"Dawdling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fathers of the convent share in the good things which they lavish on their guests; but they look as if they do. Those whom we saw bore every sign of easy conscience and good living; there were a pair of strong, rosy, greasy, lazy lay- brothers, dawdling in the sun on the convent terrace, or peering over the parapet into the street below, whose looks gave one a notion ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... answered Guy, musingly; 'and this reading comes naturally, and is just what I wanted to keep the pleasant things from getting a full hold of me. I ought to have thought of it sooner, instead of dawdling a whole month in idleness. Then all this would not have happened. I hope it ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Venice," he exclaimed, "and I'm glad of it. One gets tired of dawdling about on a magnified frog-pond. One begins to long for the open sea." Miss Stickney looked gratified, and Kenwick felt himself once ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... glad to have something to do with myself," said Lady Geraldine. "It is better than dawdling away one's ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... only hits the nail on the head, but with crushing force smites it home, and buries it.—On the other hand, let us be free to admit, he is the most unequal writer breathing. Often after some such feat, he will play truant for long pages, and go dawdling and dreaming, and mumbling and maundering the merest commonplaces, as if he were asleep with eyes ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... puzzled to explain. He was not the kind of man who, as a rule, cared to dawdle about all day with women when there was any kind of sport to be had from hunting down to ratting; more especially was he disinclined for any such dawdling when Helen Romer was amongst the number of the ladies so left to be danced attendance upon. And yet he distinctly told himself that he meant to be devoted for this one day to the fair sex. All yesterday he had been crossed and put out; the men had been out shooting from ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... fine, and, for the time of year, warm, and I took advantage of it by dawdling along that glorious stretch of sea-coast, taking in to the full its rich stores of romantic scenery and suggestion of long-past ages. Sometimes I sat for a long time, smoking my pipe on the edge of the headlands, staring at the blue of the water, the curl of the waves on the ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... any rate," he said, as he turned the switches. "And, Morton," he added, when the butler brought the coffee, "get me a screwdriver or something to undo this box. Whatever the animal is, he's kicking up the deuce of a row. What is it? Why are you dawdling?" ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... beginning of my madness. Suddenly I forgot all cares and difficulties of the present and future and became foolishly light-hearted. We were rushing towards the great battle where men were busy at my proper trade. I realized how much I had loathed the lonely days in Germany, and still more the dawdling week in Constantinople. Now I was clear of it all, and bound for the clash of armies. It didn't trouble me that we were on the wrong side of the battle line. I had a sort of instinct that the darker and wilder things grew ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... and walked slowly along the pretty rustic street; now dawdling before a little print-shop, whose contents she knew by heart, now looking back at the great windows of that temple of pleasure which ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... "Mar," the generic name for quartz,[EN23] brought us loads of specimens from every direction. Nothing is easier than to work the purely superficial part. A few barrels of gunpowder and half a dozen English miners, with pick and crowbar, suffice. Even our dawdling, feckless quarrymen easily broke and "spelled" for camel loading some six tons in ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... capacity for granted in us. In 'choice and pith of diction,' again, of which Mr. Lowell speaks, he hits the mark with a felicity that is almost his own in this generation. He is terse, concentrated, and free from the important blunder of mistaking intellectual dawdling for meditation. Nor in fine does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing has a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which goes nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or rhetorical unction. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... until some three or four nights after this, when he came hurriedly into our room. It was quite late, but Mac was still at his Mathematics, while I was dawdling with my pipe and a volume of Sternberg's pleasant tales. Clarian walked directly up to Mac, holding out his hand, and saying, "I have come to ask your forgiveness, my dear Mac; I was wrong ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... his breakfast, for which he had very little appetite, though he relished his coffee, and also an anchovy. While dawdling over these, he heard sundry wheels grinding about below the window, and the bumping and thumping of boxes, indicative of 'goings away,' for which he couldn't say he felt sorry. He couldn't even ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people—there are many of them—who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling round them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour—flirting—and if carried far enough it is punishable by law. But no law—not public opinion even—punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... the sofa, and put his yellow silk pocket-handkerchief over his face, and indulged in a snug little nap, of which the dreams, no doubt, were very pleasant, as he snored with refreshing regularity. The young men sate, meanwhile, dawdling away the sunshiny hours on the terrace, very happy, and Pen, at least, very talkative. He was narrating to Warrington a plan for a new novel, and a new tragedy. Warrington laughed at the idea of his writing a tragedy? By Jove, he ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unobtrusively that before we knew it we had accepted him as guide. In that capacity he realized an ideal, for he never addressed a word to us, nor did he even stay in sight. We wandered along at our sweet will, dawdling as slowly as we pleased. The guide had apparently quite disappeared. Look where we would we could in no manner discover him. At the next corner we would pause, undecided as to what to do; there, in the middle distance, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... they run up again ever so fast, and strut about cooing and spreading their crests—one seldom sees them fly; when they do they rise straight up, and then dart away close to the ground and drop suddenly within a few yards. Of all birds the crow has most sound common sense; there is no dawdling in his methods; down he swoops with beautifully polished feathers glistening in the sun, to the water's edge, stands for a second to look calmly from side to side; then a long drink and away he goes, thoroughly satisfied to mind his own ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... perhaps have saved Christendom from a war of eleven years. But the policy of Austria was, at that time, strangely dilatory and irresolute. It was in vain