"Cast-off" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possession of a cast-off water-bottle, which naturally was full of canteen rum, and drank till ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... of the earth [Visita interiora terrae, etc.—Smaragdine tablet, 6, 8.] where the roots of all individuality meet, the spirit rises up again [Smaragdine tablet, 10.] released from the caput mortuum, which is blacked on the floor of the hermetic receptacle. The residuum is represented by the cast-off raiment of the novice. Laboriously now, he toils forward in the darkness; the heights draw him on; escaping hell he will attain to heaven. His ascent up the holy mountain is hindered by a violent storm; he is thrown into the depths by the tempest: ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... hands of the Jews, and there must have been a great demand for them among the belles of Mayence, for I remember a ball there at which the Empress might have seen all the ladies of a quadrille party dressed in her cast-off clothes.—I even saw German Princesses wearing ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... heads at the same moment and their eyes met. The tramp, in that clearer light, showed a spare, but bent figure, roughly clad in a miner's shirt and canvas trousers, splashed and streaked with soil, and half hidden in a ragged blue cast-off army overcoat lazily hanging from one shoulder. His thin sun-burnt face was not without a certain sullen, suspicious intelligence, and a look of half-sneering defiance. He stopped, as a startled, surly animal might ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... upon an expedition; And mother, brother, guardian, she had none, Save Zoe, who, although with due precision She waited on her lady with the Sun, Thought daily service was her only mission, Bringing warm water, wreathing her long tresses, And asking now and then for cast-off dresses. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... passion for circumstantiality, and, like the average Russian, such a desire for accuracy as even a German could not rival. To what the reader already knows concerning the personages in hand it is therefore necessary to add that Petrushka usually wore a cast-off brown jacket of a size too large for him, as also that he had (according to the custom of individuals of his calling) a pair of thick lips and a very prominent nose. In temperament he was taciturn rather than loquacious, and he cherished a yearning for self-education. That ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... step grew slower and his shoulders drooped lower until at last his soul, which had always been strong and beautiful, passed out of his worn old body into the life beyond, and the cast-off body was buried by some villagers who felt kindly towards the old man, but who never dreamed that he had ever done any real service for them or their children. And soon his very name was forgotten. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... that it would be of any possible assistance to Dinah in her arrangements. He might as well have provided them for a squirrel or a magpie. The more drawers and closets there were, the more hiding-holes could Dinah make for the accommodation of old rags, hair-combs, old shoes, ribbons, cast-off artificial flowers, and other articles of vertu, wherein her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... but now I am bankrupt in all that gives value to life. A woman with an art so consummate that it seemed artless, deliberately evoked the best there was in me, then threw it away as indifferently as a cast-off glove." ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... recent domestic architecture. Beautiful and admirable as some of the recent examples of this work are, very few show the subtle appreciation of design to be found in many of the older buildings which until the last year or two have been looked upon as merely the outgrown and cast-off work of an age much ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various
... it will be felt that before the majesty of those ancient Truths, the arts of the enemy will prove weak and unavailing,—rather, will stand revealed in all their native deformity. If English Clergymen, coming abroad in the cast-off clothes of German unbelief[522], and decked out with the exploded sophisms of the last century, are to declare openly that the faith of our Fathers is already looked upon among ourselves as 'a kind of fossil of the Past,'—then is it high time that voices should be heard vindicating that ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... nothing of these happenings, had just finished exercising his men on the smooth green in front of the Castle of Crichton, and had dismissed them, when a gaberlunzie or privileged beggar, a long lank rascal with a mat of tangled hair, and clad in a cast-off leathern suit which erstwhile some knight had worn under his mail, leaped suddenly from the shelter of a hedge. Instinctively Sholto laid his hand ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is "poor" all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man who on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streets under the banner of the unemployed, or trembles—in another man's cast-off clothing, and with an infinity of hat-touching—on the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... livelihood by gambling—spends the most of his time in playing cards with greenhorns, always to be picked up at low flash houses, at fairs, races, milling-matches, &c. and is also in the holy keeping of the cast-off mistress of a nobleman whose family he was formerly in as a valet-de-chambre. The other pretends to teach sparring in the City, and occasionally has a benefit in the Minories, Duke's Place, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... dared penetrate. His face glistened all over. His mouth was wide open, showing a great cavity in which each tooth seemed to dance with delight. His jacket was as white and stiff as soap and starch could make it, while a cast-off cravat of the colonel's—double starched to suit Chad's own ideas of propriety—was tied in a single knot, the two ends reaching to the very edge of each ear. To crown all, a red carnation flamed away on the lapel of his jacket, just above an outside ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a gap of a few yards between the car and the engine, Fuller threw the switch and leaped for the cab. Murphy caught his arms and pulled him aboard. The Texas plunged backward down the track, racing the cast-off train as it rolled upon the siding. For a moment it seemed that they would collide at the north switch where the side-track re-entered the main line. Fuller, leaning from the cab, glanced apprehensively at the engineer. He had ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... the old restless energy revived. The spring came back to her step and she shed that lethargy like a cast-off garment. And in so doing her spirit rose in hot rebellion against being a prisoner to deadening drudgery, against being shut away from all the teeming life that throve and trafficked beyond the solitude in which she sat immured. When Charlie came back, there was going to be a change. She repeated ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Lovel began to consider his position. Clearly he had been kidnapped, but by whom and to what intent? He reflected with pain that it might be his son's doing, for that gentleman had long been forbidden his door. A rakehell of the Temple and married to a cast-off mistress of Goring's, his son was certainly capable of any evil, but he reminded himself that Jasper was not a fool and would scarcely see his profit in such an escapade. Besides, he had not the funds to compass an enterprise which must ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... time in more than a month in a perfectly clean suit, I donned a snowy shirt, a pair of dashing drills, Parisian pumps, and a Turkish fez, tipped with a copious tassel. Our interpreters were clad in fresh Mandingo dresses adorned with extra embroidery. My body-servant was ordered to appear in a cast-off suit of my own; so that, when I gave one my double-barrelled gun to carry, and armed the others with my pistols, and a glittering regulation-sword,—designed as a gift for the Ali-Mami,—I presented a very respectable and picturesque appearance for a gentleman abroad ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... a pass from me to follow your army to pick up rags and cast-off clothing. I will give it to him if you ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... away. The latter had pressed enough of these upon Sara, during the packing, to make Molly and herself quite comfortable, for, as Miss Prue always wore black, her dresses were suitable now; and, the madame had come to the rescue with some of the professor's cast-off ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... happy man! O, cast-off quid! is he Who, like as thou, has comforted the poor; Happy his age who knows himself, like thee, Thou didst thy duty—man can ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... roaming about you run across an old cast-off suit of Mr. Black Snake, or of any other member of the Snake family, I wish you would remember me and let me know. ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... impressed with the ingenuous and solemn manner of the traveler, and all but the father found immediate relief in his declaration. Some of the cast-off clothes of the captain, which had been removed with the goods from the city, were produced; and young Wharton, released from the uneasiness of his disguise, began at last to enjoy a visit which had been undertaken at ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... at the sepulchre before any of the other women, and conversed with Jesus. Though the disciples, in visiting the tomb, saw nothing but cast-off clothes, yet Mary sees and talks with angels and with Jesus. As usual, the woman is always most ready to believe miracles and fables, however extravagant and though beyond all human comprehension. Several women purposed to be at the tomb at sunrise ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Gondreville and others belonging to the estate, kept Malin informed of all Michu's actions. Malin had endeavored, fruitlessly, to win over Marianne, the Michus' servant-woman; but Violette and his satellites heard everything from Gaucher,—a lad on whose fidelity Michu relied, but who betrayed him for cast-off clothing, waistcoats, buckles, cotton socks and sugar-plums. The boy had no suspicion of the importance of his gossip. Violette in his reports blackened all Michu's actions and gave them a criminal aspect by absurd suggestions,—unknown, of course, to the bailiff, who was aware, ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... shuffled off its last vestiges of respectability, its corse might at least be found to have left its shroud behind; and such these tattered habiliments really are. Rag Fair to-day is still the great graveyard of Fashion; the last cemetery to which cast-off clothes are borne before they enter upon another state of existence, and are spirited into dusters ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... the structure itself, and which, if uncultivated or neglected, any amount of expenditure in building will fail to give that completeness and perfection of character which every homestead should command. Thus the tawdry erections in imitation of a cast-off feudalism in Europe, or a copying of the massive piles of more recent date abroad, although in miniature, both in extent and cost, is the sheerest affectation, in which no sensible man should ever indulge. It is out of all keeping, or propriety with other things, as we in this country ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... mind wearing that beautiful crepe de chine which is not becoming to you? Well, Mate, I suppose there was a day when I would have scorned anybody's cast-off clothes, but I pledge you my word a queen in her coronation robes never felt half so grand as I feel in that dress! Somehow I seem to assume some of your personality, I look tall and graceful and ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... that dissolute Court, for his pre-eminence in licentious disorder. He, at least, was prepared to publish himself in two of the most contemptible characters which human nature knows—the seducer who proclaims his stolen love, and the wretch that accepts the cast-off mistress of his patron. The author of the "Mmoires de Grammont," adds Lord Arran, [Footnote: With regard at least to Lord Arran, the son of Hyde's own chosen friend, Ormonde, we prefer to believe that the Grammont ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... temporary help would be hers. Madame Dalmas called herself a French-woman, and signed herself "Antoinette," but she was really an English Jewess of low extraction, whose true name was Sarah Solomons. Her "profession" was to purchase—and sell—the cast-off apparel of ladies of fashion; and few of the sisterhood have carried the art of double cheating to so great a proficiency. With always a roll of bank notes in her old leathern pocket-book, and always a dirty canvas bag full of bright sovereigns in her pocket, she had ever the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of abominations, an ill-regulated midshipman's berth—more oceans, seas, bays, and promontories, than nature ever gave to this unhappy globe. Beneath these were discovered a pair of dark blue worsted stockings, terminated by a pair of purser's shoes—things of a hybrid breed, between a pair of cast-off slippers and the ploughman's clodhoppers, fitting as well as the former, and nearly as heavy as the latter. Now, this costume, in the depth of winter, was sufficiently light and bizarre; but the manner in which I had contrived to decorate ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... own Eastern ideas, was in the position of a superior receiving an unfortunate inferior. She was the latest acquired—the darling, the reigning queen—confronted with the poor cast-off, old, unattractive first wife; and being of a nature equally noble as the type of her beauty, she felt it incumbent on her, in such a situation, to treat the unfortunate with every ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... suspected of unlawful dealings, or at least were able to make a colourable pretext of Honest Trade to such Constables and Market Conners who had a right to question them about their barterings. From the Fishmongers we took sometimes money and sometimes rich apparel—the cast-off clothes, indeed, of the Nobility, birthday suits or the like, which were not good enough for the Players of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn, forsooth, to strut about in on their tragedy-boards, and which they had therefore bestowed upon their domestics to sell. For our ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother's heels, equipped in a pair of father's cast-off galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with, one hand, as a fine lady does ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... he was the old gentleman's body-servant befo' the war. He used to wear his marster's cast-off ruffles an' high hat. A mighty likely nigger he was, too, till he got all bent up with ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... he said; "there are tears enough in this world, and we need not deposit a few more in the heart of man. These," said he, showing the verses, "are the cast-off, useless feathers of my soul; it has moulted since then, and spread its bolder wings for eternity!" He then continued to burn and destroy, while I looked out of the broken window at ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... fellows, who ran around in their shirttails because I was always in the house of the "Widow." They used red clay to do the dyeing with. In the winter time cracked feet were common. The grown people wore heavy shoes called brogans while I wore the cast-off shoes of the white ladies. We all wrapped our feet in bagging sacks to help them to keep warm. We were given one complete outfit of clothes each year and these had to last until the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... clinging bodices, all askew, and how your hips are not yet grown to support your skirts properly—draggle-tails! I see you taking the morning's milk from the hearty milkman, or going an errand in your apron and a coat too small for you, or in your mistress's or mother's cast-off jacket, out at the seams, puffy-sleeved, years behind the fashion and awry at the shoulders because it is too big. I see your floppety hat which you cannot pin down tightly to your hair, because there isn't enough of it;—your courageous attempts to be prettier than you are, or else your carelessness ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... to Patesville when the children were mostly a mob of dirty little beggars. She had distributed among them the cast-off clothing that came from their friends in the North; she had taught them to wash their faces and to comb their hair; and patiently, year after year, she had labored to instruct them in the rudiments of learning and the first principles of religion and morality. And she had not ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... "Has that man Bolas from Hailsham called?" Bolas never called. He furiously began to loathe Bolas. He was furious with himself for having "lowered himself" to Bolas. Bolas in his ignorance no doubt thought the books were a cheap charity of cast-off lumber. Uncouth clod! Stupid clod! Uncouth parish! Hateful, loathsome parish! For weeks he kept away from Hailsham and the possible vicinity of Bolas. One day he met him. Bolas passed with no more than a "Good day, Mr. Aubyn." He could have killed the man. He swung round and pushed his dark face ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... in the labourer's cottage; and with regard to clothes—it is doubtful if anything new is bought, in many families, from year's end to year's end. At "rummage sales," for a few pence, the women are now able to pick up surprising bargains in cast-off garments, which they adapt as best they can for their own or their children's wear. Economies like this, however, still hardly suffice to explain how the scanty resources are really spread out. Apart from a few cases of palpable destitution, it is not obvious that any families ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... said. "Upon my word, and a very good thing you must make of it; for I see you dressed like a gentleman from top to toe. Are you not ashamed to go about the world in such a trim, with honest folk, I dare say, glad to buy your cast-off finery second hand? Speak up, you dog," the man went on; "you can understand English, I suppose; and I mean to have a bit of talk with you before I march ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... himself like one who laboured under a load of misery almost too great to be borne, but he had wisely rejected the voluminous coat proffered by his benefactor, and appeared in waistcoat and trousers which gave him the appearance of a growing boy dressed in his father's cast-off apparel. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... sailors were seized, suddenly and mortally, a few days after displacing a pile of equipments stored deep in the hold of the Montebello. The cholera of Toulon came in a direct line from the hospital of Varna. It went to sleep, apparently gorged, on a heap of the cast-off garments of its victims, to awaken thirty years later to victorious ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Stondon Massey in Essex for thirty-six years, from 1853 to 1889. He was a rough, uneducated man, but with a certain amount of native talent which raised him above the level of the majority of his class. I can see him now in his place Sunday after Sunday, rigged out in a suit of my father's cast-off clerical garments—a kind of "set-off" to him at the lower end of the church. In his earlier days Wren had played a flute in the village instrumental choir, and to the last he might be heard whiling away spare moments on a Sunday ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... of the coarsest materials, generally hung in tatters about his tall spare figure, and he had been known to wear the cast-off shoes of a beggar; yet, in spite of such absurd acts, he maintained a proud and upright carriage, and never, by his speech or manners, seemed to forget for one moment that he held the rank of a gentleman. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... been plucked off and crumpled up and flung away. We can imagine him pinching his favorites by the ear and dictating memorials of mendacity with the self-possession of a self-made monarch. As it is, we see him only in the stage of parasite and pimp—more like the hired husband of a cast-off Creole than the resplendent rogue who fascinated even history for a time by the clamor and glitter of his triumphs. But the fellow is unmistakably an emperor in the egg—so dauntless and frontless in ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... view was not the work but the worker. Yale's mission was to give the student practice. Missions were to be laboratories—the specimens were to be humans. The eternal questions of sin and poverty were to be answered by the pious phrases and the cast-off junk of immature students. I gave a series of talks on labour unions to a selected group of students who ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... could serve her. The princess begged him to get her some men's clothes while she awaited him in a little wood close by. The good man was overjoyed to be of use, and started at once for the nearest town, where he soon discovered a shop where the court lackeys were accustomed to sell their masters' cast-off clothes. The princess dressed herself at once in the disguise he had brought, which was of rich material and covered with precious stones; and, putting her own garments into a bag, which her servant hung over his shoulders, they both set out ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... have recently come my way would alone convince me, apart from the evidence of his record and his writings, that here was a very sterling and very independent "character" of whom much more should be known. Some day I hope to know more. Meanwhile I relate one of the stories. An appeal for cast-off clothing for the poor clergy being made, some one took the line that such an appeal was infra dig. Long smoked, pondered, and thus delivered himself: "But is it not paramount that ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... as long as he had breath. Thus he wrought me up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers on one side represented in lively figures, and indeed, heightened by my imagination of being turned out to the wide world a mere cast-off whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such, with little to provide for myself, with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world, out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay. All this terrified me to the last degree, and he took care ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... Claude said of her, "but I hate to see a woman go around looking as if her clothes would drop off if it rained on her. And on Sundays, when she dresses up, she looks like a boy rigged out in some girl's cast-off duds." ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... deaf and dumb child, dressed in a white frock, with a little silk mantilla over it, made from a cast-off garment belonging to one of the ladies of the circus. She wore a plain straw hat, ornamented with a morsel of narrow white ribbon, and tied under the chin with the same material. Her clear, delicate complexion was overspread by a slight rosy tinge—the tender coloring ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... there the wayside fences and walls were broken down or dismantled; and beyond them fields of snow downtrodden and discolored, and strewn with fragments of leather, camp equipage, harness, and cast-off clothing, showed traces of the recent encampment and congregation of men. On some there were still standing the ruins of rudely constructed cabins, or the semblance of fortification equally rude and incomplete. A ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... day. For this sum he can have sufficient food, and as for clothing, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he never buys any. At various stages in his career he becomes possessed by a stroke of fortune of some article of cast-off clothing, which he wears, as it were, for life. Ordinarily, the poorest blousard has a new blouse once in five or ten years, and a new pair of wooden shoes in the same time; but the scavenger's apparel is for ever old, and he never lays it off. I have seen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... already kindling into flame. Doubtless it served in its day, and in greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very cast-off slough of a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer, lifeless and despised. It is not now, sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency by attempting ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... much worse than I, as by those chains Clipt of the means of self-revenge on those Who lay on him what they deserve. And I, Who taunted Heaven a little while ago With pouring all its wrath upon my head— Alas! like him who caught the cast-off husk Of what another bragg'd of feeding on, Here's one that from the refuse of my sorrows Could gather all the banquet he ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Nevertheless the idea never left his thoughts, so that next morning he rose early, wishing to see whether his daughter's husband was a common ragged beggar. But when he peeped in, he saw a magnificent golden man in the bed, and the cast-off bear-skins lying on the ground. Then he went back and thought, "What a good thing it was that I restrained my anger! I should have committed a great crime." But the gold-child dreamed that he rode out to hunt a splendid stag, and when ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... him I was thankful to be able to observe no trace, except one tan boot and a fragment of a ginger-beer bottle in the area. That indeed was bad enough, but, I argued, the lumber room was full of old cast-off shoes and bottles, and these would probably be set down as fragments of the rubbish displaced by ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... in illustrated novels. But rustic origin and lack of cultivation were evident from the stains on the backs of her unshapely hands; from her broad, flat, finger-nails; and from her large ungainly feet, quite out of harmony with the pair of stylish boots she was wearing—cast-off articles, doubtless, of the lady. She was pretty, nevertheless, with a fresh exuberance of youth. Her large, gray, credulous eyes were those of a stupid but playful lamb; her hair, straight, and a very light blond, hung loosely here and there over a freckled face, dark with sunburn. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... industrious poor. So public was it, that she openly boasted its purpose and its adaptation to the ensnaring vices of passion. Yes, this create in female form had spread ruin and death through the community, and brought the head of many a brilliant young man to the last stage of cast-off misery. And yet, so openly tolerated and countenanced by leading men are these things, that on the 31st of July, 1852, this mother of crime appeals to the honorable board of aldermen, as appeared in the "Proceedings of Council" in the Charleston Courier ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... suspected, the Rousseaus were awaiting them in the apartment. They were very nice looking young people, rather shabbily attired in garments which, though clearly the cast-off apparel of more prosperous owners, were still neat and remotely fashionable. Madame Rousseau was quite a pretty woman, with a soft, restrained voice and a tendency to say "Oui, Madame," with great ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... smouldering embers of the fire and raking out some overdone fragments of fish made a breakfast from them and pitched the bones into the sea. Only those who have lived three days without food can understand how delicious even those cast-off fish bones looked to me. I walked away from the mouth of the cave to be where I could not see the man eat. The daylight enabled me to explore the interior of the cave more thoroughly than I had been able to do before. From a crevice, far within, a tiny thread ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... answered Mistress Anne in a low voice. "She found them in a thieves' haunt being trained as pickpockets. They are the cast-off offspring of a gentleman who lived ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... he saw the Messiah-King crowned, but with thorns. He saw the purple robe upon Him, but it was the cast-off garment of a Roman Governor. A reed, given Him for a sceptre, was snatched from His hand to smite Him on His head. Instead of pouring holy oil of kingly consecration, as upon David's head, His enemies "spit upon Him." It was in mockery that they bowed the knee before Him ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... thee thy pantofles," replied she. "Be they a cast-off pair of his Majesty's, or did my Lord Oxford ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... from the scene. But scarcely anyone noticed the silent man, hard at work in his shirt sleeves in a corner of the adjutant's room, and such inquiries as were made concerning him elicited the information that he was a cast-off of the regular army, with a dubious reputation for sobriety, who had been hired as a clerk. But the Governor of Illinois was an intelligent man, and he was well aware of the service which the ex-Captain of ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... Chevalier de Malte than the usual run of those dignitaries, who differed chiefly from their uncrossed comrades and brethren in having no wife to be unfaithful to. He is never false to Manon—the incident of one of Manon's lovers trying vainly to tempt his rival, with a pretty cast-off mistress of his own, is one of the most striking features of the book. He positively reveres, not his mother, who is dead, and reverence for whom would be nothing in a Frenchman, but his father, and even, it would ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... with mud. The sedate chairs that usually lined the walls were pushed aside and left to stand crooked and awry, the very mockery of their former dignity. Here and there a roll of parchment, an ink-stained pen, a cast-off cloak littered the hall and looked curiously provocative and out of place—an insult to the majesty of the dead and mighty Caesar, who had caused the stately columns to be reared, and the massive walls to raise their pure lines upwards ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... moved through the routine of life—precisely as we all do, whatever may be in our minds and hearts. She went out, crossed Long Acre and entered the shop of a dealer in women's cast-off clothes. She reappeared in the street presently with a fat, sloppy looking woman in black. She took her to the rooms, offered for sale her entire wardrobe except the dress she had on and one other, the simply trimmed sailor upon her head, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... for a married man, Harvey," said he, "as I do for a half-starved dog. I'm always going out of my way to feed some of these cast-off dogs around town, so why shouldn't I do the same for a poor devil of a husband? I'll make you comfortable until you get into Davis', but don't you ever let on to these damned women that you're a failure, or that you're strapped, ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... had souls, they would be pure ones, since they can bear such contamination and not be harmed,—nay, since even from such foul food as we give them they can evolve results so beautiful. We give them our cast-off and worn-out materials, and they return us the most beautiful flowers and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... disorder of her appearance. Over her rough peasant's clothes, some article of cast-off apparel cuts a strange and lamentable figure: a muslin morning-wrap, once white and covered with filmy lace; long, faded ribbons, which fasten a showy Watteau pleat to the back, with ravelled ends spreading over the thick red-cotton ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... introduction of all bull and bear similes into poetry. "Well," I replied, "whatever your antipathies may be to bulls and bears, you have no objection to wolves." "Yes," he answered, "I equally abominate the whole tribe of lion, bull, bear, boar, and wolf similes. They are more thread-bare than a beggar's cast-off coat. From their rapid transition from hand to hand, they are now more hot and sweaty than halfpence on a market day. I would as soon meet a wolf in the open field, as in a friend's poem." I then rejoined, "Your objection, once at least, to wolf similes, was not quite so strong, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... if they believed Him to be a king. A king must wear the purple. And so they got hold of an old, cast-off officer's cloak of this colour and threw it over His shoulders. Then a king must have a crown. So one of them ran out to the park in which the palace stood and pulled a few twigs from a tree or bush. These happened ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... have