"Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... malignant cunning so as not to be limited in specific form of words to the negro race, but they were exclusively confined to that race in their execution. It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted to fit his case. Loitering around tippling-shops, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... seems that it is madder never to abandon oneself, than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor. As to magnetism, that is only a matter of fancy. You sometimes need just such a field in which to wander vagrant, and if it bear a higher name, yet it may be that, in last result, the trance of Pythagoras might be classed with the more infantine transports of ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... his pay-roll. Naturally he is promptly paid off and dismissed, and he may go through the same experience as often as he is foolish enough to try it. But even if he be inactive, he is not safe—far from it. He is known to the police and liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without visible means of support. Nor is this all. Suppose him to be recorded in prison archives as a safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere and the culprits escape. The credit of the police department demands that an arrest be made, if not of the person ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... at the time an urban centre capable of utilising the vast possibilities of the area in which it was placed. But this twofold object was not to be limited to Italy. He dreamed of transmarine enterprise taking a more solid and more generally useful form than that furnished by the vagrant trader or the local agent of the capitalist.[652] The idea and practice of colonisation across the sea were indeed no new ones; isolated foundations for military purposes, such as Palma and Pollentia in the Balearic Isles, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... is he? A man of vnreasonable boldnesse, bent to conspiracie, inconstant to performe that which he rashlie taketh in hand, readie to run into batell, vncircumspect in danger, practising things of great importance, seking after things vnpossible, bringing with him few good soldiers, but gathering a vagrant rout of rascals. There is nothing in him that we ought to be afraid of, for looke whatsoeuer he attempteth manfullie, the same he giueth ouer womanlie, in all his dooings vnfortunate, in all encounters either he is ouercome and ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (4 of 12) - Stephan Earle Of Bullongne • Raphael Holinshed
... read by most classes of Chinese who have been educated up to the requisite standard, and long journeys have often been undertaken to distant parts of the Empire, not so much from a thirst for knowledge or love of a vagrant life, as from a desire to be enrolled among the numerous contributors to the deathless literature of the Middle Kingdom. Such travellers start with a full knowledge of the tastes of their public, and a firm conviction that unless they ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... wandering slowly passed. Few people they met, and those, for the most part, various types of vagabonds and nomads; some wild and savage, roaming like beasts from place to place; others, harmless, mere bedraggled birds of passage. In this latter class were the vagrant-entertainers, with dancing rooster or singing dog, who stopped at every peasant's door. To the shrill piping of the flageolet, these merry stragglers added a step of their own, and won a crust for themselves, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... rather, he said that they sent him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... lightly, as a man should, for if one followed every vagrant fancy and intuition, taking account of signs and omens, he would slue and waver in his course like a toy boat in a mill pond, which after great labor and adventure comes, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... raisonnees. If I succeed in this Bill, as I expect to do, relating to the able poor, I shall, next sessions, proceed to accomplish the rest of my plan, by amending and giving force to (where necessary) the Bastard, Vagrant Laws, and generally those of police respecting the poor. The plan is extensive, but I have much considered it. I think I have it clear in comprehension, and can pursue it through each effect on the industry and manners of our people. I cannot be idle, ainsi ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... no mirage of a vagrant brain like that sea-picture, or that wild vision at Beauseincourt, but sober, and sad, and strange reality. I understood my position from that moment, geographically as well as physically. I was a prisoner ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... wished that she might walk among them. She knew, too, that the little sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate had been locked ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... man sees you as he is going home in the evening, and takes you to the overseers of the poor, and says, "Here is a little vagrant girl I found in the streets. We must send the poor little thing to the poor house, or she will starve ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... half-opened windows, soft and cool As Spring's young breath, the vagrant evening air, My day-worn soul is hushed. I fain would bear No burdens on my brain to-night, no rule Of anxious thought; the world has had my tears, My thoughts, my hopes, my aims ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... generosity to the government's friends. Its acts did not show this. Enactments in respect to freedmen, passed by the President's reconstructed legislatures, grudgingly bestowed civil rights. A different punishment for the same offence was prescribed for the negroes; apprentice, vagrant, and contract labour laws tended to a system of peonage; and the prohibition of public assemblies, the restriction of freedom of movement, and the deprivation of means of defence illustrated the inequality of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... angels leave heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy." I think that is nearly equal to this: "If you do not want your wife, give her a writing of divorcement," and make the mother of your children a houseless wanderer and a vagrant—nearly as good as that. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Major-Generals was coming into operation, he had been apprehended, on his way to Newark, by the vigilance of Major-General Haynes, and committed to prison in Yarmouth, There seems to have been no definite charge, other than that he was "the poet Cleveland" and was a questionable kind of vagrant. He had been in prison for some months when it occurred to him to address a letter to the Protector himself. "May it please your Highness," it began, "Rulers within the circle of their government have a claim to that ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... remember that for any outside the circle of the ancient blood to lift his eyes to the daughter of Solomon is to earn death, death slow and cruel for himself and all who aid and abet him. Let him remember, lastly, that this high-born lady to whom he, an unknown and vagrant Gentile, dares to talk as equal to equal, has from childhood been my affianced, who will shortly be my wife, although it may please her to seem to flout me after the fashion of maidens, and that we Abati are jealous of the honour of our women. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... to drown those other strains, vagrant wraiths that now floated upwards over fields and houses on the tepid wings of the sirocco—fragmentary snatches, torn from the brazen measure of the municipal band as it marched with the funeral ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... as far as Miss Unity was concerned; she had seldom spent such an afternoon in her life. She had been taken out for a walk in the mud, with rain threatening; she had talked in the open High Street, under the very eye of the dean, with a little vagrant out of Anchor and Hope Alley; she had of her own accord, unadvised and unassisted, formed an original plan, and not only formed it, but taken the first step towards carrying it out. Miss Unity hardly knew herself and felt quite uncertain ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... poor hut! Filled with content so great, The smell of stubble burnt, delights. Piled high The wagons silent standing take their nightly rest, On distant hills the silver birches I descry, Framed gold by fertile fields the sacred picture blest. Then with a joy unshared save by the vagrant, I see the threshing floor well filled and fragrant, The sloping straw-thatched cottage roofs again, The window panels carved, ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... State officials be entrusted with the unhampered control of civil affairs, and this was more than enough to revive the bulldozing methods that had characterized the beginning of Hamilton's administration. Oppressive legislation in the shape of certain apprentice and vagrant laws quickly followed, developing a policy of gross injustice toward the colored people on the part of the courts, and a reign of lawlessness and disorder ensued which, throughout the remote districts of the State at least, continued till Congress, by what are known as the Reconstruction Acts, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... your rose bushes through the pickets, and nooned upon your front porch, and pigs dreamed Arcadian dreams under your garden fence or languidly frescoed it with pigments from the nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor man's golden age. Your cow, or your goat, or your pig led a vagrant, wandering life, and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees, which was almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and came home fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled yourself where she went or how far ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Cambridge in the ninth century, but in 870, and again in 1010, the Danes sacked the town, and it would seem that the bridge was destroyed, for early in the twelfth century we find a reference to the ferry being definitely fixed at Cambridge, and that before that time it had been "a vagrant," passengers crossing anywhere that seemed most convenient. This fixing of the ferry, and various favours bestowed by Henry I., resulted in an immediate growth of prosperity, and the change was recognized by certain Jews who took up their quarters in the town and ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... frequently seen floating upon the sea in these regions, some of which are no doubt thrown upon the shores of the new created lands; from which accidental circumstance this fruit is there propagated. Vagrant birds unconsciously deposit the germs of various other productions of the vegetable kingdom, which in due season spring up and clothe their surfaces with verdure; and the natural accumulation of dead and putrid ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first chapter there is a certain stiffness; but ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the sea-blue swallow-wort, and there The pale-hued maidenhair, with parsley green And vagrant marsh-flowers; and a revel rare In the pool's midst the water-nymphs were seen To hold, those maidens of unslumbrous eyes Whom the ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... destitute sick wherever found; some requiring only temporary medical aid and nursing; others, whom God has chastened with more continuous suffering, requiring, in their penury, constant care and continual ministration." There is also under their charge a church school for vagrant children, and one also for the children of those comfortably situated ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... you live; you are a vagrant on the water—you have the reputation of a bad man—you live with us. Who will you make believe that you are ignorant ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... shade, bareheaded, dressed in white, stood a girl, so amazingly beautiful, that Sam wondered for a few moments whether he was asleep or awake. Her hat, which she had just taken off, hung on her left arm, and with her delicate right hand she arranged a vagrant tendril of the passion-flower, which in its luxuriant growth had broken bounds and fallen from its place above.—A girl so beautiful that I in all my life never saw her superior. They showed me the other day, in a carriage in the park, one they said was the most beautiful girl in England, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... no attention to anybody, until once, at court time, some carousing fellows hired Jack Wonnell to walk up to Meshach Milburn and ask to swap a new bell-crown for the old decrepit steeple-top. Looking at Wonnell sternly in the face, Meshach hissed, "You miserable vagrant! Nature meant you to go bareheaded. Beware when you speak to ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... India House; the introductions of Coleridge and his own growing repute in the world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends—Southey, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest—more congenial, and certainly more profitable, than the vagrant intimados, "to the world's eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Major had left behind her the reputation of "a saint." It was not undeserved: her quiet, constant charities,—her kindliness of look and manner, which were in themselves the best of charities,—a gentle, Christian way she had of dealing with all the vagrant humors of her husband,—and the constancy of her devotion to all duties, whether religious or domestic, gave her better claim to the saintly title than most who wear it. The Major knew this, and was proud to say it. "If," he was accustomed to say, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... novels and "purpose" books dealing with great industries and commodities cease to sell, the vagrant atoms and shadings of history ending with the opening of the two world-important canals might be employed by writers seeking incidents as entrancing as romances and which are capable of being woven into narrative sufficiently ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... wild day in Manila. Far over near the Escolta somebody shot at a vagrant dog lapping water from a little pool under one of the many hydrants. The soldier police essayed an arrest; the culprit broke and ran; the guard fired; a lot of coolies, taking alarm, fled jabbering to the river side. The natives, ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... and pleasure of a large district. It is so beautifully clean that, as at Nikko, I should feel reluctant to walk upon its well-swept streets in muddy boots. It would afford a good lesson to the Edinburgh authorities, for every vagrant bit of straw, stick, or paper, is at once pounced upon and removed, and no rubbish may stand for an instant in its streets except in a covered box or bucket. It is correctly laid out in square divisions, formed by five streets over a mile long, crossed by very numerous short ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... sundry items of live freight in the shape of some pigs, which were stowed in the long- boat on top of the deck-house; three cats, two belonging to the Portuguese steward and messing in the cuddy, while the third was a vagrant Tom that had strayed on board in the docks, and making friends with the carpenter Gregory, or "old chips" as he was generally called, was allowed to take up his quarters in the forepeak, migrating to the cook's cabin at meal-times with ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... was a fine grove for picnic purposes within easy reach, which was also frequently used for camp-meeting purposes. Gnarly old live-oaks spread their branches like a canopy over everything, while the sea-green moss hung from every limb and twig, excluding the light and lazily waving with every vagrant breeze. The fact that these grounds were also used for camp-meetings only proved the broad toleration of the people. On this occasion I distinctly remember that Miss Jean introduced a lady to me, who was the wife of an Episcopal ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... down the long