that William and Heinsius represented the importance of every hour. "The Emperor's ministers go on dawdling," so the King wrote to Heinsius, "not because there is any difficulty about the matter, not because they mean to reject the terms, but solely because they are people who can make up their minds to nothing." While the negotiation at Vienna ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quite without gifts. You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair organ. But you produce your notes badly; and that music which you sing is beneath you. It is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture—a dawdling, canting, see-saw kind of stuff—the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody; no cries of deep, mysterious passion—no conflict—no sense of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... American trains is as a rule slower than that of English ones, though there are some brilliant exceptions to this rule. I never remember dawdling along in so slow and apparently purposeless a manner as in crossing the arid deserts of Arizona—unless, indeed, it was in travelling by the Manchester and Milford line in Wales. The train on the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... doesn't that good for nothing bring in the milk?" grumbled Mr. Peabody. "I declare he gets later and later every morning. The balers will be over to start work at seven, and if he thinks he's going to spend half an hour dawdling over his breakfast after they ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... Can my answer reach you now? Fate has left me your debtor, You will remember how; For I went away to Nantucket, And you to the Isle of Orleans, And when I was dawdling and dreaming Over the ways and means Of answering, the power was denied me, Fate frowned and took her stand; I have your unanswered letter Here in my hand. This—in your famous scribble, It was ever a cryptic ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... connection with humanity, he submitted, half-laughing at himself, to be made the tool of any woman whose person attracted him, or of any man whose tattle diverted him. He thought little and cared less about religion. He seems to have passed his life in dawdling suspense between Hobbism and Popery. He was crowned in his youth with the Covenant in his hand; he died at last with the Host sticking in his throat; and during most of the intermediate years, was occupied in persecuting both Covenanters and Catholics. He was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... passenger in the smoker, who found the stoppages at these wayside hamlets interminable, both in frequency and in the delay at each of them; and while the dawdling train remained inert, and the moments passed inactive, his eyes dilated and his hand clenched till the nails bit his palm; then, when the trucks groaned and the wheels crooned against the rails once more, he sank back in his seat with sighs of relief. Sometimes he would get up and pace the aisle ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... to his friend, Hugh became painfully aware of the weakness of his own slouching, pleasure-loving mind. It seemed to him that, in the intellectual region, he was like a dusty and ragged tramp, permeated on sunshiny days with a sort of weak, unsystematic contentment, dawdling by hedgerow-ends and fountain-heads, lying in a vacant muse in grassy dingles, and sleeping by stealth in the fragrant shadow of hayricks; while his friend seemed to him to be a brisk gentleman in a furred coat, flashing along ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rose deliberately, taking time to brush every crumb from his lap. At the door he reached for a whisk broom and wielded it conspicuously. He could not have said whether bravado or contempt was moving him to such flamboyant dawdling. Or was he merely trying to persuade himself that he had nothing to fear in any case? He stepped out into a shower of noonday sunshine flooding through a rift in the high fog of a July morning in San Francisco. A delicious thrill from open spaces communicated itself ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... than taking his time, he was dawdling, keeping his donkeys fat, and letting his men wander at pleasure to right and left gathering reports for him of unusual folk or things. We came very close to being seen by one of them, who emerged from a village near us with a pair of chickens ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... she couldn't assert her identity; those huge passive folds of green country wouldn't believe her. They wouldn't accept the fact that she was Gabrielle Hewish, now called Considine. To them she was just the wife of a country parson dawdling through the leafy lanes in a pony-trap. She lashed the pony into a canter, but felt no better for it. The animal settled down again into his shamble. No power on earth could make him keep on cantering over the hills of the South Hams, and he ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... its lurid light the Government for a moment forgot its dawdling "peace policy," and "let slip the dogs of war." No wonder the canting prayers of maudlin fanatics were stilled amid the wrathful cry for vengeance. The blood of Canby and Thomas and Sherwood "cried unto God from the ground" against them. The ghastly, sickening tragedy which should send ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... sin, playing poker with body-snatchers. Pa Rearick simply cut loose and bombarded the neighborhood with red-hot adjectives. That he should have brought up a son to do him honor and should have found him dawdling his college moments away with loafers; fawning on the idle sons of the rich; tinkling a mandolin instead of walking with Homer; wasting time and money instead of trying to earn his way to success—"Bah," likewise "Faugh," to say nothing of other picturesque expressions ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... preacher and he would have sustained you. You tacitly put certain conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them. I shall continue to respect them. But—when you married me, you didn't marry a dawdling dude chattering 'advanced ideas' with his head full of libertinism. You married a man. And that man ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... such," said I, to prevent argument, "and for God's sake don't let us squabble any more. If you're right again, we may as well turn-to and get at the cache without further dawdling. You ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... whirling about his head, and the bayonets an inch from his breast, he does not go dreaming of scenes a hundred miles off, or think anything else than the one thing, how to keep a whole skin and wound an enemy. If Christian men will do their work in the dawdling, half-interested, and half-indifferent way in which so many of us promenade through our Christian service as if it was a review and not a fight, they are not likely to bring back many trophies of victory. You must put your ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... dresses, some were very tasty milliners. It gave them a reliance upon what they could do themselves. The two daughters of one workman kept a little poultry-yard "scientifically," and dressed themselves from its proceeds. Industry became more general. Instead of dawdling away whole evenings in gossip, they had some light employment, and worked ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... kind. She is a handsome girl, with good abilities, who has had the sense to make the most and best of herself instead of dawdling." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... punishment, Anne sprang up the next morning at Louise's first call and dressed at once. To her surprise, she found that it was really pleasanter than dawdling over her toilette, and Louise good-naturedly gave her permission to take Honey-Sweet for a before-breakfast stroll to the arbor ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... training, to get the habit of conquering impulse, of doing disagreeable things. Nothing is more useful to a man than that power. We must not let our lives get too easy and our wills too soft. To jump out of bed when the whistle blows, instead of dawdling just for a minute more in indolent comfort, to make one's self take the cold bath that is abhorrent to the flesh, to deny one's self the cigar or the candy that may not be in itself particularly harmful-by some means or other to keep one's ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... not work as fast now, for things were nearly in order, and she dreaded having nothing to do; her aunt, Mrs. Dale, would have said she was dawdling, but Miss Deborah Woodhouse, who had come over to the rectory early to see if she could be of use, said haste was not genteel, and it was a pleasure to see a young person who was deliberate in ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... birth, Leo was a youth most simple-minded. He knew that much was expected of him, and that he was destined to rule; yet so easily was he satisfied that his greatest happiness was to lie all day basking in the sun or dawdling through his father's park with his dog at his heels, the heels themselves in a very down-trodden state of humility, watching with languid gaze the movements of the world ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... sense of dreariness, as new as it was strange, swept momentarily over Nan as she pondered this. The summer months would be grievously clouded. Dick had been the moving spirit of all the fun; the tennis-parties, the pleasant dawdling afternoons, would lose their zest ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... minutes after Lanier went out, and went silent but in unspeakable wrath, Paymaster Scott came dawdling in, and though but a casual visitor at the post, just back that day from a tour of the northward camps and forts along the Indian border, he saw at a glance that something had gone amiss. The colonel was laboriously waltzing; ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... for by this time the sun was sinking, giving the plain on which so many important events had occurred a more weird and deserted look than ever. The cavass in charge of the servants was beginning to be fussy, in fear that while we were dawdling about the one train might come and go, and the sitts and effendis be left to the limited accommodations of Aiasulouk for the night. So we filed down to the station, the servants preceding us with the hampers upon their heads, and the Armenian lady stepping out after them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... now, and old women; fleshy women, and women with small children and babies. Couples came, too—dawdling couples, plainly newly married: the men were not two steps ahead, and the women's gloves were buttoned and their ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... he had set about something! You let him go on dawdling and dawdling without even making up his mind whether or not he ought to do anything! Take my word for it, Richard, you'll have him on your hands till the day of ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... return, for she soon took up her old habits of intimacy, she sat listlessly by the fire, holding her two hands in her lap, as usual, and not even dawdling at netting. Perhaps the still evening and the quiet room induced confidence, or she may have felt the effect of my "receptivity," as she called it. (She always insisted that she could not help telling me everything.) She turned away ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... his hat, he begun at once with his daily news of the farm. "I hope they'll get that wheat field done to-day," he said: "but it doesn't look much like it—they've been dawdling over it for the last three days. I am afraid Wilson isn't much of a manager, after all; if I take my eyes off him, he seems to ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... a week in Cairo, and at the end of that time the Countess de Mattos had accepted an invitation to go yachting; not for a day, but for a vague period of "dawdling," as Virginia evasively expressed it. The beautiful Portuguese woman had hesitated at first, and confided to the American girl that, on account of the delay in receiving an expected sum of money, she did not quite see how she could get away in time. But Virginia had begged the Countess not to ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... rather of Reed's work than of the man himself. This is as he would have had it. There was in him a magnetic charm that attracted all who came near him, and which bound his friends to him as by "hooks of steel." Erect and manly in bearing, he stepped along, never apparently in a hurry, never dawdling. One had only to look in his beautiful face, the bright kind eyes, the high wide brow, and to come under the spell of his winning smile, to obtain a glimpse ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... note. Armstrong, waved a good-bye and took his place at the tail of the procession. Up the narrow street they turned, and passed the two-story wooden Hotel Ingles, where Ives and Dawson and Richards and the rest of the chaps were dawdling on the broad piazza, reading week-old newspapers. They crowded to the railing and shouted many friendly and wise and foolish farewells after him. Across the plaza they trotted slowly past the bronze statue of ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... later a child on a pony tore into the weed-grown drive leading to the great mansion on the hill, scaring a lone darky who had been dawdling among ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... the wood, but he hasn't brought the wood, and hasn't come back himself. I'll just go and help him!" So off he went too, and never came back. And the third wolf was left sitting there, and at last he said: "I must really go and hurry them up. What are they dawdling all this time for!" And as soon as he was gone, he set off running and never so much as ...
— More Russian Picture Tales • Valery Carrick