stopped there. But I didn't. With a perversity which should be forgiven to those who suffer night and day and are as if drunk with an exalted unhappiness, I went on: "For the sake of an old cast-off glove; for I suppose a disdained love is not much more than a soiled, flabby thing that finds itself on a private rubbish heap because ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Sally; judiciously calculating that, from the envy and jealousy he had seen between the sisters, this would be the most effectual mode of mortifying his perfidious fair. Jilting Jessy said her sister was welcome to her cast-off sweethearts: and Saucy Sally replied, her sister was welcome to be her bridemaid; since, with all her beauty, and all her airs, she was not ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... do just as I feel, I should sit down or stand up and call out, as it were, from the housetops to every one in the world to come and see the show. If it were not for the cut of them I should think that all the cast-off clothing had been misdirected and had gone to Japan instead of Belgium. But they are mostly as queer in cut as they are in material. Imagine rummaging your attic for the colors and patterns of past days and then gathering up kimonos of all the different colors and patterns and sizes and ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... have good and wholesome food, clean and comfortable quarters. Once in a while give them a holiday, or an evening off, a cash remembrance at Christmas, and from time to time some part of your wardrobe or cast-off clothing. They are just like children, and must be treated with the rigor and mild discipline which a schoolmaster uses toward his pupils. In all their movements they should be noiseless and as automatic as possible in ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... behind us? Why do we substitute such strange and foolish tasks, particularly for women? What would leading lawyers and doctors do, I wonder, if they were asked, as busy women often have been, to spend a precious morning in a church-room sorting cast-off clothes? ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... every conceivable attitude, and, uncovering their feet, commenced pelting each other with the cast-off leathers. When the sport had lasted a few minutes, Joe ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... he refused entrance. But he was also a keen trader. All manner of men and women came to him; some for a permanent change of costume, some for a night's exchange only. Peasants, grown suddenly and strangely rich, bearing passports and tickets for other lands, came to buy the cast-off finery of the one time nobility. Russian, Japanese, American soldiers and officers came to Wo Cheng for a change, most of them for a single twelve hours, that they might revel in places forbidden to men in uniform. But some came for a permanent ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... and kissed, she was set down in the middle of the clean kitchen-floor, on her own rug, hedged in by soft white pillows. There she sat, serene and happy, surveying her playthings with quizzical eyes; while her mamma gathered up bath-tub, towel, and cast-off clothes, and went up ...
— The Nursery, December 1877, Vol. XXII. No. 6 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... then, is he? The form I used to see Was but the raiment that he used to wear. The grave, that now doth press Upon that cast-off dress, Is but his wardrobe locked;—he is ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... the sentiments attributed to me burned on my lips, but I extinguished the flame. I submitted to be looked upon as the humiliated, cast-off, and now pining confidante of the distinguished Miss Fanshawe: but, reader, it was ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... vanitatum [Lat.], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity^; triviality &c (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum [Lat.], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. litter, rubbish, junk, lumber, odds and ends, cast-off clothes; button top; shoddy; rags, orts^, trash, refuse, sweepings, scourings, offscourings^, waste, rubble, debris, detritus; stubble, leavings; broken meat; dregs &c (dirt) 653; weeds, tares; rubbish heap, dust ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Norah plainly that I disapprove of the Cabin, the past can hatch no egg of discord in the shape of the Cast-Off Glove. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... of these people was very simple. Many of them had nothing more than a pair of short trousers on, with a dirty old turban, and even the place of this was sometimes supplied by a coloured rag, or a cast-off sailor's cap. The Malays wore long cloths wound round their bodies, with one end hanging over their shoulder. The Chinese preserved intact their usual costume and mode of life; and the coloured servants of the ship's officers were the only ones who were occasionally ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... introduced. Disraeli showed himself particularly gracious, and warmly congratulated the artist, whose pencil had lately been employed in satirising him in a disparaging fashion, depicting him as a nice young man for a small party, i.e. the Young England party, as a Jew dealer in cast-off notions, and as a young Gulliver before the Brobdingnag Minister (Sir R. Peel). Disraeli tried his hardest to ingratiate himself with the distinguished caricaturist, but Leech, proof against the wiles of the charmer, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... sewing all day in sight of the street, reminding the Parisians of seraglios, were never empty of those who had money to spend. For leaner purses, the women who sat under umbrellas in front of the Colonnade of the Louvre had bargains of cast-off clothing; and there were booths along the quays on Sunday, and a fair in the Place de la Greve on Monday.[Footnote: Mercier, viii. 269, ix. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... arranged, and we were tearing back rather short in the wind when I espied a figure sitting on a bench beside the booking-office on the pier. It was a slim figure, in an old suit of khaki: some cast-off duds which had long lost the semblance of a uniform. It had a gentle face, and was smoking peacefully, looking out upon the river and the boats and us noisy fellows with meek philosophical eyes. If I had seen General French sitting there and looking like nothing on earth ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... know I was always rather vain of my looks, and I do believe that the greatest terror poverty holds for me is the knowing that I must wear seedy hats and threadbare coats, and trousers a year behind. Maybe Grey will sometime send me a box of his cast-off clothes. ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... his daughter found employment of a somewhat novel kind in the service of the late Queen Victoria. Being in figure the exact size of the Queen, her Majesty's dresses were all tried on this lady by the royal dressmaker; and, as a portion of her remuneration, the cast-off clothing of the Queen became her perquisite. On the occasion of the wedding of one of her friends at Horncastle, the bride and her bridesmaids were all attired ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... human constitution; the body has dropped away from the man; he is excarnated, disembodied; six principles still remain as his constitution immediately after death, the seventh, or the dense body, being left as a cast-off garment. ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... down a peg in life, old sport, that's all," laughed Carrie. "In Italy wearing a hat is a sign of gentility. No work-girl ever has one on her head even on Sundays. I offered a cast-off of mine to the bonne at a hotel once, and she eyed it longingly, but said she daren't wear it if she took it, her friends would think ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... irresistible clamor of life and action, the driver suddenly laid his four spirited horses on their haunches before the quiet spot. The express messenger clambered down from the box, and approached what seemed to be a heap of cast-off ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... and daggers. Few monasteries refused a meal or a rough bed to the wandering scholar. Rarely was any fee exacted for the lesson given. For the rest, none were too proud to earn a few sous by sweeping, or drawing water, or amusing with a tune on the reed-flute; or to wear the cast-off tunics ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... pap, But I will bring it and an orangeade, Thus heaping honors on two noble men. (Exit muchacho) Quezox: But thought hath strayed like an unbridled steed, And I must harness it to work my will. This Bonset: Francos seems to love him well And may him thrust in Carpen's cast-off shoes; My bowels gripe me with suspicion dire That plans are rip'ning to this very end; Hence we must pour in an unwilling ear A weighty protest ere the scheme matures. An open opposition were not wise For Francos hath, I ween a stubborn ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... the schooner the boat cast-off, Senhor Silva saying that he would go on board, and ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... along the Mooki River, on the overlanders' camp, Where the serpents are in millions, all of the most deadly stamp, Wanders, daily, William Johnson, down among those poisonous hordes, Shooting every stray goanna, calls them 'black and yaller frauds'. And King Billy, of the Mooki, cadging for the cast-off coat, Somehow seems to dodge the subject ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... half a dozen of the Apaches, chiefs every one of them, a ragged group clad in a mixture of their native garb and cast-off clothes of the white man; frowzy hair hanging to their shoulders and bound round at the brows by soiled thin turbans. But they stood erect and there was a dignity in the way they held their heads back, a dignity in their immobility of feature and in their slow, grave ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... heart out dreaming of you. Every hour of work, every step I've climbed in the struggle of life, was with your face smiling on me from the past. All my hopes and ambitions I owe to you. The last message you spoke to me has been my guiding star. And when this man threw you from him as a cast-off garment—you, the beautiful queen of my soul—I would have killed him but for the fierce joy that now I could ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... civilized life, adopts its arts, shaves his poodle, and puts on a black coat.—Hints at the process by which a Cast-off ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Francesca by sending her his cast-off gown and begging her to be Sir Patrick Spens; and she was still more gloomy (so I imagined) because he had not proffered his six feet of manly beauty for the part of the captain in Mary Ambree, when the only other person ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... make a dog in America go mad. The dog biscuit that are fed to American dogs would pass as a delicate confection on the menu of any steamboat we struck, and I had rather lie down in a barn yard with a wet dog for a pillow and a cast-off blanket from a smallpox hospital for a bed, than to occupy the bridal chamber of any steamboat ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... system is not that of any of the simple forms of government, nor any combination of them. The attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of government recognized by political writers, is an attempt to clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past. The American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy, better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better than any possible combination of these several forms, because it accords more nearly ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... jests, tool, man of all occasions. He considered himself a part of Mr. Belcher's personal property. To be the object of his clumsy badinage, when visitors were present and his master was particularly amiable, was equivalent to an honorable public notice. He took Mr. Belcher's cast-off clothes, and had them reduced in their dimensions for his own wearing, and was thus always able to be nearly as well dressed and foppish as the man for whom they were originally made. He was as insolent ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... among the men of the Outer {81} Hebrides, and he had a grievance to avenge. He was sprung from the Robertson clan, which did not easily forget or forgive. He still remembered his quarrel with Crooked-armed Macdonald on the Saskatchewan. In his mind was the goading thought that he was a cast-off servant of the North-West Company; and he yearned for the day when he might exact retribution for his injuries, some of them real, ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... in hand for the sake of a little gentle exercise. One unhappy Jacques Bonhomme made hot and toilsome hay in thick brown clothes, plainly manufactured from a defunct Brother's gown; for, to judge from appearances, a cast-off gown is a thing unknown. It was good to see a Brother, in horn spectacles of mediaeval cut, tenderly chopping a log for firewood, and peering at it through his spectacles after each stroke, as a man examines some delicate piece of natural machinery ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... at the suggestion of Corinda, she looped back the muslin curtains with some green ribbons, which she had intended using for her "dolly's dress." The bare appearance of the table troubled her, but by rummaging, she brought to light a cast-off spread, which, though soiled and worn, was on one side ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... he had passed through three judicial ordeals since the last sunset, besides being scourged with the flagellum horrible and exposed to the rude buffeting of the midnight guard. He had been clothed in the cast-off purple of the Roman procurator and wore a derisive crown of thorns. But, as he issued from the Hall of Judgment, such was his commanding presence that the multitude was hushed ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... they were stripping him for the last sad toilet, and the cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized marbles rolled out of the pocket in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that Little Dierck should ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... his nest in a hollow limb and though he seems to care very little about its appearance he has, nevertheless, an idea of his own about decoration and evidently thinks no nest is complete without a bit of cast-off ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... 'give me some of my brother's cast-off clothes, and a few days' food, and I'll go out into the world and try my luck; you have children enough as it is, that I ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... came and the looking and longing and waiting were over, after the solemn services of the church had been said and the cast-off earthly garments of her precious boy hidden away from sight for ever, the mother's hold upon life grew feebler every day. She was slowly drifting out from the shores of time, and no hand was strong enough ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... about your No. 26, and I don't want to," said Dorothy, firmly. "I'm not used to taking cast-off things, so I'll just ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... king "was a time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiation of some of his greatest judgments," passed by, and the ex-chancellor died at Rouen. He had begun his history in exile as the faithful servant of a dethroned prince; he ended it in exile, as the cast-off servant of an ungrateful monarch. As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has given us the form and color of the time. The book is in title and handling a Royalist history. Its faults are manifest: ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... my life," she said; "and I was so young, so ignorant, and loved you so. You betrayed me, and left me mocking me and trampling me into the dust, a soiled cast-off. You might better have killed me then. Then I should not have ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... (1909) he seeks to interpret anew and on the basis of scrupulous attention to all the documents in the case the oft-treated story of the mysterious foundling who came to light in Nuremberg in 1828 and who was supposed to be a cast-off prince of Baden. Moreover, of the three narratives in the volume entitled The Sisters (1906), two are fantastically constructed criminal cases which endeavor suggestively to explain the unusual and the baffling by reference to mysterious undercurrents in the soul. One of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons, Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper in the Borough. We may surmise how his Caxtons ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... panting haste and fear— "Thou art welcome to the dead leaves sanctified by song, if thou thinkest them of value, but I would rather see the rosebud of love nestled in that pretty white breast of thine, than the cast-off ornaments of fame!