driveway that led to Tutors' Lane, Tom slowed his pace. Overhead, Betelgeuse was making the most of its recent publicity, unobstructed by vagrant clouds. Tom gazed up at it with a certain air of proprietorship. He had known Betelgeuse years ago and personally had always preferred its neighbour Rigel, which had received no publicity at all. As a small boy some one had given him a Handbook of the Stars, ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... Secretary of State, had since he came to manhood, resided principally on the Continent, and had learned that cosmopolitan indifference to constitutions and religions which is often observable in persons whose life has been passed in vagrant diplomacy. If there was any form of government which he liked it was that of France. If there was any Church for which he felt a preference, it was that of Rome. He had some talent for conversation, and some talent also for transacting the ordinary business of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... again, he took it many hundred yards round to the bridge. Smoaker died at the great age of eighteen years. His son Shark was also a beautiful dog. He was by Smoaker out of a common greyhound bitch, called Vagrant, who had won a cup at Swaffham. Shark was not so powerful as Smoaker; but he was, nevertheless, a large-sized dog, and was a first-rate deer greyhound and retriever. He took his father's place on the rug, and was inseparable from me. He was educated and entered at deer under Smoaker. When Shark ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... Woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant, as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... open sloping field, where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its lacy, crystaled edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the establishment of a bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out against a red barn. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... what it is to be vagrant born? A waif is only a waif. And so, For another idle hour I sit, In large content while the fire ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... handsome; a narrow forehead, the hair receding from the temples, a high-bridged nose with wide-cut nostrils, lips thin and fine, moving flexibly as they muttered. It matched with what the voice had told Mark, was not the face of the brutalized hobo or low-bred vagrant, but beneath its hair and dirt showed as the mask of a man who might have fallen from high places. Even his curses went to prove it. They were not the dull profanities of the loafer, but were varied, colorful, imaginative, such curses as might come from one who ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... at all events, are not enclosed in envelopes, writing on their knees, evidently on account of a paucity of tables. There are, besides, sundry figures, who, if they were to appear in the streets of London, or any of our highways, would be liable to the penalties of the Vagrant Act for indecent exposure. Under the tableland by which these figures are supported, some evidence of a laudable curiosity is depicted, by three or four ladies, who are represented reading a billet doux, or valentine, and some little boys, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... very tailors and cooks worked fantasies in silk and velvet, sugar and paste. Thomas Harman, whose grandfather had been Clerk of the Crown under Henry VII., and who himself inherited estates in Kent, became greatly interested in the vagrant beggars who came to his door. He made a study of them, came to London to publish his book, and lodged at Whitefriars, within the Cloister, for convenience of nearness to them, and more thorough ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... a cry of the joy of youth. She stood facing the coming day, and the sea and sun; and a puff of morning breeze flung behind her a vagrant strand ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... aspect of a warrior, was an object of terror to his soldiers, at least, and to his kinsmen. Before and after the death of Alexius, the Greeks made two vigorous and well-conducted attempts to burn the navy in the harbor; but the skill and courage of the Venetians repulsed the fire-ships; and the vagrant flames wasted themselves without injury in the sea. [78] In a nocturnal sally the Greek emperor was vanquished by Henry, brother of the count of Flanders: the advantages of number and surprise aggravated the shame of his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... pomp which waits on greatness, Ill suits my humble, unambitious soul;— Then leave me here, to tread the safer path Of private life; here, where my peaceful course Shall be as silent as the shades around me; Nor shall one vagrant wish be e'er allow'd To stray beyond the bounds ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... the rear, as a goose does an intruder, and now and then picked something from his coat, which I supposed to be a vagrant thread, or a piece of lint or straw, and then retreated a step or two to avoid closer contact. He was compelled at last to turn again on his pursuer, and expostulate with her in no gentle terms. I heard ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... now evening; faint shadows encircled them. Sanine lit a cigarette and the delicate odour of tobacco mingled with the fragrance of the garden. He told them how life had tossed him hither and thither; how he had often been hungry and a vagrant; how he had taken part in political struggles, and how, when weary, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... customers were suddenly distracted from their thoughts of gain as we whirled by; the crowd close behind sweeping everything before it. The falling of barrels and boxes, the rattling of tin cans, the crashing of crockery, the howling of the vagrant dogs that were trampled under foot, only ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... whispering aspens, bright green in their new foliage, with small spruce and pine. Here and there a few flowers showed; by the side of the road the wild roses peeped up from the denser growths of foliage, and a vagrant butterfly or so made the round of blossom after blossom. It was spring-summer down here, sharp contrast indeed to the winter which lurked above and which would not fade until June had far progressed. But with it all, its ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... maintenance of two former nuns, noble and well educated, who, at the fall of their community, had been recommended, or had procured a recommendation, to her. Mesdames de Brinon and du Basque were these two vagrant nuns. Madame de Maintenon, instinctively attracted to this sort of persons, welcomed and ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... are the eternal humorist The eternal enemy of the absolute, Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—" ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... themselves over the immense plains which lie between the Vistula and the Volga. The care of their numerous flocks and herds, the pursuit of game, and the exercises of war, or rather of rapine, directed the vagrant motions of the Sarmatians. The movable camps or cities, the ordinary residence of their wives and children, consisted only of large wagons drawn by oxen, and covered in the form of tents. The military strength of the nation was composed of cavalry; and the custom of their warriors, to lead ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... this while in a vagrant life, among infidels, Turks, pagans, and such sort of people. I had no minister, no Christian to converse with but poor William. He was my ghostly father or confessor, and he was all the comfort I had. As for my knowledge of religion, you have ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... saying that you Australians have queer ways of maintaining authority," continued the European, lazily raising his eyebrows, and speaking with the accent—or rather, absence of accent—which, in an Englishman, denotes first-class education. "A vagrant, by appearance, and probably not overburdened with honesty, is found trespassing on your property; then this individual—by Gad, I feel curious to know who our learned brother for the defence is—bandies words with you on the other ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... joke-importers. The club was heterogen'ous By strangers seen as A refuge for destitute bons mots— Depot for leaden jokes and pewter pots; Repertory for gin and jeux d'esprit, Literary pound for vagrant rapartee; Second-hand shop for left-off witticisms; Gall'ry for Tomkins and Pitt-icisms;[3] Foundling hospital for every bastard pun; In short, a manufactory for all sorts of fun! * * * * Arouse my muse! such pleasing themes to quit, Hear me while I say ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... me one day, looking in at a shop window where I could see myself, that I was a most disreputable-looking object, quite eligible to be apprehended as an able-bodied vagrant.' ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... community. In this stage it can now be seen among barbarous tribes—as, for instance, in Central Africa. And some traces of it still survive, under different pretexts and disguises, in the lowest strata of civilised nations, where it may be said to represent the natural reluctance of the vagrant human fancy to be satisfied with higher forms and purer conceptions that are always imperfectly assimilated ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the store the first afternoon I noticed a Bible open at Judges and a number of slips of paper on which questions had been written. On my second visit for oil and vinegar, two strangers from off a vagrant yacht which had entered the little harbor nudged one another and demanded to know whether either had ever seen anything like it. On the third, my companion protested that it was not clean, and seeing that there were other stores we decided to ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... As you see, my portmanteau contains a shirt, a pair of socks, a comb and a toothbrush. Also a copy of the works of the divine vagrant Maitre Francois Villon, which I will take out at once. He was a thief and a reprobate and got nearer hanged than any man who ever lived, and he is the dearest friend ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... skies and watched by him from the stony bases of inaccessible cliffs—and yet it was familiar, goodly, his old accustomed company. This face—and that—and that! how he startled from it laughter or indifference or vagrant thought. There were low exclamations, a woman's slight scream, pause, confusion, and from the rear an authoritative voice demanding reason for the delay. Past him, staring and murmuring, swept the peacock-tinted ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... history. Glimpses of moral truth, or suggestions of what may lead to it; indications of neglected difficulties, and occasionally conjectural solutions of such difficulties,—these are what this essay offers. It was meant as a specimen of fruits, gathered hastily and without effort, by a vagrant but thoughtful mind: through the coercion of its theme, sometimes it became ambitious; but I did not give to it an ambitious title. Still I felt that the meanest of these suggestions merited a valuation: ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Life of Milton, Johnson records his own experience. 'Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... me its rough side, was not such a bad place after all. I began seriously to regard the universe from the standpoint of a professional tramp to realize that there is something to be said for the philosophy of the unmitigated vagrant. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... her timidity away and with the same gesture accepted Donnegan as something more than a dangerous vagrant. She took the lamp from the hands of the crone and sent her about her business, disregarding the mutterings and the warnings which trailed behind the departing form. Now she faced Donnegan, screening the light from her eyes with a cupped hand and by the same device focusing ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... he saw his old friend. It took him a full minute to realize that the gentle sportsman, the true Christian, the delicate man, the delightful companion, was there before him, a wreck—cast out from among his fellows, confined in a noisome cell, and hopelessly given over to his vagrant fancies and the tender mercies of Thomas Buffum. When the memory of what Paul Benedict had been to him, at one period of his life, came to Jim, with the full realization of his present misery and degradation, the strong man ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... above sixty (which is the prime of life, nowadays) and he lives quietly and keeps out of scrapes poetical and political, and if Robert and I had a little less modesty we are assured that we should find access to him easy. But we can't make up our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant minstrels, when he may probably not know our names. We could never follow the fashion of certain authors, who send their books about with intimations of their being likely to be acceptable or not—of which practice ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... name. Don't talk to me about 'her being providentially thrown into your hands,' unless you desire to hear me say things which you have frequently taken occasion to inform me 'deeply grieved' you. I dare say the little vagrant whines in what she considers orthodox phraseology, that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb!' and, like some other pious people whom I have heard canting, will saddle some Jewish prophet or fisherman with the dictum, thinking that it sounds like the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Every vagrant joy-maker and world-builder the modern era boasts—genius, lover, singer, artist, has had to have his struggle with the hod-carriers of culture, and if a lover of books has not enough love in him to refuse to be coerced into joining the huge Intimidator, the aggregation of the Reading Labour Unions ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... must recognize a taste as fine and fastidious as her own. He suspected Mrs. Upton of finding him merely ethical and he was eager that she should see that his grasp on life was larger than she might imagine. His taste was fine and fastidious; it was also disciplined and gracefully vagrant; she must see that in the few but perfect pictures and mezzotints on his walls; the collection of old white Chinese porcelain standing about the room on black carved stands; in his wonderful black lacquer cabinets and in all the charming medley of ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... but never to be recalled without pleasure. About eleven the guests generally depart, and by midnight the great avenue of this city is hardly disturbed by a foot-fall; not a sound comes on the ear except the short, fierce wrangle of packs of vagrant curs crossing each other's hunting-ground, which they are as tenacious of as the Indians are of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... hand, confidently, caressingly. The end of the thin black veil, that was shabby now, and had darns in many places, was wafted across her face by a vagrant puff of cooled air from the river, and she kissed it, bringing the tears very near the deep, sad eyes that looked at her, and then turned away. Saxham, in default of any excuse for lingering near her, went back ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... scarcely touched with the gray of age. Arrayed in a decent black dress, with a decent black bonnet and a black woollen shawl, the old lady looked intensely respectable. There was nothing of the picturesque vagrant about her. Therefore Miss Greeby, and with every reason, was disappointed, and when the queen of the woodland spoke she was still more so, for Mother Cockleshell did not even interlard her English speech with ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... of a sudden a wretched bitch waddled out from the woods into his path. It was a vagrant bitch, as thin as a skeleton, and so big in the belly that she walked with difficulty. Her dugs dragged along the snow, for she was in pup. They came from opposite directions, two lonely creatures, who are paddling their own canoes in America, and meet one cold winter day out in the snow. At first ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... two houses, land, peasants, silver and glass, and talk of wandering about from one shelter to another like a beggar, like Markushka, the vagrant." ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... save my life or anything like that, did you?" she adventured; like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion—I shouldn't know ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the crater, "vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together a thousand feet under us and totally shut out land and ocean; not ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... ask, "Where did the Hastur kid go?" before a vagrant logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he did not even speak the trailmen's language, that it had slipped from ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... believed by the jury. But suppose that, on cross-examination, it turns out that this witness can give no good account of his manner of earning his living or of his place of residence; that he had been arrested not long before as a vagrant, and that down to the time of the action he had no respectable clothes, and that he suddenly became possessed of some; that he deserted from the army immediately after getting his bounty-money, and so on, there can be little doubt that his credit with the jury would ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... a wider meaning; in which it becomes true also for our historical experience. Csar and Rome have flourished and expired together. The illimitable attributes of the Roman prince, boundless and comprehensive as the universal air,—like that also bright and apprehensible to the most vagrant eye, yet in parts (and those not far removed) unfathomable as outer darkness, (for no chamber in a dungeon could shroud in more impenetrable concealment a deed of murder than the upper chambers of the air,)—these attributes, so impressive to the imagination, and which all ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... bench—its only furnishing—Take-a-Stitch hastened to make all secure. The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, but still and happily the worn-out "Guardian" slept; so that, herself overcome by fatigue and the closeness of the atmosphere the now vagrant "Queen of Elbow Lane" dropped in a heap on ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... think a gentleman degraded, by having subjected himself to the denomination of a vagrant? Though, no; you have wit enough to laugh at gray-beards, and their ridiculous forms and absurd distinctions. Know then, there is a certain set or society of men, frequently to be met in straggling parties about this kingdom, who, by a peculiar kind of magic, will metamorphose ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... woman, but emaciated, with long black hair. Some vagrant—quite in rags. She's got a wedding-ring on, however. They must fetch her away to the workhouse to-morrow. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... and his occupation; The jolly bird hath learned his cheer Upon [50] the banks of Windermere; Where a tribe of them make merry, 565 Mocking the Man that keeps the ferry; Hallooing from an open throat, Like travellers shouting for a boat. —The tricks he learned at Windermere This vagrant owl is playing here—570 That is the worst of his employment: He's at the top [51] ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the snow away, made the bare patches of earth quiver with coming life, sent the crows and an occasional flock of ducks overhead—vagrants of the air, calling to their vagrant brothers about the fire—there was no sorrow in the break-up of the family, but only a universal joy in ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... understanding passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... a week ago they were burning and burying alive those who differed from the ruling party in regard to salvation, eviscerating in public those who had new ideas of government, and hanging old women who were accused of traffic with the devil. All of them had been no better than vagrant savages a year before. Their fuller knowledge was altogether too recent to have gone very deep, and they had many institutions and many leaders dedicated to the perpetuation of outworn notions which would otherwise ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... have before been told, This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold, And with his dancing crest So beautiful, through savage lands Had roam'd about, with vagrant bands Of Indians in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a mistake again! if you do I will make you suffer severely for it! And you, shameless girl! if you presume to set foot on these premises but once again, I will have you sent to the work-house as a troublesome vagrant." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... county jail. During the succeeding night one of these persons thrust a poker into the stove, and heating it red hot, made an effort to push the hot iron through the door, thus burning a large hole in the door-casing. The next morning the sheriff, entering the jail, perceiving what this vagrant had done, was displeased, and tried to ascertain which one of the ten was guilty of the offense. The comrades of the guilty party refused to disclose the perpetrator of the act. Court was then in session. The sheriff had these ten fellows brought into ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... the Assizes before they could enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. But the Government were dealing with the difficulty in a wiser and more effectual way. The old powers to enforce labour on the idle and settlement on the vagrant class which had been given by statutes of Henry the Eighth were continued; and each town and parish was held responsible for the relief of its indigent and disabled poor, as well as for the employment of able-bodied mendicants. But a more efficient machinery ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... them, so close that they all but rested in its shadow, was one of those monster aircars, its tentacles moving to and fro as though wafted into motion by some vagrant breeze. But since neither Sarka nor Jaska could feel the breeze, Sarka knew that it was life which caused the waving motion of those tentacles ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... "'Vagrant, your Honor,' the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, 'Ten days,' ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... chosen, their sanctum. Before the door hung a friendly oak branch, heavy with leaves, that swayed and swung with every breeze. Now it hid the entrance from the east, now from the west, and with every change of the vagrant wind the observer must choose a new point ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... also seemed to Paulus as sinister as it was exquisite. Its beauty, whether of silver Nile or lilac mountains or tawny desert, enervated by its appeal to the love of easy delight, and bred mad, vagrant thoughts, precursors of moral disaster. He had slept in the desert one night. The enamelled turquoise of the daylight sky, the clear, red gold of the sunset, the ghostly amber of the afterglow gave way to moonlight. As he lay and watched the silver bloom spread over the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... In the opinion of respectable authors, they are called Cingary or Cinli, because they in every respect resemble the bird cinclo, which we call in Spanish Motacilla, or aguzanieve (wagtail), which is a vagrant bird and builds no nest, (37) but broods in those of other birds, a bird restless and poor of plumage, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... floweret's velvet breast, How close the busy vagrant lies? His thin-wrought plume, his downy breast, Th' ambrosial gold that swells his thighs. Perhaps his fragrant load may bind His limbs;—we'll set the captive free— I sought the living bee to find, And found the picture ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... consulate in the United States, sine cura, would be considered by him as a fair discharge of the obligation of the Government to him for his services. Lord Liverpool was not disposed to prostitute such favours upon a mercenary and intriguing vagrant, and referred him to the Government of Lower Canada, then in charge of Sir George Prevost, who had succeeded Sir James Craig. Henry knew the little estimate that was placed upon his services in Canada; he therefore betook himself back to the United ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... had been pushed into it by a social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure. Their source was Virginia. They were of a thriftless, unstable class; that vagrant peasantry which had drifted westward to avoid competition with slave labor. The niece, Nancy, has been reputed illegitimate. And though tradition derives her from the predatory amour of an aristocrat, there is ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... tapestry, where, from earliest Spring until the grapes were gathered colour and light were caught and imprisoned within the web. At the bend in the river, where the rushes grew thickly, the river-god kept his harp, which answered with shy, musical murmurings to every vagrant wind. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... sat, hammering out my thoughts, and with them the conviction that stonebreaking should be allotted to minor poets or vagrant children of nature like myself, never to such tired folk as my poor mate at ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... Vagrant Acts included "minstrels" in their definition of rogues and vagabonds, it is evident that the suitors of the Minstrelsy Court would have run the risk of commitment to the House of Correction and a whipping, if the acts had not specially excepted the franchise of the Dutton family from their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... a little gasp for breath, as if frightened at her own audacity. Her manner and phrases were an evident imitation of the way in which she had heard advice bestowed upon vagrant or criminal by the benevolent judge whose memory she so tenderly cherished. It was second nature to her to act as she fancied he would have acted. Courthope composed himself to receive the judicial admonition with ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... to sleep. Turning at full length upon his back, his arms above his head, he stared steadily up into the darkness until his brain, freed of all lesser problems, all vagrant thoughts, was concentrated upon the great problem which now ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... inner eye were things that he had grown ashamed of. But here was a shrewd little lady who seemed to think his fancy and confidence nothing discreditable. He was encouraged greatly to let her into his vagrant mind, so sometimes in passionate outbursts, when the words ran over the heels of each other, sometimes in shrinking, stammering, reluctant sentences he told her how the seasons affected him, and the morning and the night, the smells of things, the sounds of woods and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... election unawares, and infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives. Not consciously and strongly to will the right, not resolutely and with coercion of the vagrant self to will to take God for our aim, is to choose the low, the wrong. Perhaps none, or very few of us, would deliberately say 'I choose Mammon, having carefully compared the claims of the opposite ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... more delicate since 1800: and it is not surprising to find—as we do find—that between the text of the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, and that of 1802, there are many important variations. This is seen, for example, in the way in which he dealt with 'The Female Vagrant', which is altered throughout. Its early redundance is pruned away; and, in many instances, the final text, sanctioned in 1845, had been adopted in 1803. Without going into further detail, it is sufficient to remark that in the year 1803 Wordsworth's ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... begun when it ended; it was all over in an instant. The two who had escaped injury leaped back aboard the Drab. Those who needed assistance were helped back. The Drab drifted away, her vagrant course unheeded at first, for it looked as though all aboard had taken part in ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... care not. She's a real vagrant, that girl is. No manner of use. She may go her own ways; I wash my ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... been a reckless vagrant creature, wandering through the woods at night like a half-deranged person; but she had wit enough to see that there was safety in confession. She pretended to have committed, by witchcraft, crimes enough to have hanged her a dozen times. If she had stood ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... a good gardener's year, and I am sorry that the fall anemones and the blooming of the earliest chrysanthemums insist upon telling me that it is nearly over,—that is, as far as the reign of complete garden colour is concerned. And amid our vagrant summer wanderings among gardens of high or low degree, no one point has been so recurrent or interesting as the distribution of colour, and especially the dominance of white flowers in any landscape or garden in ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... who watch and listen, lie in wait, Seeing the cloudy cavalcades blow past,— Happy if some bright vagrant, soon or late, May venture near the snares of sound, at last— Most fortunate captor if, from time to time, One may be taken, trembling, ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... the long wall from the door to the garden gate is only one small high window. But time and nature have done much to beautify the spot. In the cracks of the roof, thatched or tiled, whichever it may be, many a vagrant seed has found lodgment. The weeds have grown up in profusion to cover the bare little place with leaf and flower. Indeed, there is here a genuine roof garden of the prettiest sort, and it extends along the stone wall separating the dooryard ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... you took to this kind of life," said the baronet, strangely interested in this vagrant girl; "how did you get your ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... know Fatty Budlow?" asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale. But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course. The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... with slightest touch of rein against arched neck, or with tickle of spur or press of knee, he kept the mare to the way he willed. Once, as she whirled and danced, he caught a glimpse of the Big House. Big it was in all seeming, and yet, such was the vagrant nature of it, it was not so big as it seemed. Eight hundred feet across the front face, it stretched. But much of this eight hundred feet was composed of mere corridors, concrete-walled, tile-roofed, that connected and assembled the various ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... out-of-door life we now led. Emperor penguins began to visit us in companies up to forty in number: probably they were birds whose maternal or paternal instincts had been thwarted at Cape Crozier and had now taken to a vagrant life. They suffered, I am afraid, from the loose dogs, and on one occasion Debenham was out on the sea-ice with a team of those dogs of ours which were useless for serious sledging. He had taken them in hand ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... and jocular companion. Though he loved good cheer, and frequented the houses of the rich or more hospitable people of America, yet he was an enemy to all manner of excess and intemperance. While his vagrant temper led him from place to place, his natural discernment enabled him to form no bad judgment of the characters and manners of men wherever he went. Though he appeared a friend to no established church, yet good policy winked at all his irregularities, as he every where proved a steady friend ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... Western Isles, And in your confines with his lawless train Daily commits incivil [8] outrages, Hoping (misled by dreaming prophecies) To reign in Asia, and with barbarous arms To make himself the monarch of the East: But, ere he march in Asia, or display His vagrant ensign in the Persian fields, Your grace hath taken order by Theridamas, Charg'd with a thousand horse, to apprehend And bring him ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... those who would assert the theory to bring forward positive proof of it. There is, however, one point in Mr. Darwin's view of domesticated animals which tells against his theory. The cat remains unchanged, because from its vagrant habits man has no control over its pairing [Footnote: Darwin's "Animals and Plants," vol. ii. p. 236.]