... write them down." Books she flung away impatiently; but the woods and streams, and the wild flowers, the rooks returning to roost in the trees at sunset, the horses playing in the paddocks, the cows dawdling back from their pastures, all sweet country scents and cheerful country sounds she became alive to and began to love. There would be trouble enough in Beth herself at times, wherever she was; it was hard that she could not have been kept in some such ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... way, so far. Now, you can keep on in the way you have selected. I'll give you five thousand dollars, but you'll never get another cent from me until you've learned what a fool you're making of yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long! There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Russian, who was not Zeppelin's pupil, set to showing with vehemence that his "method" was a worthless one. He was barely started when a wiry American, in a high, grating voice, called Schilsky a wretched fool: why had he not gone to Berlin at Easter, as he had planned, instead of dawdling on here where he had no more to gain? At this, several of the young men laughed and looked significant. Furst—he had proved to be a jolly little man, who, with unbuttoned vest, absorbed large quantities of beer and perspired freely—Furst alone was of the opinion, which he ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... riding-school will, of course, occupy much of your mornings for some time. I trust, however, you will keep in view drawing, languages, etc. It is astonishing how far even half an hour a day, regularly bestowed on one object, will carry a man in making himself master of it. The habit of dawdling away time is easily acquired, and so is that of putting every moment either to use or ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... out-grown that one too. You pant like a lizard when you run to catch a car. You cross your legs and have to hold the crossed one on with both hands to keep your stomach from shoving it off in space. After a while you quit crossing them and are content with dawdling yourself on your own lap. You are fat! Dog-gone ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... word of the ninth number of his new book, and did not expect for another month to "see land from the running sea of Little Dorrit." He had resumed the house he first occupied, the cottage or villa "des Moulineaux," and after dawdling about his garden for a few days with surprising industry in a French farmer garb of blue blouse, leathern belt, and military cap, which he had mounted as "the only one for complete comfort," he wrote to me that he was getting "Now ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... chestnut gathering a rare good time. Far off, and now near, the girls were singing their quaint wild songs. Thus heard, the rondinella sounds well: it is of the woods and deserts; strange, barbaric, oriental, bacchantic, what you please, save dawdling ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... wonderful message, the king whom she loved so loyally, and for whom she died, spoiled all her plans. He, with his political advisers, prevented her from driving the English quite out of France. These favourites, men like the fat La Tremouille, found their profit in dawdling and delaying, as politicians generally do. Thus, in our own time, they hung off and on, till our soldiers were too late to rescue Gordon from the Arabs. Thus, in Joan's time, she had literally to goad them into action, to drag them on by constant prayers and ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... audible, louder and louder, until in unison it mingled with the dull impact of their feet on the heavy sod like the exhaust of many engines. No horseman who values the life of the beast between his legs, fails to heed that warning. Landor did not, but at the first dawdling prairie creek that offered water and, with its struggling fringe of willows, a suggestion of shade, he gave the word to halt, and for four mortal, blistering hours while, man and beast alike, the others slept, kept watch over ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... bearing the name of President Miraflores is daily scrubbed with soap-bark and sand. An old half-breed Indian tends the grave with fidelity and the dawdling minuteness of inherited sloth. He chops down the weeds and ever-springing grass with his machete, he plucks ants and scorpions and beetles from it with his horny fingers, and sprinkles its turf with water from the plaza fountain. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... Philander, a dawdling lover; so called from Philander, the Dutch knight mentioned above, who was wooed by Gabrina. To "philander" is to hang about a woman in a half-hearted ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... when you've nothing to do, and takes up more time than you'd believe. I think of you all in the morning in the dear little house, every one bustling round, and only longing for more hands and legs to get along the quicker, while here we sit, the six of us, dawdling over breakfast, with not a thing to think of but how to waste the time until we can decently begin to eat again! It isn't energetic, and it isn't useful, and it isn't wise, or noble, or improving, or anything of the kind, but I won't disguise ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... dawdling away the months in Mexico and California. For years he had felt, together with many other people, that a sea-voyage was the essential beginning of every journey; he had started round the world soon after leaving Cambridge; he had fished through Norway and hunted in India, and shot everything ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... fell, which added to the excitement of the situation, whilst a large fire crackled and blazed on the hearth within doors. Marie would gladly have shortened the inevitable slowness of this state of siege: she did not at all like to see her betrothed dawdling about in the wet and cold; but she had no voice in the affair—nay, she had even to share ostensibly in the cruelty of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... different patents. This alloy has all the useful properties of the finest steel with about one-fourth its weight, and is besides perfectly non-oxydisable and never tarnishes. Without the production of a metal with all these combined qualities, we might still in our journeys, be dawdling along at sixty miles an hour in a cumbrous railroad car behind ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... then; one day's enough for me. Of course, we must go as it's settled; but you won't catch me staying dawdling about, looking at the same old things over and over again as I see two years ago. I shall be off and ...
— Archie's Mistake • G. E. Wyatt
... a note and instructions to wait for an answer, at the very moment when every domestic ordinance demanded his absorption in the cleaning of knives and of boots. Being but human, Alfred naturally embraced the heaven-sent chance of dawdling, passing the time of day with various cronies, and rapturously assisting to hound a couple of wild, sweating and snorting steers along the dusty lane, behind the churchyard, to Butcher Cleave's slaughter-house: with the consequence that his menial duties devolved upon Laura ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... be," he said gruffly. "I know enough of him to be sure that he needs no one prying and ferreting into his affairs. Besides, it isn't safe for us to be dawdling about here. How many soldiers have you ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fresh from her sulphur bath, was reclining on a sofa in her large cool room, where the jalousies were half closed, and dawdling over Godey's Lady's Book, a fashion magazine printed in the United States, which found great favour in ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... is good to us," he said, quite irrelevantly. Selim muttered the sacred word "Allah." Chase's trend of thought, whatever it may have been, was ruthlessly checked. "That reminds me," he said briskly, "we can't waste Allah's time in dawdling here. Luck has been with us—and Allah, too—great is Allah! But we'll have to do some skilful sneaking on our own hook, just the same. If the upper gate is being watched—and I doubt it very much—we'll have a hard time getting ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... are so incorrigibly idle,' she said; 'but I must give you to understand at once that you will have no time for dawdling at Albury Lodge. The first bell rings a quarter before six, and at a quarter past I shall expect to see you in the schoolroom. You will superintend the younger pupils' pianoforte practice from that time till ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... fine May morning in Colonel Hugonin's rooms at Selwoode, which is, as you may or may not know, the Hugonins' country-place. And there we discover the Colonel dawdling over his breakfast, in an intermediate stage of that careful toilet which enables him later in the day to pass casual inspection ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... is practising, not amusing themselves or dawdling, and because it is an hour and half an hour, neither more nor less, and not an uncertain time, which is left to the performer's pleasure. To make any progress with music after you are grown up, you must give three or four hours a day to its acquirement, and that you would find it difficult—almost ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... and well-directed haste. The moments granted to any of us are too few and precious to let slip unused. The field to be cultivated is too wide and the possible harvest for the toiler too abundant, and the certain crop of weeds in the sluggard's garden too poisonous, to allow dawdling to be considered a venial fault. Little progress will be made if we do not work as feeling that 'the night is far spent, the day is at hand,' or as feeling the apparently opposite but really identical conviction, 'I must work the works of Him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... veteran soldier—how many hours of his life has he spent actually under fire? No, I'm not forgetting the workers either: but you need not tell me that they are all sick at heart because they are not dawdling in a country lane. It would bore them to death, and they can live a very happy life without it. That's the false pathos again—to think that everyone who can't do as we like must be miserable. And anyhow, I have done my twenty-five years on the treadmill, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pitched his endeavour so high as in leaving that card on the Misses Dosson. He was in search of freshness, but he needn't have gone far: he would have had but to turn his lantern on his own young breast to find a considerable store of it. Like many of his dawdling coaevals he gave much attention to art, lived as much as possible in that more select world where it is a positive duty not to bustle. To make up for his want of talent he espoused the talent of others—that is of several—and was as sensitive ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... his childhood, as a perfect connoisseur, a dilettante. He has told us how, as a child, in New York, Paris, London, and Geneva, he enjoyed more than anything else the "far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping." And, while giving us this picture of the small boy that was ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... just that thing, or appear to? Why, even the buds on the trees teach us the lesson. How many springtimes have you gone to your bed feeling that the season was late, and the trees were bare, and the fruits would all be backward, and Nature was dawdling along in a very wearisome fashion; and awakened in the morning to find that there had in the night been a gentle rain, and a movement of mysterious power among the buds and the grasses, and that now, in the morning sunshine, the ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... tenderest love songs. Altogether his society was much more intellectual and more agreeable than any to be had at Mauleverer Manor. Miss Wolf parted from him reluctantly, and thought that Ida was unreasonably urgent when she insisted on leaving him at the end of half an hour's dawdling walk up and down ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... toward the rising sun, immeasurably remote, astronomically remote, in Newport, Rhode Island, Holy Land of High Society, ineffable Domain of the American Aristocracy. As a rule they spent a part of every Sabbath—after morning service—in this sumptuous home, the rest of it they spent in Europe, or in dawdling around in their private yacht. Six days of sordid and plodding fact life at home on the ragged edge of Lakeside and straitened means, the seventh in Fairyland—such had been ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... you stay dawdling here, my letter won't be written, and my vases won't come. Fancy, Theodora, such delicious Sevres vases, big enough to hold the Forty Thieves, sky blue, with medallions of Mars and Venus, and Cupids playing tricks—the loveliest ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for some time. A pair of hands could be spared; if they remained in the business all the workers would be condemned to semi-idleness. The old man could stand nothing as little as what he called dawdling. The only thing that was lacking was that our hero should resist. He knew nothing of his brother's plans. The latter had wisely not initiated him into them, because he knew him too well to expect his support in a matter ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... Why are we dawdling? All the heads are up, Steepled on spikes above the Scottish Gate,— Some of ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... direction of St. Sylvester's, trying to work out his problem as he walked. He was not, however, so deep in thought that he had no eyes for the passers-by, and his attention was suddenly attracted by a servant-girl dawdling along the opposite pavement. He watched her keenly, but furtively, as if to make quite sure, and when she turned down a side street he followed, and speedily ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and going within are swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every one of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... scarcely left the roof of the house and got themselves down to the large, breezy, sparsely furnished parlor, ere the lazy, dawdling Indian ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... ecclesiastic" beat to arms. In view of the impending danger that their scattered fellow-countrymen might come into mutual fellowship on the basis of their common faith in Christ, the Lutheran leaders at Halle, who for years had been dawdling and haggling over the imploring entreaties of the shepherdless Lutheran populations in America, promptly reconsidered their non possumus, and found and sent a man admirably qualified for the desired work, Henry Melchior Muehlenberg, a man of eminent ability and judgment, of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... had quietly decided to get rid of him. From his point of view his poet had been a bad investment. Schiller had not kept his contract in the matter of the new play; he had done nothing but procrastinate and make excuses. 'Don Carlos' had not even been begun. There seemed to be no excuse for such dawdling, when a man like Iffland could always be relied upon to turn out a fairly acceptable play in a few weeks. No great wonder, therefore, that Dalberg lost faith in Schiller and concluded that he had exhausted his vein. Through a friend he suggested a ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... six rehearsals, a piece ran, as the saying is, twenty nights, leaving me all the mornings and three evenings in the week at my own disposal. Here we rush from place to place, at each place have to drill a new set of actors, and every night to act a different play; so that my days are passed in dawdling about cold, dark stages, with blundering actors who have not even had the conscience to study the words of their parts, all the morning. All the afternoon I pin up ribbons and feathers and flowers, and sort out ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... is so much in the way if he is dawdling about a house all day long. You would begin to regard me as a nuisance, Sheila, and would be for sending me to play croquet with those young Carruthers, merely that you might get the rooms dusted. Besides, you know I couldn't ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... there was no dawdling and putting off of the day's work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played with a free conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything connected with a newspaper, he would now pass by those on the hall-table with never so ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... it was no good dawdling; for her master was resolute and formidable. The room, like others in old-fashioned houses with thick walls, had a double door. He shut the one with a stern slam, and then the other; and though the honest maid loitered in the hall, and, indeed, placed ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... sandwich-box and sherry-flask, gives a final word of instruction to his groom, and then moves slowly off. A Roman meet is a little less business-like than the same thing elsewhere; there is a little more dawdling, a little more conversation when many ladies chance to have come to see the hounds throw off; otherwise it is not different from other meets. As for the Roman mountains, they are so totally unlike any other hills in the ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... enjoyed. She felt at once that for the present all was lost, that her only hope was to be allowed to remain in France. She made all her arrangements, therefore, so that affairs might proceed in her absence as much as possible as though she were present, and then prepared to set out. Dawdling day by day, she put off her departure as long as could be, and when at length she left Madrid only went to Alcala, a few leagues distant. She stopped there under various pretexts, and at length, after five weeks of delay, set out for Bayonne, journeying as slowly ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the flight of time; just as, in Dresden, I joyfully marked each sunset, as bringing me twenty-four hours nearer home and the boys. And now the boys are within reach; at a wish I could have them all round me; and still, in my thoughts, I hurry the slow days, and blame them for dawdling. With all their broad, gold sunshine, and their rainbow-colored flowers, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... writing to a youth who had obtained a situation and asked for his advice, gave him in reply this sound counsel: "Beware of stumbling over a propensity which easily besets you from not having your time fully employed—I mean what the women call DAWDLING. Your motto must be, Hoc age. Do instantly whatever is to be done, and take the hours of recreation after business, never before it. When a regiment is under march, the rear is often thrown into confusion because the front do not move steadily and without interruption. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... in advance for her departure this young lady received from Mrs. Touchett a telegram running as follows: "Leave Florence 4th June for Bellaggio, and take you if you have not other views. But can't wait if you dawdle in Rome." The dawdling in Rome was very pleasant, but Isabel had different views, and she let her aunt know she would immediately join her. She told Gilbert Osmond that she had done so, and he replied that, spending many of his summers as well as his winters in Italy, he himself would loiter a ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... truly must have been inspired, to act like the dove with the branch of the olive when I flew between them; and the eyes of Jose were blazing; and Senor Jack—" There came the smile again, and the dawdling of the brush while she thought of those two. So the pretty senora was forgotten, after all, and left to shiver over her mending in the prairie schooner because Teresita was a spoiled child with more hearts than it is good for a girl to ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... opposite opinions one hears about the condition of the poor. Some persons say that there is no distress, others that it cannot be greater. The fact is, the men were never better off, the women and children never so badly off. Every man can have enough to eat and too much to drink by dawdling about with a gun. As his home is cold and cheerless, when he is not on duty he lives at a pothouse. He brings no money to his wife and children, who consequently only just keep body and soul together by going to the national cantines, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was apparently a fool in her hands; and, whoever had the merit, the neutrality of England continued. That was, he repeats more than once, a most critical time for Russia; it was an object almost of life and death to the Czar to keep England dawdling in a state of actual though not avowed neutrality. It is, he argued, a matter of fact, that precisely this result was attained, and "I shall be slow to believe that Madame de Lieven did not deserve a great share of the glory (as you would think ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... train started, and there I sat in my glory till we got to Annapolis, just the sleepiest town, crowded full of the oldest houses and the slowest people that I ever saw in my born days. Some colored persons were dawdling around the depot, and a few lazy white folks passing down the street, stopped to look at us as we got out of the cars. Especially my white hat and double-breasted jacket seemed ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... lantern, bleary with a night of service, came dawdling up the side of the train, and the conductor hove in sight, watch in hand. "Four left Argenta on time," said he to the engineer. "What the mischief keeps her? She ought to have gone by five minutes ago. Who's ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... We are dawdling our time away very idly and pleasantly at a Mrs. Leishman's, Chase, Enfield, where, if you come a-hunting, we can give you cold meat and a tankard. Her husband is a tailor; but that, you know, does not make her one. I know a jailor ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... He remembered that the thought of the men at the wharves had been: "Who would know?" Willis had never heard that anybody had lost his place at the wharves on account of dawdling. What if August never was found out? Was it right to steal an hour, or half an hour, of his ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... shabby figure on the sofa, were the most dismal part of the interior at St Roque's Cottage, so far as it appeared to the external eye. But it is doubtful whether Mrs Fred, spiteful and useless, with her poor health, her selfish love, her utter unreason, dawdling over trifling matters which she never completed; or the three children, entirely unrespectful of father and mother, growing up amid that wonderful subversion of the ordinary rules of nature, with some loyalty to Nettie, but no reverence in them, were not as appalling ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... clothed not in white, but in decent black, ever mourning their lost glory. But we are in a perfect duck of a hotel, covered with Virginia creeper, and as close by as can be. We arrived this afternoon, and have had an hour or two of delightful dawdling in the Abbey. Soon we are to have an early dinner, which we shall bolt if necessary, so that we may go in again by moonlight, before the moon escapes. I have dressed quickly, because I wanted to begin a letter to you. I shan't have time to finish ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... called out another young woman from, the broad hammock in which she had been dawdling with half-alert ears through the foregoing conversation. "Spoken like a true Briton. What is ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... the thin old woman, who was propped up in bed, with some scarlet garment around her that made her resemble more than ever the cockatoo of which Sheila had thought on first seeing her. "Yes," said Sheila. "I want to see you alone: I can't bear him dawdling about a room, and staring at things, and saying nothing. Does he speak ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... of one. The Basin where the river widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more signs of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and then and smoked incessantly. And now even the low-lying foothills in which the elder Hunter had tried to see from homesick eyes a resemblance to the outguard of his own Cumberlands were no longer ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... nor the Frenchified Spaniards and Portuguese who gobble the guisillo madrileno at Don Jose's in the Rue Helder, nor the half-French Cossacks amid the potrokha in the Restaurant Cubat, nor the Orientals with the waxed moustachios and girlish waists who may be observed at moontide dawdling over their cafe a la Turque at Madame Louna Sonnak's. These are the Frenchmen of Paris no more than the habitues of Back Bay are the Americans of Boston, no more than the Americans ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... willingly followed by his group. If there is one pupil in the class whose ability to lead is so strong that the others are overshadowed, it is sometimes well to let the work be done by small groups who use the table turn about. This plan stimulates a wholesome rivalry and discourages dawdling. ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... tapestries. — Lay these mats and hangings by the windows, and at the tables for our feet, and take out the skillets of silver, and the golden cups we have, and our two flasks of wine. LAVARCHAM. What ails you? DEIRDRE — gathering up a dress. — Lay them out quickly, Lavarcham, we've no call dawdling this night. Lay them out quickly; I'm going into the room to put on the rich dresses and jewels have been sent from Emain. LAVARCHAM. Putting on dresses at this hour, and it dark and drenching with the weight of rain! ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... man, a confirmed valtudinarian, a day-dreamer, who had wasted away his life in dawdling and maundering over Simple Poetry, and sighing over his unhappy attachment; no child, no babe, was more thoroughly helpless ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... emptiness When the birds left in the fall. But to fill it came late butterflies, Dawdling flocks of brilliant things In clouds of scintillating beauty, Covering every bush and flower. As silently as they came did they disappear And in their place came the music Of the katydid and the cricket. Day and night the cheerful songs Of these tiny insects ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... woman's presence seemed to transform the house. She was no sooner installed than she took possession. That very morning she established her position, after a sharp but decisive battle with the airy "colored lady," who for some days had been dawdling about the house. The mammy had gauged her as soon as her sharp eyes ...
— Mam' Lyddy's Recognition - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... twenty-four hours, of their absurdity of pomp and circumstance—but only that they asked for company, once in a way, as they were so splendidly formed to give it, and that the best company, in a changed world, at the end of time, what could they hope it to be but just the lone, the dawdling person of taste, the visitor with a flicker of fancy, not to speak of a pang of pity, to spare for them? It was in the flicker of fancy, no doubt, that as I hung about the great top-most terrace in especial, and then again took my way ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the gate in the white railings at the front of the house, and went in at the opened doors. She had had leave given to choose out any books she wished to read, and to take them home with her; and it was just the sort of half- dawdling employment suited to her taste this afternoon. She mounted on the ladder to get to a particular shelf high up in dark corner of the room; and finding there some volume that looked interesting, she sate down on the step to read part of it. There ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony of dressing, dawdling, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... have you been reading, and what tastes of rare Authors have you to send me? I have read (as usual with me) but very little, what with looking at the sea with its crossing and recrossing ships, and dawdling with my nieces of an evening. Besides a book is to me what Locke says that watching the hour hand of a clock is to all; other thoughts (and those of the idlest and seemingly most irrelevant) will intrude between my vision and the written words: and then I have to read over again; ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... a few moments. I will try to tell you or rather to show you what she looked like, when I have ended my story. She enlightened me not a little. I saw how lame a thing my own journey was my leisurely dawdling back to my work. This girl came as it were on wings, with power in her heart and will, that would take no denial but God's. Her few words as we walked up and down the well-deck were words that burnt and ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... cigars, and pass his hours in that airy flower garden, making dashes every now and then at some splendid monster as it fluttered round his head. His example need not be followed by everyone; but it must be allowed that—at least as long as he was in his tree—he was neither dawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise harming himself, and perhaps his fellow creatures, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... wait; at a pinch, I could attend to Nmes in the rain. It was my belief that Aigues-Mortes was a little gem, and it is natural to desire that gems should have an opportunity to sparkle. This is an excursion of but a few hours, and there is a little friendly, familiar, dawdling train that will convey you, in time for a noonday breakfast, to the small dead town where the blest Saint Louis twice embarked for the crusades. You may get back to Nmes for dinner; the run is of about ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... said in a loud voice as he stepped on board. "I found them dawdling and gossiping in the street, forgetting altogether that you were waiting for your evening meal until they ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Milly could make nothing of the blurred canvas and was depressed. Jack seemed more intent on watching the lithe figure, with the mottled flesh tones, the steel-blue eyes, the mocking mouth than in putting brush to canvas. When Milly complained of his dawdling, the Baroness remarked with a curl of ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... probable that Mr. Woolsey declined this; for, as soon as he was gone, Walker, in a tremendous fury, began cursing his wife for dawdling three hours on the road. "Why the deuce, ma'am, didn't you take a cab?" roared he, when he heard she had walked to Bond Street. "Those writs have only been in half an hour, and I might have been off but ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was known to several. It is best you should know the truth. It is a common story enough in the history of the world; but whenever it happens, it is enough to make the misery of one man's life. I was not always what you have known me, Clarissa,—a worn-out machine, dawdling away the remnant of a wasted existence. I once had hopes and passions like the rest of mankind—perhaps more ardent than the most. Your mother was the loveliest and most fascinating woman I ever met, and from the hour of our first meeting I had but one thought—how I should ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... spoiled since he was ill. You mustn't mind his fidgets and dawdling ways. He'll get over them soon, and then I know you two will be ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D— at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive—but that is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... persons seem to think there is no middle course. In their enthusiasm for humanity, they forget that the brotherhood of man may be made as ridiculous as the eight-hour day. Between eight hours of the creative work of a Milton and eight hours of the dawdling done by a lazy housemaid, there is no relation save that both may be measured ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... popular of ministers in a town much visited by sick persons, with whom he was an especial favourite. I disliked him—and specially disliked his unpleasant behaviour to women. If I had been a woman, I should have spurned him for his perpetual insult of inane compliments. He was always dawdling after "the sex," which was one of his sweet phrases, and yet he was not passionate. Passion does not dawdle and compliment, nor is it nasty, as this fellow was. Passion may burn like a devouring flame; and in a few moments, like flame, may ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... see, is a great plague to you as well as me; for not only does it not bring me the grapes, but is the cause of your having this long dawdling letter. Why don't you show up its iniquities? What is a "Post" made and set up for, if not, among other things, to bear affiches testifying to the people of their wickedness? The express is the most slovenly ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... the regular master of the form was unwell, and they were to be heard by one of the new masters, quite a young man, who had only just left the university. Certainly it would be hard lines, if, by dawdling as much as possible in coming in and taking their places, entering into long-winded explanations of what was the usual course of the regular master of the form, and others of the stock contrivances of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... the Oberhof were briskly hurrying back and forth with skimming-spoons or forks between the various cooking-places. If the guests were to find the food palatable, there could not be any dawdling over the skimming and turning. For in the large kettle over the hearth eight hens lent strength to the soup, and in the other twenty-three or-four pots, kettles, and pans there were boiling or roasting six hams, three turkeys, and five pigs, besides ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... queer mood myself; rather a cruel mood, although the starting-point of my intention had been kind. I knew that my mood had something of cruelty in it, because I discovered that I was purposely dawdling over my dinner, in order to keep the man longer than necessary on the rack. Queer, the complexities one unearths in oneself. But probably if I had been an ordinary straightforward kind of fellow, I should never ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... genius—a boarding student who put in all her time with music—who sat for hours producing the most marvelous tones from instruments where other girls drew discords—who would sit all day at the piano, and not find the time long; and who spent her leisure in dawdling over sofas, or playing practical jokes on every one about her. She was a long-limbed, fair-haired girl, with a touch of wit from some remote ancestor who must have had O' tacked to his name, and a great inaptitude toward books. She could ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... typical example. Here the dramatist sketches a tragic incident arising from the conflict of two social classes, the petty tradesmen and the nobility. From the coarse environment of the first emerge honest, upright natures like Krasnov; from the superficial, dawdling culture of the second come weak-willed triflers like Babayev. The sordid plot sweeps on to its inevitable ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... college boys by a similar program were metamorphosed, almost at over-night, into capable army officers, had the same effect. How signally had the schools failed! And these long years spent in school and college, "dawdling over the frills," had been to no effect, whereas "a few weeks under ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... 29. After breakfast, Mrs. and Miss Thrale took me to Widget's, the milliner and library-woman on the Steyn. After a little dawdling conversation, Captain Fuller came in to have a little chat. He said he had just ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... ship was in, and he could afford the big hotel, it had no charms. He hated the women dawdling in its alleys, the men smoking in its corridors, the whole idle crowd, lunching ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... leave her, and remained to help her. Just as they were going down at last, they met Mrs. Langford on her way up with inquiries for poor Mary. She would have almost been better pleased with a slight indisposition than with dawdling; but she kindly accepted Henrietta's apologies, and there was one exclamation of joy from all the assembled party at ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... us awfully cheerful," said Major Hunt, when dinner was over, and they were dawdling over coffee. "Stella and I were feeling rather down on our luck, I believe, when you appeared, and now we've forgotten all about it. Do you always behave like this, ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... Dawdling in steamer chairs and looking upon the Michigan shore sat little mother of the country and big son of the city. The woman—the blessed silver-haired creature—forgot herself, and talked to the son as a crony. ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo |