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... "the men are by profession story-tellers and mimics, imitating the voices of men and the notes of animals; their male children are also trained to dance. In payment for their entertainment they are frequently content with cast-off clothes, which will of course be of use to them in assuming other characters." [417] Occasionally also they dress up in European clothes and can successfully assume the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... on the top shelves of closets, peering into rag-bags, exasperating the lodgers with her persistence and importunity. She was collecting junks, bits of iron, stone jugs, glass bottles, old sacks, and cast-off garments. It was one of her perquisites. She sold the junk to Zerkow, the rags-bottles-sacks man, who lived in a filthy den in the alley just back of the flat, and who sometimes paid her as much as three cents a pound. The stone jugs, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... pate, who spoke French fairly well, and seemed much inclined to come to an understanding with us and open up his country to trade and civilisation. He came to call on me in great state, dressed in the handsome uniform of a general of the French Republic, the cast-off garments of some performer at the Cirque Olympique. He had a tricolour plume in his hat, a gold laced coat with lapels turned back on the chest, white breeches, and top boots. He wore the decoration of the Legion of Honour, which he ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... I say. I believe Nelly Bolivar is as poor as Job's turkey and that Peggy Stewart pays all 'her expenses here. And I know she wears Peggy's cast-off clothes. I saw Peggy's name in one of her coats. You know Peggy has her name and the maker's woven right into the linings. Just you wait and see what her father looks like and then see ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... and making mud-pies in a gutter, than in his splendid raiment and well-furnished nursery; an uninteresting nursery, where there were no cupboards full of broken wagons and head-less horses, flat-nosed dolls and armless grenadiers, the cast-off playthings of a flock of brothers and sisters—a very chaos of rapture for the fingers of infancy! Only a few expensive toys from a fashionable purveyor—things that went by machinery, darting forward a little way with convulsive jerks and unearthly choking ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... will notice them here." (Which was true enough, for in those days the land was strewed with shreds and patches of the war. The drivers and conductors of street cars wore overcoats made out of shoddy army blankets, and the dustmen went about in cast-off infantry caps.) "What troubles me is that I can't wait to start you ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... be a cast-off spring overcoat, out of season and color on this blustering winter day, a rich buff waistcoat of an embossed pattern, such as few persons would care to assume, save, perhaps, a gambler, negro buyer, or fine "buck" barber. The assumption of a large ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... two; the knowing ones declared that Dolly was Beaumont's daughter; others, who professed to be more knowing, entertained other views. Dolly was a tiny girl with crumpled features, who wore dresses that were remade from the big woman's cast-off garments. She sang in the chorus, was in receipt of a salary of five-and-twenty shillings a week, and was a favourite with everyone. Around her stood a group of girls; they formed a black mass of cotton, alpaca, and dirty cloth. ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... his indigent rooms in the Alle Petit Chat, and washed and dressed. (Fortunately, he had at no time a heavy beard, so did not have to shave in the evenings.) Well-dressed he was not, even in his evening clothes, which were a cast-off of his brother's, and not, as evening clothes should be, faultless; but still they passed, and ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... the book for a minute and guess. Can not? Try it again! Not yet? No—nor could you, were you to try from New Year's morn to New Year's eve. Wonderful, as you may think it, Sprigg saw there on the ground, not a dozen paces from him, his cast-off moccasins, coming slowly toward him—first the right foot, then the left—without so much as a pair of knee buckles to show for legs, till they had set their toes within easy speaking distance, squarely confronting him. The boy stood stock still, staring before him, ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... had suddenly become empty—empty except for a row of tumbled beds and nine little tired-out, cast-off bodies. They had been shed as easily as a boy slips out of his dusty, uncomfortable overalls on a late sultry afternoon, and leaves them behind him on a shady bank, while he plunges, head first, into the cool, dark waters of the swimming-pool just below him, which have ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... shale; carapace, plastron; cockle, conch, periwinkle, cowrie, whelk, mitre shell, abilone shell; exuviae (cast-off); conchite (fossil). Associated Words: conchology, conchologist, malacology, testaceous, cockled, mollusk, conchiferous, conchiform conchometer, conchometry, crustacean, exuvial, exuviate, exuviation, Loricata, bivalve, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... a long look from head to foot The dress was a poor enough velveteen and had a cast-off air, but it clung to her figure finely, and its sleeves were picturesque with puffs at the shoulder and slashings of white,—indeed the moonlight made her all black and white; her eyes, which were tawny brown by day, were black as velvet ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fires smouldered near each, and, round about, half a dozen chocolate-coloured piccaninnies, innocent of clothes, ran and played, laughing and chattering to one another. In the shade the men were lounging, indolent and indifferent, wearing such cast-off clothes as they had been able to beg or steal from station hands, and smoking tobacco obtained by a similar process. In the heat and sunshine the women worked at such tasks which need demanded—the search ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... that! And for a moment her illogical heart wavered. She drew out her hanky, muttering 'how I hate him!'—and blew her pretty nose. Then she clenched her hands and set her teeth. Then she went lax again. Then—oh, dear! he had even insulted her by leaving her to pick up the cast-off ring!—for, of course, she could not leave it there for Miss Tod or a ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... but it's very curious. These two M's, these cast-off robes sacrificed to love, everything makes my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... doors makes a very nice theater for acting charades. Almost anything may be used for dressing up—shawls, anti-macassars, table-cloths, handkerchiefs, cast-off dresses, or a dressing-gown. The latter is a very useful garment in representing an old gentleman, while tow or white fire ...
— My Book of Indoor Games • Clarence Squareman
... better than ideas half-hatched, and convictions reared by accident. They are like a man who should pace up and down the world in the delusion that he is clad in sumptuous robes of purple and velvet, when in truth he is only half-covered by the rags and tatters of other people's cast-off clothes. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... to be groundless; the kind-hearted German kept Yakov with him, let him study with his other pupils, fed him (dessert, however, was not offered him except on Sundays), and rigged him out in clothes cut out of the cast-off morning-gowns—usually snuff-coloured—of his mother, an old Livonian lady, still alert and active in spite of her great age. Owing to all these circumstances, and owing generally to Yakov's inferior position in the school, his schoolfellows treated him in rather a casual fashion, looked down ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother's heels, equipped in a pair of his father's cast-off galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... Why had I asked him? Of course it was Leah. I could see her strange light-coloured eyes glancing up in my direction. What was she doing in London? I wondered. She was dressed well, evidently in her mistress's cast-off clothes, for she wore a handsome silk dress and mantle. Had they quarrelled and parted? I felt instinctively that it would be a good day for Gladwyn if Leah ever shook off its dust from her feet. Gladys regarded her as a spy and informer, and she had evidently an unwholesome influence ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... For when Miss Kemp went to see the palace of the King all the decoration she saw there was a simple table and chair. A Tibetan kitchen was a very popular slide. In that country they apparently use a golf-bag to brew tea in, and cast-off bicycle wheels for plates. There prevails in Tibet some element of democracy, for Miss Kemp's cook was also a J.P., a Civil Servant, and held other such offices of fame. One of her assistants was a positive marvel—a human carpet-sweeper. If ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... own magnificent project. That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to whose personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom history knows few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the son of an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of Macedon. There were those who said that he was in reality a son of Philip himself. However, he rose at court, became a private friend of young Alexander, and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of the Life Guards. And from thence he rose rapidly, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... the effect of bringing the flash and heavy, dull report of the old, cast-off military muskets which the Malays were using; and as these weapons flashed, the defenders of the various buildings seized the opportunity to return the fire, guessing at the enemy's ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... awoke by a hideous purring; there, as he thought, upon his cast-off garments, sat the enemy of mankind: he had drawn the mark gained at the dice out of the gypsire, and was feasting on it with his eyes, ever and anon licking it with great gusto, and meanwhile purr, purr, purring like a ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... you set them on by rejecting them. They run about like blind, mad oxen till they bump their stupid heads against somebody that will have them. I shouldn't wonder if I got a second-hand husband one day, taking up with some cast-off of yours." ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... upon the green slime their tiny fleet of chips, and, grown a little older, it was here they waded in the happy summer days. The very dump-carts came and went like perpetual argosies, bringing riches—discarded furniture and cast-off clothing—to ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... waited in the vicinity of the house inhabited by the unknown for the hour at which letters were distributed. In order to be able to spy at his ease and hang about the house, he had followed the example of those police officers who seek a good disguise, and bought up cast-off clothes of an Auvergnat, the appearance of whom he sought to imitate. When the postman, who went the round of the Rue Saint Lazare that morning, passed by, Laurent feigned to be a porter unable to remember the name of a person to whom he had to deliver a parcel, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... earnest. In a short space of time wheat, oats, and barley were added to our battle-honours. But if the spirit was willing, our reaping implements were correspondingly weak. The Corps 'Agricultural Officer' had collected from surrounding farms a fantastic assortment of cast-off scythes, jagged hooks, and rusty sickles, which fell to pieces 'in the 'ands' and refused to do more than beat down the crops to which they were opposed. The scythes seemed hardly able to stick their points, in the ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... at the pawnbroker's for sixty francs. As soon as that sum was spent, the Thenardiers grew accustomed to look on the little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity; and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thenardier brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest had left—a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat. Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions; Cosette ate ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... taking another course. "They's one great way to reach folks's hearts and that's through their sympathy. All of you give up to furrin missions to rescue naked fellers with rings in their noses. That's sympathy, hain't it? Mebby they hain't needin' sympathy and cast-off pants, but that's neither here nor there. You think they do.... Coldriver's great on sympathy, and it's a doggone upstandin' quality." Again the audience sucked in its breath at this approach to the ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... of God before their eyes"; that is, the greatest part of men are utterly destitute of this godly jewel, this treasure, the fear of the Lord. Poor vagrants, when they come straggling to a lord's house, may perhaps obtain some scraps and fragments, they may also obtain old shoes, and some sorry cast-off rags, but they get not any of his jewels, they may not touch his choicest treasure; that is kept for the children, and those that shall be his heirs. We may say the same also of this blessed grace of fear, which is called here ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... with certain titled people from abroad, whose shoes he had had the honor of polishing. The only person in whose presence he restrained his braggadocio style was Phillis. Her utter contempt for nonsense was too evident. Bacchus was the same size as his master, and often fell heir to his cast-off clothes. A blue dress-coat and buff vest that he thus inherited, had a great effect upon him, bodily and spiritually. Not only did he swagger more when arrayed in them, but his prayers and singing were doubly effective. He secretly prided himself on a likeness to Mr. Weston, but this must have ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... dust arising far ahead along the road wrought up his hopes to a Bluebeard pitch, as regularly to fall. First came a cast-off soldier from the war in the Netherlands, rakishly forlorn, his breastplate full of rusty dents, his wild hair worn by his steel cap, swaggering along on a sorry hack with an old belt full of pistolets, and his ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... made the whole of Europe seem tawdry. I felt ashamed of the gorgeous sights I had seen, of the rich dinners I had eaten, of the luxuries I had enjoyed. I felt as if I would like to have the whole of my past life fall away from me as a cast-off garment, and that if I could only begin over I could do so much better with my life. I could have knelt and beat my hands together in a wild, impotent prayer for the past to be given into my keeping for just one more trial, one more opportunity to live up to the beauty and holiness and ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... way they discovered such cast-off material as the retreating German army had discarded in order to hasten their march—broken caissons and guns that had been rendered temporarily useless by reason of some accident; stocks of provisions that could not be carried; cooking outfits that were the ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... from them that keep; but if I should be a wife, all I had then was given up to the husband, and I was henceforth to be under his authority only; and as I had money enough, and needed not fear being what they call a cast-off mistress, so I had no need to give him twenty thousand pounds to marry me, which had been buying my lodging too dear ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best definition of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
