylay them with inquisitive questions; but Stephen's grave and steady face, and the presence of Bess, who walked close beside him, as if there was shelter and protection there, kept them silent; and they were compelled to satisfy their curiosity with secondhand reports. Martha went on with Bess to her own cottage to stay all night with her, and help her to console her ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton

... locality. Stow (Survey of London, edit. 1720, lib. iii. p. 122) says:—"Long Lane, so called from its length, coming out of Aldersgate Street against Barbican, and falleth into West Smithfield. A Place also of Note for the Sale of Apparel, Linnen, and Upholsters Goods, both Secondhand and New, but chiefly for old, for which it is of note." See also p. 284 of the same book, and Cunningham's Hand Book of London, edit. 1848, in voce, with the authorities and illustrations there ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown

... director or someone had muffed the perfume that the Lady Jane wore. Instead of the wholesome freshness of the free, open air, Jane was wearing a heady, spicy scent engineered to cut its way through the blocking barrier of stale cigar smoke, whisky-laden secondhand air, and a waft of cooking aroma from the kitchen of the standard ...
— The Big Fix • George Oliver Smith

... head again. "No. You wouldn't like what you find here. Freedom is heady stuff, but you have to have a taste for it. You can't acquire a fondness for it secondhand. And for a while, there's going to be freedom here. Besides, once you get back to Earth, you'll ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey

... got to be very sure that money in such a case is not the motive. If it is the penalty never fails to follow. Mr. Bumble married Mrs. Corney for "six teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a milk-pot, with a small quantity of secondhand furniture and twenty pounds in money." And in two months he regretted his bargain and admitted that he had gone "dirt cheap." "Only two months to-morrow," he ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... agency—Dove was always on the spot to guide and assist his friends; to advise where the best, or cheapest, or rarest, of anything was to be had, from secondhand Wagner scores to hair pomade; he knew those shops where the "half-quarters" of ham or roast-beef weighed heavier than elsewhere, restaurants where the beer had least froth and the cutlets were largest for the money; knew the ins and outs of Leipzig ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... those of Wilkins Micawber the younger, are excellent. To persons conscious of mental debility and incapable of grappling even with a short shilling novel, a brief and easy form of reading may be recommended. They may study catalogues; they may peruse the lists of their wares which secondhand booksellers and dealers in all kinds of curiosities circulate gratis. This is the only kind of circular which should not go straight to its long home in the waste-paper basket. A catalogue is full of information. It is so exceedingly inconsecutive that even the most successful barrister, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... whilst I read this epistle, I remarked the address with which Diderot affected a milder and more polite language than he had done in his former ones, wherein he never went further than "My dear," without ever deigning to add the name of friend. I easily discovered the secondhand means by which the letter was conveyed to me; the subscription, manner and form awkwardly betrayed the manoeuvre; for we commonly wrote to each other by post, or the messenger of Montmorency, and this was the first and only time he sent me his letter ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... early, with the vague, aimless step of a dreamer, and stood about, staring vacantly. Leh Shin's shop attracted him, and he would squat on the ground either just outside the narrow entrance, or just within, and, with flaccid, dropping mouth, stare at the hanging array of secondhand clothes, making himself a source of endless entertainment for the boy, who found him easy to annoy and distress, and consequently practised upon ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of impossibility. There was no sort of help available except that of indoor servants, for whom she had no accommodation. The furniture was their own; it was partly secondhand, but on the whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt's bias for cheap, gay-figured muslin had found ample score. In many ways I should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and cramped sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking everything, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... but he does no more. He reads again, really to instruct his mind, and learns about this and that: but he does not learn the causes of things; the reasons of the chances and changes of this world; and so he is not satisfied; he takes up doctrines, true ones, perhaps, at secondhand out of books and out of sermons:, without having had any personal experience of them; and so, when sickness or sorrow, doubt or dread, come, they do not satisfy him. Then he longs—he ought at least to long—for truth. He thirsts for truth. O that I could know the truth about myself; ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... two kinds of thought: New Thought and Secondhand Thought. New Thought is made up of thoughts you, yourself, think. The other kind is supplied to you by jobbers. The distinguishing feature of New Thought is its antiquity. Of necessity it is older than Secondhand Thought. All genuine New Thought is true for the person who ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... of medicine from his pocket—naphtha it was—and gave it to Inger with orders to take it regularly and get well again. And there were the windows and the painted doors that he could fairly boast of; he set to work at once fitting them in. Oh, such little doors, and secondhand at that, but painted up all neat and fine again in red and white; 'twas almost as good as having pictures on ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun

... the Marionette studied by lamplight. With some of the money he had earned, he bought himself a secondhand volume that had a few pages missing, and with that he learned to read in a very short time. As far as writing was concerned, he used a long stick at one end of which he had whittled a long, fine point. Ink he had none, so he used the juice of blackberries or cherries. Little by little his diligence ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini

... and interest in intellectual pursuits is entirely gone, and resources can neither be found in the present, or hoped for in the future. Hard is the fate of those who are bound to such victims by the ties of blood and duty. They must suffer, secondhand, all the annoyances which ennui inflicts on its wretched victims. No natural sweetness of temper can long resist the depressing influence of dragging on from day to day an uninterested, unemployed existence; and besides, those who can find no occupation for ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... must be moral discipline too. Laziness, worldliness, the absorption of attention with other things, self-conceit, prejudice, and, I was going to say, almost above all, the taking of our religion and religious opinions at secondhand from men and teachers and books —all these stand in the way of our hearing the Spirit of God when He speaks. Come away from the babble and go by yourself, and take your Bibles with you, and read them, and meditate upon them, and get near the Master of whom they speak, and the Spirit ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... noted. What I want to ask you is this. Our contact with you has been through vidscreen only. We must rely on indirect evidence, since none of us goes above. We can only infer what is going on. We never see anything ourselves. We have to take it all secondhand. Some top leaders are beginning to think there's too much ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick

... house had burned one night, and the master of Bramble Farm could not bring himself to pay out the cash for even a secondhand wagon. As a result, the always limited social activities of the farm were ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson

... those everlasting freedmen. John was to forward mine. He had taken up the box to write my address on it, when the yellow bundle tumbled off the desk at his feet and scared the wits out of his head. So I came in for father's secondhand clothes, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... writer of fiction. He was elected to the French Academy in 1884. Smooth shaven, of placid figure, with pensive eyes, the hair brushed back regularly, the head of an artist, Coppee can be seen any day looking over the display of the Parisian secondhand booksellers on the Quai Malaquais; at home on the writing-desk, a page of carefully prepared manuscript, yet sometimes covered by cigarette-ashes; upon the wall, sketches by Jules Lefebvre and Jules Breton; a little in the distance, the gaunt form of his attentive ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Mr. Cibber; and all the company, men and women, seemed to think they had an interest in what was said, and were half as well pleased as if they had said the sprightly things themselves; and mighty well contented were they to be secondhand repeaters of the pretty things. But once I faced the laureate squatted upon one of the benches, with a face more wrinkled than ordinary with disappointment 'I thought,' said I, 'you were of the party at the tea-treats—Miss Chudleigh has gone ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various

... presence of bishops and handing niggers Bibles—engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered somehow. And ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... fight for—the whims as well as the convenience of his customers. It was he who took arms against the Westminster City Council in defence of the out-of-door-stall, the 'classic sixpenny box,' and at least brought off a drawn battle. He is at pains to make his secondhand catalogues better reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing. He has done, also, his pious share of service to good literature. He has edited James Thomson, him of The City of Dreadful ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... old man's nostrils were dusty with snuff, and his poor garments hung about his shrunken form in the careless ease which is common to the tailor's shopboard. I could not help admiring the brave old wrinkled workman as he stood in the doorway talking about his secondhand trade, whilst the gusty wind fondled about in his thin gray hair. I took a friendly pinch from his little wooden box at parting, and left him to go on struggling with his troublesome family to "keep above the flood," by translating ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... Ajax, who was known in private life as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called at the house in Little Queen Street where the Lambs lived, and they all had gin and water, and the elder Lamb played the harpsichord, a secondhand one that had been presented by Mr. Salt, and recited poetry, and Coleridge talked the elder Lamb under the table and argued the entire party into silence. Coleridge was only seventeen then, but a man grown, and already ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard

... middle-age church. It was against the feeble race of imitators, and not against the master himself, that the protest of the lake poet was raised. He proposed to do away with the Miltonic vocabulary altogether, not because it was in itself vicious, but because it could now only be employed at secondhand. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... Giardini, the erewhile cook, in the poor fellow she saw, without wondering by what series of disasters he had sunk to keep a miserable shop for secondhand food. She went in and sat down, for she had come from Fontainebleau. She had walked fourteen leagues that day, after begging her ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... These sounds served to cover effectually any noises he made as he felt about and made up his small pack. His old canvas coat, his most treasured article of apparel, he took down from the hook where it accumulated dust from month to month. His ancient, secondhand cartridge belt with the antiquated revolver he removed from another hook—he had never been given enough ammunition to become a shot of any quality—and he pushed quickly into ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... been moved by his words. Even at secondhand I was moved by them. Jay Allison looked at the floor, and I saw him twist his long well-kept surgeon's hands and crack the knuckles with an odd gesture. Finally he said, "I haven't any choice either way, Doctor. I'll take the chance. ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... their knowledge of what is good and moral to the Bible alone, sir," I answered. "They get it secondhand, it is true, just as they get their knowledge of God from the Bible, although they may never look into it. Without the Bible we should still be worshipping blocks of stone, or creeping things, or the sun and stars. Without it man would never ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston

... "I was kind of glad to get away, and Lem was certain everything would open right out. But he's awful hard to do with; he wouldn't take a dollar from parties who had every right to stake him good, and borrowed five from no more than a stranger to buy that secondhand barber chair. What he needed was chloroform to separate these farmers from their dimes and whiskers." Bowman laughed loudly, and a corresponding color invaded Bella. "Of course no one knew Lem had done time, then. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... done its work. All frayed and secondhand loves may be made ashamed by the fearlessness of these two walking to their farewell trysting-place, lonely amid the world of heather. Only daft Jock Gordon above them, like a jealous scout, scoured the heights—sometimes on all-fours, sometimes bending double, with his long arms swinging ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... her mistress's back was turned—for Stuppeny did not return for nearly a quarter of an hour. He looked slightly more presentable as he climbed into the back of the trap. It struck Joanna that she might be able to get him a suit of livery secondhand. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... almost everything that could be bought or sold, from French wines to secondhand shoes. The effect was to raise prices so as to make even the common necessaries of life excessively dear. A great outcry finally arose; Parliament requested the Queen to abolish the "monopolies"; she hesitated, but when she saw their determined attitude she gracefully ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... light-headed, why did she order a landaulet? She declared, too, that I was unfit for town service; gave new orders to Houlditch; took possession of a chariot fashioned eight months later than myself; sent me to Long Acre to be disposed of, and I became a secondhand article! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various

... at end of First Act, when prancing steeds, with secondhand park-hack saddles, at quite half-a-crown an hour, are brought in, and, on a striking tableau of bold but impecunious warriors refusing to mount, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various

... the squire. "Stirn, I say, Stirn!" But Stirn had forced his way through the hedge and vanished. Thus left to his own powers of narrative at secondhand, Mr. Hazeldean now told all he had to communicate,—the assault upon Randal Leslie, and the prompt punishment inflicted by Stirn; his own indignation at the affront to his young kinsman, and his good-natured merciful desire to save ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... feature which we dare not overlook, and that is, the hearty conscientiousness with which the writer does his work. He takes nothing at secondhand, but goes straightway to the authorities. It begets confidence in a writer, when he is enabled to say for himself, as the Professor apologetically does in his Preface, "It has been my aim to examine for myself every reported ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... and in fact a large part of it is not packed at all. Most of the small fruit growers use the sixteen quart crate, while the apple, if it is packed at all, is packed in barrels. One requirement of a package is that it be clean, and if it must be clean a secondhand package cannot be used. Many fall down here by using secondhand, odd sized and dirty crates or barrels. The shipping crate should be kept out of the field and off of the ground. The place for it ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... is communicated, experience shows that this does not occur by animals coming near or in contact with one another. It is an indirect infection. The cattle from the infected district first infect the pastures, roads, pens, cars, etc., whence the susceptible cattle obtain the virus secondhand. Usually animals do not contract the disease when separated from infected pastures by a fence. If, however, there is any drainage or washing by rains across the line of fence this rule does ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... the capital or at the outposts of the Empire! There is nothing that may not be found there. One never knows what extraordinary or wonderful thing one may light upon there. Among old rusty fire-irons one finds an ancient sword offered as a poker; among the litter of holy and secular secondhand books, hand-painted missals of the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... visiting, moreover, most of the harbors of the Levant. Careful to be always well supplied with the products in most general demand—coffee, sugar, rice, tobacco, cotton stuffs, and gunpowder—and being at all times ready to barter, and prepared to deal in secondhand wares, he had ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... at his wife with a smile—such a smile! "You might have afforded your lover something better than a secondhand souvenir," he said. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... Galveston," Cappy interrupted triumphantly, "I'll have Mike Murphy buy a nice, staunch little secondhand motor cruiser, thirty-eight or forty feet long, with plenty of power and comfortable living accommodations for half a dozen people. Mike will arrange for extra oil and gasoline tankage, and we'll swing this cruiser in on the main deck and let it rest there in a cradle, with the slings round it, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... that Darco paid his whole expenses, and that his salary came to him each week intact. He began to save money and to develop at the same time an inexpensive dandyism. He took to brown velveteen and to patent leather boots. He bought a secondhand watch at a pawnbroker's, but disdained a chain. His father had inspired him with a horror of jewellery; for once, when he had spent the savings of a month upon a cheap scarf-pin, the elder Armstrong had wrathfully asked him what he meant by sticking that brass-headed nail in ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... to the office he passed a secondhand book-stall. He had lingered in front of it many times before now, turning over the leaves of this and that odd volume, and picking up the scraps of amusement and information which are always to be found in such an occupation. To-day, however, he overhauled the contents of the trays with ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... pawnbroker, going to the shop and returning with two or three secondhand revolvers ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs

... vowed vengeance at the foot of the scaffold on which his father and mother had perished, an idea can be formed of the terrible chief of the assassins of Avignon, who had for his lieutenants, Farges the silk-weaver, Roquefort the porter, Naudaud the baker, and Magnan the secondhand clothes dealer. ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Rudliche calmly replied, with the true phlegm of ignorance, 'My dear friend, I think your resolution in regard to your books a very prudent one; but I do not perfectly conceive your plan as to the profit; for, though your volumes may be very curious, yet you know they are most of them secondhand.'—I was so vexed with the fellow's stupidity that I had a great mind to punish him by not disclosing a syllable more. However, at last my vanity got the better of my resentment, and I explained to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... This is a grand square, looking towards the cardinal points, and composed of ahuehuetes, grand old deciduous cypresses, many of them forty feet round, and older than the discovery of America. My companion, not content with buying collections at secondhand, wished to have some excavations made on his own account, and very judiciously fixed on this spot, where, though there were no buildings standing, the appearance of the ground and the mounds in the neighbourhood, together with the historical notoriety ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... to sleep buried beneath his favorite authors, and his first thought in the morning is how to obtain instruments so we can study the harmonics of the sky." And a way was to open: they were to make their own telescopes—what larks! Brother and sister set to work studying the laws of optics. In a secondhand store they found a small Gregorian reflector which had an aperture ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... of the depression is obvious. But that is not all that you and I mean by the new order of things. Our pledge was not merely to do a patchwork job with secondhand materials. By using the new materials of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... far as it is a name; of fact, so far as it is a thing. Dr. Stirling has not taken the trouble to refer to the original authorities for his history, which is consequently a travesty; and still less has he concerned himself with looking at the facts, but contents himself with taking them also at secondhand. A most amusing example of this fashion of dealing with scientific statements is furnished by Dr. Stirling's remarks upon my account of the protoplasm of the nettle hair. That account was drawn up from careful and often-repeated observation of the facts. Dr. Stirling ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... "you couldn't find Miss Pompret's things here—in a store like this. They only sell new china, and hers would be secondhand!" ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope

... fault. My object has been narrowly limited. I have tried by means of a bald record of conversations and things seen, to provide material for those who wish to know what is being done and thought in Moscow at the present time, and demand something more to go upon than secondhand reports of wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by either one side or the other, and often by neither one side nor the other, but by irresponsible scoundrels who, in the natural turmoil of the greatest convulsion in the history of our civilization, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... worth?" quoth Belcolore. "Worth!" ejaculated the priest: "I would have thee know that 'tis all Douai, not to say Trouai, make: nay, there are some of our folk here that say 'tis Quadrouai; and 'tis not a fortnight since I bought it of Lotto, the secondhand dealer, for seven good pounds, and then had it five good soldi under value, by what I hear from Buglietto, who, thou knowest, is an excellent judge of these articles." "Oh! say you so?" exclaimed Belcolore. "So help me God, I should not have thought it; however, let me look at it." So Master ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio

... near her confinement, but it was she who cleaned and put in order her new home. Every penny as of consequence, she said with pride, now that they would soon have another other mouth to feed. She rubbed her furniture, which was of old mahogany, good, but secondhand, until it shone like glass and was quite brokenhearted when she discovered a scratch. She held her breath if she knocked it when sweeping. The commode was her especial pride; it was so dignified and stately. Her pet dream, which, however, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... is the immense fireplace, with its huge spit like a baby crane, and a collection of old iron and brass instruments which pass as the original furniture of the fire, though as a matter of fact they have been picked up from time to time by the Bishop at secondhand shops. In the near end of the left hand wall a small Norman door gives access to the Bishop's study, formerly a scullery. Further along, a great oak chest stands against the wall. Across the middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by eleven stout rush-bottomed chairs: four ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... boy, nineteen years old, with what seems to us a "secondhand head," which doubtless came down to him from some knight who wore it during the Border Wars. It looks a very old head indeed, with deep-set blue eyes and beaked nose. Young as he is, Hall has had experience ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... passed away. During that period David had built up a shed in his back yard and had established a printing-press there, with a respectable, though not extensive, fount of type—bought, all of it, secondhand, and a bargain. John and he spent every available moment there, and during their first experiments would often sit up half the night working off the sheets of their earliest productions, in an excitement which took no count of fatigue. They began with reprinting some scarce local tracts, with ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... now—the professional Jimmie Dale. Quick as a cat, active, lithe, he was over a six foot fence in the rear of a building in a flash, and crouched a black shape, against the back door of an unpretentious, unkempt, dirty, secondhand shop that fronted on West Broadway—the last place certainly in all New York that the managing editor of the NEWS-ARGUS, or any one else, for that matter, would have picked out as the setting for the second debut of ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... Rat came swinging in on his secondhand crutches looking as if he had been made a general, and Marco came with him; and the drill the Squad was put through was stricter and finer than any ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... when he claims to have "done all that could reasonably be expected in a work of this nature."—L. Murray's Gram., Introd., p. 9. He that sees with other men's eyes, is peculiarly liable to errors and inconsistencies: uniformity is seldom found in patchwork, or accuracy in secondhand literature. Correctness of language is in the mind, rather than in the hand or the tongue; and, in order to secure it, some originality of thought is necessary. A delineation from new surveys is not the less original because the same region ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... set, the Keith custom shifted to Hamilton and Company. And because the Keiths were wealthy and influential, and because the head of the family saw that that influence was brought to bear upon his neighbors and acquaintances, their custom followed. Hamilton and Company put a delivery wagon—a secondhand one—out on the road, and hired a distinctly secondhand boy to drive it. And Mary and Shadrach and Zoeth and, in the evenings, the boy as well, were kept busy waiting on customers. The books showed, since the silent partner took hold, a real and tangible ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln

... historical work, we should consider both the writer's sources of information and the use he has made of them. Has he gone to original and trustworthy sources of information or has he taken his materials at secondhand? Has he given them thorough or only partial examination? Has he well digested his materials, so that he writes from the fullness of assimilated knowledge, or does he present only the raw materials of history? While delightful and useful histories may be ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... father's house; but, in that case, I should want three pounds journey money, and I should be very glad if you would be so kind as to let me have a sovereign in advance of my allowance, as Price knows of a capital secondhand bow and arrows. With my best love to all, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Providence, I can afford to buy a bit of tea and sugar and a quart loaf when a friend drops in," said Pauline, "but the meanness isn't any less disgusting. He'll want her to sell her cast-off dresses to the secondhand ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon

... girl," admitted Henry Reardon. "But this is beside the point: which is, that you're sticking on a matter that means everything to me, and which is only a secondhand interest to you—a point of sentiment. You pity the girl. What's pity? Bah! I pity a dog in the street, but would I cross you, Garry, lad, to save the dog? Sentiment, I say, ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... the books, but their titles gave them, in his mind, human existence so that he thought of them as actual persons living in different parts of the shop. There was, for instance, the triumph of "Lady Audley's Secret." An old lady with a trembling voice and a very sharp pair of eyes wished for a secondhand copy. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole



Words linked to "Secondhand" :   used, secondhand car, old, secondary



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