. Now considering the variety of conditions under which cats exist, here is surely a great opening for natural selection. But it ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... thoughtless woodman, Hew but what you need, They give balm to vagrant breezes, For their lives ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... Artificial Swarming. If the Apiarian perceives that his swarm instead of clustering begins to rise higher and higher in the air, and evidently means to depart, not a moment is to be lost: instead of empty noises, he must resort to means much more effective to stay their vagrant propensities. Handfulls of dirt cast into the air, or water thrown among them, will often so disorganize them as to compel them to alight. Of all devices for stopping them, the most original one that I have ever heard of, is to flash the sun's rays among them, by the use of a looking glass! ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... then, I entreat you, seek speech without delay with our sublime fellow-Shade—with him who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name was the common property of the winds; it, as it were, floated naked over the waters about the equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics, and have essayed to put into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity—feats which you ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... 'Excursion.' Much ridicule, and even obloquy, did the staunch poet of Rydal incur for choosing such a character, when he might have taken Laras and Conrads by the score, and been praised for his choice. But "the vagrant merchant under a heavy load," being a portion of the mountain life which surrounded the poet's home, was better than any hero of romance for his purpose; and a younger generation has confirmed the poet's choice of a hero, and few remain now to mock at the Pedlar. ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country seat. I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle fancies. I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant humor had been fostered in me by Tom Dribble, the prime wag and great genius of the school, who had all the rambling propensities ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... to the outer door. A vagrant breeze stirred the stale air in the room. Back in the patio his Mexican, Manuelo, lay snoring, wrapped in a tattered blanket. The Spider turned from the doorway and gazed at the sanded spot on the floor, leaning against the bar and drumming on its edge with his nervous fingers. "He'll see ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... all these seas are holiday seas—the yachts, the sail vessels, the puffing steamers, moving swiftly from one headland to another, or loafing about the blue, smiling sea, are all on pleasure bent. The vagrant vessels that are idly watched from the rocks at the Pier may be coasters and freight schooners engaged seriously in trade, but they do not seem so. They are a part of the picture, always to be seen slowly dipping along in the horizon, and the impression is that they are manoeuvred for ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fringed with spruce and fir; stretches of woodland, too, where the road is lined with giant pines and you lift your face gratefully to catch the cool balsam breath of the forest. Coming from out this splendid shade, this silence too deep to be disturbed by light breezes or vagrant winds, you find yourself on the brow of a descending hill. The first thing that strikes the eye is a lake that might be a great blue sapphire dropped into the verdant hollow where it lies. When ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... thereabouts thought they could tell her. Nat was into one scrape after another—nothing especially wicked; but a compound of the bubbling mischief in a too ardent life—robbed orchards, broken windows, practical jokes, Halloween jinks, vagrant whimsies of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Lollards; so did the Act of the Six Articles. A curious attempt was made to deal with the problem of vagrancy, the outcome of prevalent economic conditions, which the penalties of flogging and hanging had failed to repress. The vagrant was to be brought before the magistrates, branded, and handed over to some honest person as a "slave" for two years. If he attempted to escape from servitude, he was to be branded again and made a slave ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... his absence. He was amazed now at his own assumption that design, not accident, had caused such desertion. He could almost have started in his solicitude, to seek the missing man, such was the rebound of his mind. Yet to all this he only gave vagrant thoughts, such as we give to our fellows in church. The temple of the night had become a holy place, and his heart was heavy—perhaps for his old friend, standing there with uplifted face, perhaps on account of the words he was uttering, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... I hope, been successful, and it is as painful for me to tell as for you to hear, that there exists in your midst a youthful reprobate, trained in all the arts of ensnaring the vagrant fancies ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... from commercial enterprises which appealed to the cupidity of capitalists and led to investments that promised speedy and ample returns. A desire to improve social conditions and to solve the problem of the poor and the vagrant, which had become acute since the dissolution of the monasteries, was arousing the authorities to deal with the pauper and to dispose of the criminal in such a way as to yield a profitable service to the kingdom. England was full of resolute men, sea-dogs and soldiers of fortune, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... Oroville, he got up, and read these words, or some like them, in the village newspaper:—"The heavy frost which fell last night brings with it at least one source of congratulation for our citizens. Soon the crowd of vagrant street-sleepers, which infests our town, will be forced to go forth and work for warmer quarters. It has throughout this summer been the ever-present nuisance and eyesore of our otherwise beautiful and romantic moonlit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... way they did much toward ridding European society of its most turbulent elements; while at the same time they gave fresh development to the spirit of romantic adventure, and connected it with something better than vagrant freebooting.[321] By renewing the long-suspended intercourse between the minds of western Europe and the Greek culture of Constantinople, they served as a mighty stimulus to intellectual curiosity, and had a large share in bringing about that great ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... predict how Passepartout's lively nature would agree with Mr. Fogg. It was impossible to tell whether the new servant would turn out as absolutely methodical as his master required; experience alone could solve the question. Passepartout had been a sort of vagrant in his early years, and now yearned for repose; but so far he had failed to find it, though he had already served in ten English houses. But he could not take root in any of these; with chagrin, he found his masters invariably whimsical and irregular, constantly running ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... country, Robert," said Mr. Massey to his coachman, and so away they started at a leisurely pace, since the complacent horses refused any other. Sometimes vagrant chickens wandered into the road, exhibiting a daring that enthralled Peter. His opinion of chickens rose when, the fat horses almost upon their tail ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... made them pliable for his use, Magician he could be by planned surprise. For do they see the deuce in human guise, As men's acknowledged head appears the deuce, And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal. Among them certain vagrant wits that had Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad; Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal; But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane. With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings The way of such transfeminated ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... related in Exodus, Jahveh was but the tutelary god of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial possessions, was not even a nation. Like his people he too was a vagrant. Like them he had no home. Other gods had temples and altars. He lacked so much as a shrine. In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew, each day he moved on. The threats of a land that never smiled were reflected in his face. The sight of him was death. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... to admire the roses, and no one entered the cool, inviting tent. The whole place might have been dead, as far as human life was concerned; and although the smoke did ascend straight up from the kitchen chimney, a vagrant or a tramp might have been tempted to enter the house by the open hall door, were it not protected ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... pale, thin vapour that clung close to the shimmering surface and dazzled the eye with an ever-shifting glaze. The air was lifeless, sultry, stifling; not a leaf, not a twig in the tall, drooping willows moved unless stirred by the passage of some vagrant bird. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... mere habit, towards the feebly lighted windows of his mother's room, his eyes encountered the figure he had just lost, standing against the iron railings of the little waste enclosure looking up at those windows and laughing to himself. Some of the many vagrant cats who were always prowling about there by night, and who had taken fright at him, appeared to have stopped when he had stopped, and were looking at him with eyes by no means unlike his own from tops ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... its appropriate functions has no connection with the working of freedom, any further than it may have been a struggle to get rid in some measure of the surveillance of the mother country in order to coerce the labourer so far as possible by vagrant laws, &c. The immediate pretext was the passing of a law by the imperial Parliament for the regulation of prisons, which the House of Assembly declared a violation of that principle of their charter which forbids the mother-country to lay a tax on them ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... scarcely any success whatever. Sometimes, when most fortunate, he sold two or three volumes a week, but oftener did not find a single purchaser. Kindness, too, he met but little, most of the people treating him as a pauper or a vagrant. Many advised him to try the sale of trinkets and drapery, or of pills and 'patent medicines,' instead of poetry; while others went so far as to recommend him to become an itinerant musician. Having traversed the country in all directions, suffering from want and fatigue, and, more still, from ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... honest, at least in the expression of your ideas, was a felony. To do right was a capital offense; and in those days chains and whips were the incentives to labor, and the preventives of thought. Honesty was a vagrant, justice a fugitive, and liberty in chains. Only a few years ago men were denounced because they doubted the inspiration of the bible—because they denied miracles and laughed at the wonders recounted by ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... at her face in one of the mirrors, and then tucked into place a vagrant lock of hair with a shapely finger, thereby suggesting, had there been a cynical observer present, that Miss Alma Marston never allowed any situation, no matter how crucial, to take her ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Spuyten Duyvil. To port, only a few scattered gleams along the base of the cliff or atop it, showed that the sparsely settled Palisades were drawing abeam. The ceaseless, swarming activities of the metropolis were being left behind. Silence was closing in, broken only by vagrant steamer-whistles from astern. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Rend and ravel and tear and pick; What can resist these hooks of steel, Sharp as the claws of the ancient Nick? Cast-off mantle of millionaire, Pestilent vagrant's vesture chill, Rags of miser or beggar bare, All ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... deserved distinction for its opening poem, "The Vagrant," which proceeds from the thrice-gifted pen of Mrs. W. V. Jordan. The piece is one well worthy of close attention, since it contains to a marked degree those elements of charm which render its author so prominent among amateur bards. Bold and discriminating choice of words and ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... are many others. The Burges were religious people, used their slaves kindly, and brought them up well, so that the negroes on the plantation to-day are respectable, and in some instances, exemplary people, very different from the vagrant negro type which has developed since the War, making labor conditions in some parts of the South uncertain, and plantation life, in some sections, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... age of the Romans. Each may have continued to imitate the approved ornaments of its predecessors, till we trace in the productions of this contemporary pottery, the patterns used by the nations of antiquity when just emerging from barbarism. Hunting, the most necessary of arts to the vagrant and carnivorous savage, is the employment celebrated on all these vessels, A stag, followed by ferocious quadrupeds and hungry bipeds, forms their general ornament. I have picked up the same groups among Roman ruins, have often contemplated them in the cabinets of the curious, and here I ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... mentioned what had been their own domestic experience of the case. They described the wandering propensities which took the lad away from home, and the odd concealment of his waistcoat, on the last occasion when he had returned from one of his vagrant outbreaks. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... the town an hour's walk lives the mother of Basilio and Crispin. The wife of a heartless man, she struggles to live for her sons, while her husband is a vagrant gamester with whom her interviews are rare but always painful. He has gradually stripped her of her few jewels to pay the cost of his vices, and when the suffering Sisa no longer had anything that he might take ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the days He went about his vagrant ways, And prowled at eve for good or bad In lanes and alleys of BAGDAD, Once found, at edge of the bazaar, E'en where the ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... equality of sleep, to inquire how many of its phenomena are common to all classes, to all degrees of wealth and poverty, to every grade of education and ignorance. Here, for example, is her Majesty Queen Victoria in her palace, this present blessed night, and here is Winking Charley, a sturdy vagrant, in one of her Majesty's jails. Her Majesty has fallen, many thousands of times, from that same Tower, which I claim a right to tumble off now and then. So has Winking Charley. Her Majesty in her sleep has opened or prorogued ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens |
