"Disused" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had steadily diminished, instead of increasing, till they had become so powerless and utterly insignificant that, since the year 1615, they had never once been convened. Not only had they been wholly disused, but they seemed to have been wholly forgotten. During the last two reigns no one had ever mentioned their name; much less had any wish been expressed for their resuscitation, till the financial difficulties ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... buckler. More were frightened than hurt, more hurt than killed therewith, it being accounted unmanly to strike beneath the knee. But since that desperate traitor Rowland Yorke first introduced thrusting with rapiers, sword and buckler are disused.' In The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, a comedy, printed in 1599, we have a pathetic complaint: 'Sword and buckler fight begins to grow out of use. I am sorry for it; I shall never see good manhood ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... road, along which for hundreds of years rolled to and fro the tide of martial life between London and the great Sea Gate of the Realm, lies near by, silent and almost disused. Mr. Balfour's land, on the brow of Hindhead, is enclosed but not yet built upon, although a whole archipelago of cottages and villas is springing up amid the heather as the ground slopes towards Selborne—White's Selborne—that ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... shrubberies, which lay at the back of the holly hedge that surrounded the little enclosed garden outside the library, beyond the. end of the battlements, and reached by a disused footpath, a great tree stood upon the edge of the steep hillside and thrust its sweeping ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... daughter of the principal robber-clan of the district. His official position gave him the means of doing many little kindnesses to his new relations, and with their concurrence he arranged to gladden Charteris's eye on his return by the spectacular destruction of an old disused fortress, the clan's headquarters being transferred to a larger post in a more sequestered district. Unfortunately, in following up a raid, Charteris tracked the raiders to their lair, and as they thought their kinsman-in-law had betrayed them, and retaliated by informing on him, ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... in which Osmond Waymark taught was situated in "a pleasant suburb of southern London" (Brixton, to wit); had its "spacious playground and gymnasium" (the former a tolerable back-yard, the latter a disused coach-house); and, as to educational features, offered, at the choice of parents and guardians, either the solid foundation desirable for those youths predestined to a commercial career, or the more liberal training adapted to minds of a professional bias. Anything further in the way of information ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... is obviously a subdivision of the novel of life and manners. But, dealing as it does with remote ages, with forgotten opinions and long-disused customs, it has to reconstruct where the novel of contemporary life has only to illustrate. Strict historical accuracy can hardly be expected in fiction concerned with the past. The details of life, always difficult to seize, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... to her, to be near her, as something very new, captivating and full of interest—that was all. No one else within his sphere could talk so well. The Rector was very great indeed on the reredos question, and the necessity of reviving the disused "Church" customs; but Reginald could not go so far as he did as to the importance of the reredos, and was quite in doubt whether it was not as well for most people to "direct" themselves by their own consciences as to be directed by the spiritual head of the parish, who was not over wise ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... end in the middle of the garden, and waited to see how it would fall. It pointed directly down the moonlit road that leads to the City of Dreadful Night. The sound of its fall disturbed a hare. She limped from her form and ran across to a disused Mahomedan burial-ground, where the jawless skulls and rough-butted shank-bones, heartlessly exposed by the July rains, glimmered like mother o' pearl on the rain-channelled soil. The heated air and the heavy earth had driven the very dead ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... thus brought together were like one family, and still called the new Bishop by the never disused abbreviation that recalled his home. He was the guest of the now retired Chief Justice and Lady Martin, who were occupying themselves in a manner probably unique in the history of law and lawyers, by taking charge of the native school at ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of modern manufacture, and far more magnificent, as to brightness of color and material beauty, than the ancient ones; but yet they looked vulgar, glaring, and impertinent in comparison, because such revivals or imitations of a long-disused art cannot have the good faith and earnestness of the originals. Indeed, in the very coloring, I felt the same difference as between heart's blood and a scarlet dye. It is a pity, however, that the old windows cannot be washed, both inside and out, for now they ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Goderich Court, and ask the porter to admit him to a sight of the finest collection of armour in the world. We are not going to dive into these matters; we will rather say roundly, that ever since armour came to be disused, we think military men have gone clean daft in equipping themselves. Only look at the uniforms of the campaigns of the Grand Monarque or William of Orange; see what inconvenient coats those glorious fellows that won Blenheim and Ramilies wore; recollect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... change seems to have come over Chinese custom, since the Middle Ages, in regard to the disposal of the dead. Cremation is now entirely disused, except in two cases; one, that of the obsequies of a Buddhist priest, and the other that in which the coffin instead of being buried has been exposed in the fields, and in the lapse of time has become decayed. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... enormous length of time during which these animals have lived in the depths of the sea, never using their hind feet in seizing objects, their disused feet have wholly disappeared, as also their skeleton, and even the pelvis ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... a point of some technical interest to be noted in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, The Doctor's Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the attention ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... route I spoke of," said Stephens. "I remember marking it upon the map I made for you, Miss Adams. Baedeker says that it has been disused on account of the cessation of all trade which followed the rise of the Dervishes, but that it used to be the main road by which the skins and gums of Darfur found their way ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The hand or muscle disused withers in power. The fishes of the Mammoth Cave, having no use for their eyes, lose them. Mr. Darwin in an impressive passage of his biography testifies that he began life with a taste for poetry and music, but that by disuse this aesthetic taste grew atrophied ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... the shore pell-mell and some hurried to the barn for the only means of rescue—an old disused skiff and a leaky, discarded canoe. Others gazed in wistful silence out upon the ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a Cornish farmer who, returning home one dark and misty night, struck across the moorland, every yard of which he knew, in order to avoid a long tramp by road. In one place there were a number of disused mine-shafts; the railing which had once protected them had rotted away, and it had been no one's business to see that it was renewed—some few had been filled up, but many of them were hundreds of feet deep, and entirely ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is where I live," she said, pointing to a large and sever structure whose walls had plainly not been whitewashed for many long years. "It's an old disused convent, built by the Good Duke Alfred. Wasn't ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden, and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an Eden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow—quite the most extraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously, daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... way of the churchyard. In passing the tower he thought of what she had said about the sergeant's virtuous habit of entering the church unperceived at the beginning of service. Believing that the little gallery door alluded to was quite disused, he ascended the external flight of steps at the top of which it stood, and examined it. The pale lustre yet hanging in the north-western heaven was sufficient to show that a sprig of ivy had grown from the wall across the door to a length of more than a foot, delicately tying ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... September 14th the brigade reached the battlefield and deployed in an old disused road that crossed the mountain some four hundred yards to the right of the turn-pike. No enemy in sight. Failing to drive D.H. Hill from their front, the Federals made a detour and approached him by the flank. Two hundred yards from the road mentioned above ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... investigations; the more and more do they lose the power, not only of independent thought, but even of understanding the fresh human thought of others, which lies beyond the bounds of their Talmud. But the principal thing is, that they pass their best years in getting disused to life; they grow accustomed to consider their position as justifiable; and they convert themselves physically into utterly useless parasites, and mentally they dislocate their brains and become mental eunuchs. And in precisely the same ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... understood to be very ridiculous, really interesting and affecting. It is deemed a misfortune amongst our friends, that the practice of printing the Speaker's speeches on this occasion in the journals is now disused. Grenville's speeches would have done him the highest credit, as well as afforded an excellent precedent to future Speakers. I have prevailed with Mr. Speaker to mount his wig, and the whole apparatus to-day: he must consider this ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... the matter of that; at least none were likely to discover me, as I could easily see, by the rust of the chain and he grass-grown edges, that the well had been long disused. Now the position was far from being pleasant. There stood the farm-house, full of soldiers, the muskets ranging over every approach to where I lay. Of my comrades, there was nothing to be seen, they had either missed the way or retreated: and so time crept on, and I pondered ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... obstructive edges of the centre-board case. A medley of damp tins of varied sizes showed in the gloom, exuding a mouldy odour. Faded legends on dissolving paper, like the remnants of old posters on a disused hoarding, spoke of soups, curries, beefs, potted meats, and other hidden delicacies. I picked out a tongue, re-imprisoned the odour, and explored for beer. It was true, I supposed, that bilge didn't hurt it, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the society, from its first appearance, has disused those names of the months and days, which having been given in honor of the heroes or false gods of the heathen, originated in their flattery or superstition; and the custom of speaking to a single person in the plural number, as having arisen also from motives ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... bee-keeper. If the woods in any given locality are deficient in trees with suitable cavities, the bees resort to all kinds of makeshifts; they go into chimneys, into barns and outhouses, under stones, into rocks, and so forth. Several chimneys in my locality with disused flues are taken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every season. One day, while bee-hunting, I developed a line that went toward a farmhouse where I had reason to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up and questioned ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... on the edge of evening, when the lighted street-lamps were yet too pale to show distinctly, that he passed the disused boarded shop and saw, on the side of the street opposite, the babu who had brought him the story of riot that afternoon. He stopped his carriage and stepped out. On second thought he ordered the carriage away, for he was in plain clothes and not likely to attract notice; ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... enterprise was the project of a few choice spirits only. It was too perilous to confide to many. The disused cellar was chosen as the avenue of escape. It was never visited, and might be used with safety. But how to get there was a difficult question to solve. And how to hide the fact that men were absent ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... mined in the Radstock district, and iron used to be obtained from the Brendons, though operations now seem to have ceased, and the mineral railway which brought the ore to Watchet for shipment is now disused. Quarries are numerous. The Mendips in the N., Street in the centre, and Ham Hill in the S., all afford plenty of material for the stone mason. There are large breweries at Shepton, Oakhill, Frome, and Wiveliscombe. Paper is made at Wookey, furniture is manufactured ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... officer of the watch. Maclean's next business was to bury the dead, which done, he searched the ship. He made two discoveries: He found in the captain's cabin a chest containing no less than fifteen thousand golden rubles; and locked away in one of the disused bathrooms astern, inhumanly disposed of in a tub, the silent form of Captain Brandon. But the tough little bulldog of an Englishman was by no means dead, and when some three days later the ghost of what ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... it had been a grand mansion once, before the days of the Revolution, and had probably been the residence of some of the stiff old worthies whose portraits hung in dreary dignity in the disused dusty galleries of the chateau, which now, turned into a citadelle, stood upon a high point of the cliffs commanding the town. The term rambling might well be applied to this house, for in its eccentric ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the second was the Doctor's consulting-room, used also as the dining-room; the third, changingly speckled by the rustle of the plane-tree in the yard, was the Doctor's bedroom, and there, in a corner, stood the disused shoemaker's bench and tray of tools, much as it had stood on the fifth floor of the dismal house by the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl—Gertrude had found a disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle revival—while their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... among the young men of fashion, at that great sale of the imperial wardrobes) a toga, of altogether lost hue and texture. He wore it with a grace which became the leader of a thrilling movement then on foot for the restoration of that disused garment, in which, laying aside the customary evening dress, all the visitors were requested to appear, setting off the delicate sinuosities and well-disposed "golden ways" of its folds, with harmoniously tinted flowers. The opulent sunset, blending ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... himself. The sacrificer not only fled, but fasted and mourned. It is possible that, as among the Aztecs, the victim was regarded as also an embodiment of the God, but this is not certain, the rite having long been disused. Mr. Grinnell got the description from a very old Skidi. There was also a festival of thanks to Ti-ra-wa for corn. During a sacred dance and hymn the corn is held up to the Ruler by a woman. Corn is ritually called 'The ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... future of sorts but also in a lurking benignancy somewhere. Stimulated myself in this way, even although I was approaching a rehearsal of a revue, I came suddenly in the King's Road upon that disused burial-ground opposite the Six Bells, and was aware that, sitting there on seats facing the road, in white aprons and caps, with shawls over their shoulders, were five of the saddest old ladies I have ever seen—occupants, I presume, of a neighbouring workhouse. There they sat, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combination of words. When the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions; as any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... go to the Tredgold College, because as yet the College had not settled down for the session. She was supposed to be reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled into the vegetable garden, and having taken up a position upon the staging of a disused greenhouse that had the double advantage of being hidden from the windows of the house and secure from the sudden appearance of any one, she resumed the reading of Mr. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... this now far advanced dropping of miracles by modern apologetics from their ancient use as evidences of a supernatural Revelation. We are not ignorant of the law, which holds throughout the material, the mental, and the moral realms, that disuse tends to atrophy and extinction. Disused organs cease to exist, as in the eyeless cave-fish. For centuries the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus was serviceable for confirmation of his claim to be the Son of God. In the address of the angel of the annunciation to Mary that claim is expressly rested on the miraculous ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... division of these same Institutes into four books, comprising the first elements of the whole science of law. In these the law previously obtaining has been briefly stated, as well as that which after becoming disused has been again brought to light by our imperial aid. Compiled from all the Institutes of our ancient jurists, and in particular from the commentaries of our Gaius on both the Institutes and the common ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... be seen. Neither was MacDonald. There seemed to be no one. The day shift were going back in the tunnels below. The windlass handle hung prone as a disused well. It had not flown back broken. The cable had been cut. Then, he heard a groan. It was Calamity lying on her face at the foot of the windlass, weeping and reaving her hair. Stretched on the grass a few paces back from the windlass with two bloody bullet ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... visited, but we were interested in the remains of a ducking-stool in the crypt of the church, although it was far from being complete, the only perfect one of which we knew being that in the Priory Church of Leominster, which reposed in a disused aisle of the church, the property of the Corporation of that town. It was described as "an engine of universal punishment for common scolds, and for butchers, bakers, brewers, apothecaries, and all who give short measure, or vended adulterated articles of food," and was ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... and France. There was not a single full-sized galley at Sal[e] in 1634, and accounts a hundred years later agree that the Sal[e] rovers had but insignificant vessels, and very few of them, while their docks were practically disused, in spite of abundance of timber. In the latter part of the eighteenth century there seems to have been an increase in the depredations of the Sal[e] pirates, which probably earned them their exaggerated reputation. At that time they had vessels of thirty and ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... lately—well, did you observe what happened? It was given out that everybody was to declare where he lodged on a particular night. But were the census-papers distributed among the homeless? No—all those who live in sheds and outhouses, or on the Common, or in newly erected buildings, or in the disused manure-pits of the livery stables—they have no home, and consequently were not counted in the census. That was cleverly managed, you know; they simply don't exist! Otherwise there would be a very unpleasant item on the list—the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... celestial spheres to confirm this news, and as Baliardo, overjoyed, is conversing with him strains of music are heard to herald the arrival of the lunar potentates. All repair to an ancient gallery, long disused, whence the sound proceeds, and here, indeed, a pageant has been secretly arranged. The room is discovered to be richly adorned with costly hangings and pictures, ablaze with lights, and presently, after various masqueraders have appeared dressed as the astronomers Keplair and Galileus, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... own grandeur, not for the defence of their degenerate allies. They sent intelligence to Saxony of the fertility and riches of Britain; and represented as certain the subjection of a people so long disused to arms, who, being now cut off from the Roman empire, of which they had been a province during so many ages, had not yet acquired any union among themselves, and were destitute of all affection to their new liberties and of all national attachments and regards [i]. The vices and ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... galleys by the name of Liburnians, and observes that they were as swift (without explaining the difference between them) as the vessels with fifty oars; but that they were far inferior in speed to the triremes, which had been long disused. Yet he reasonably concludes, from the testimony of Polybius, that galleys of a still larger size had been constructed in the Punic wars. Since the establishment of the Roman empire over the Mediterranean, the useless art of building large ships of war had probably ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... that grey storehouse, fallen to dust and rotten, Lay piled the traps and engines of forgotten greed, The tomes of codes and canons, long disused, forgotten, The robes and sacred books of ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... deadly cannonade continues, but amid it all, the dead General, buried in a disused ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... belong to me, but to our King's daughter, the Princess Dunya." "What be thy monthly wages?" asked the Wazir and he answered, "One diner and no more." Then the Minister looked round about the garden and, seeing in its midst a pavilion tall and grand but old and disused, said to the keeper, "O elder, I am minded to do here a good work, by which thou shalt remember me. Replied the other, "O my lord, what is the good work thou wouldest do?" "Take these three hundred diners," rejoined the Wazir When the Keeper heard speak of the gold, he said, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... there is little to repay a nearer examination. It is far otherwise with the Abbey of Saint Peter, whose apse, though on a far smaller scale, is distinctly more skilfully managed than that of the cathedral. The disused collegiate church of Saint Andrew has some good Transitional work, and Saint Martin-in-the-Vale, just outside the town, is a gem of bold and simple Romanesque. But the secondary churches of Chartres ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... failed him. Though the words came fluently, his long-disused vocal chords were unequal to the strain of measured speech. He asked hoarsely for some hot water. When Courtenay next came across him in the saloon he was asleep, and changed so greatly by the removal of pigments from his face that ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... by little, his rule had been growing as hard and cruel as that of a medieval tyrant could be. The dungeons were reopened which had long been closed; the torture chamber, long disused, was refitted, as it had been in the dreadful days of King Stephen; the defences had been looked to, the weapons furbished, for, as a war horse sniffs battle afar off, ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... with a solemn, wordless thankfulness. Then, when the imminent danger was passed, the Government went rapidly to work to improve the obstruction and strengthen the battery at Drewry's Bluff. This became a permanent fort, admirably planned and armed with navy guns, worked by the seamen of the disused vessels. The Federals stuck to the name they first gave it—Fort Darling—for no reason, perhaps, but because of the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... water, and set off with her for the schoolhouse. Except for her draggled tail, she already looks wonderfully composed, and so long as the frost holds I shall have little difficulty in keeping her with me. On Sunday I found a frozen sparrow, whose heart had almost ceased to beat, in the disused pig-sty, and put him for warmth into my breast-pocket. The ungrateful little scrub bolted without a word of thanks about ten minutes afterwards to the alarm of my cat, which had not known ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... Smith coming to school, and crying that she should be late and must run, the little maid picked up her paraphernalia (not forgetting the red bergamot), and fled down the lane. And Jack, with equal haste, snatched up the tell-tale heap of flowers and threw them into a disused pig-sty, where it was unlikely that Daddy Darwin would go to look for ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... an hour I paced the passage without or wandered through the back door into the neglected garden, which I found abutted on a disused graveyard—a very common object, met with often in startlingly unlikely places in ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... here on the west coast, where they could exploit, so to speak, the land, and try with the newer machinery some of the old neglected workings. Now, I am instructed that you have on your estate one of these disused mines, and my company, for whom I act, are willing to run the risk of trying if anything can be made of it with the modern appliances. You see I am quite frank with you, sir. In other words, they are desirous of becoming the purchasers of your little ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... sofa in the parlour, after she had persuaded little Mary into eating her long-delayed dinner of some mutton hastily minced for her, and had seen her safely asleep and cuddling a kitten. Mrs Pearson was only too happy to have the baby to occupy her long-disused wicker cradle, and Tirzah had rushed off to the scene of action as soon as she had seen ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place, among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He looked down from the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have been long disused. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world. There was no sign of the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in against the wall ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shut in on the north by tall hills and moors, and lies on the way to nowhere. It is almost wholly an agricultural town, and has a curious humped bridge, right in the middle of the town, where men stand about on market days and discuss the price of bullocks. It has two churches—one, disused, on a precipitous spur above the town, surrounded by an amazingly irregular sort of churchyard, full, literally, to bursting (the Kirkbys lie there, generation after generation of them, beneath pompous tombs), and the other church a hideous rectangular building, ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... a distance the men chanted in chorus, giving rhythmic time to the motions of the dancers and telling in the long-disused words the story of the drama. And the drums beat till their rolling thunder resounded far ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... from the school. A basket ball court took up most of the floor space. A balcony for spectators ran around three sides of the room. Every possible device hung from the ceiling, rings, ladders, trapezes and horizontal bars, but for the most part, these were dusty and disused. ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... leaves of the trees; on all sides were the variegated blue clusters of vetch, the golden cups of bloodwort, and the half-lilac, half-yellow blossoms of the heart's-ease. In some places near the disused paths, on which the tracks of wheels were marked by streaks on the fine bright grass, rose piles of wood, blackened by wind and rain, laid in yard-lengths; there was a faint shadow cast from them in slanting oblongs; there was no other ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... projecting window, her own house was at right angles on her left, the street in question plunged steeply downwards in front of her, and to her right she commanded an uninterrupted view of its further course which terminated in the disused graveyard surrounding the big Norman church. Anything of interest about the church, however, could be gleaned from a guide-book, and Miss Mapp did not occupy herself much with such coldly venerable topics. Far more to her mind was the fact that between the ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... while I had outgrown all dogmas and thrown aside all recognised forms of religion. So strong were my feelings on this point, that I would not have married any woman who still clung to the worn-out and (by me) disused traditions; but I fancy that I have succeeded in converting you to my views, and that our ideas upon religion are now practically identical. ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... now making tea for me. I have been in my gown ever since I came here. It was, at my first coming, quite new and handsome. I have swum thrice, which I had disused for many years. I have proposed to Vansittart, climbing over the wall, but he has refused me. And I have clapped my hands till they are sore, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... her bed, she opened the door, wheeled in the davenport, shut it in, turned the big rusty key with both hands and a desperate effort, then repairing to her own little inner room, disturbed the honourable retirement of the last and best-beloved of her dolls in a pink-lined cradle in a disused doll's house, and laying the key beneath the mattress, felt heroically ready for the thumbscrew rather than yield it up. She knew Armine would say she was right, and be indignant that Janet should meddle with mother's private stores. So she turned over on the pillow, cooled by the morning ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hall. Light was admitted above these walls, which measured about half the height of the columns and were interrupted at the centre by a curious doorway cut through their whole height and without any lintel. Long disused types of capital were revived and others greatly elaborated; and the wall-reliefs were arranged in bands and panels with a regularity and symmetry rather Greek ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... heard that disused railway-cars were convertible into sea-side cottages. But the news had not fired my imagination nor protruded in my memory. To-day, as an eye-witness of the accomplished fact, I was impressed, sharply enough, and I went nearer to the crescent, drawn by a sort of dreadful fascination. I found ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... a series of apartments on the right, hastily fitted with accommodations for arranging and completing their toilet; while others, who took no part in the intended drama, were ushered to the left, into a large, unfurnished, and long disused dining parlour, where a sashed door opened into the gardens, crossed with yew and holly hedges, still trimmed and clipped by the old grey-headed gardener, upon those principles which a Dutchman thought worthy of commemorating in a didactic poem upon ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... cuts off more than two miles of bad road for him—road that's just being made. I thought you'd rather like a stroll through the bamboo grove, which everybody admires so much. The only part of the walk that will be hot is going across a bit of disused pasture land. But we'll take green-lined parasols. I have a lot of them about the house, for visitors. We ought to start by two-thirty; and by three-fifteen, with the motor, we can be coming in sight of the Lucky Star Gusher, like a huge black geyser. ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... absolutely commonplace. But now the greenish powder comes upon the scene. The source of that greenish powder seems, unfortunately, lost. Master Whibble tells a tortuous story of finding it done up in a packet in a disused limekiln near the Downs. It would have been an excellent thing for Plattner, and possibly for Master Whibble's family, if a match could have been applied to that powder there and then. The young gentleman certainly did not bring it to school in a packet, but in a common ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... was now disused and partly dilapidated, but many wonderful tales existed among the neighboring habitans of a secret passage that communicated with the vaults of the Chateau; but no one had ever seen the passage—still less been bold enough to explore it had they found ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of the bank the road ran out into the fog, which was thicker on this side. She walked along it and was lost to Margot's incurious eyes. Here it was utterly deserted: since the bridge had been blown up the road had become disused and only the few who passed over by Margot's boat ever found their way across these fields. She strayed along by the road's edge and could distinguish the blanched ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Norman pillars and arches preserved from the rebuilding craze that despoiled Yorkshire of half its ecclesiastical antiquities. Making our way along the riverside to Grosmont, we come to the enormous heaps above the pits of the now disused iron-mines. This was the birthplace of the Cleveland Ironworks, and Grosmont was at one time more famous than Middlesbrough. The first cargo of ironstone was sent from here in 1836, when the Pickering and Whitby Railway ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... the lead now. Jack was content to play "second fiddle," as he called it. As Paul had gone through the disused canal in his canoe, exploring it pretty thoroughly, he must act ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... be reputed clement, suffers those to live whose conduct he himself abhors. Where is that L. Cassius, whose name I vainly inherit? Where is that Marcus,—not Aurelius, mark you, but Cato Censorius? Where the good old discipline of ancestral times, long since indeed disused, but now not so much as looked after in our aspirations? Marcus Antoninus is a scholar; he enacts the philosopher; and he tries conclusions upon the four elements, and upon the nature of the soul; and he discourses learnedly upon the Honestum; and concerning the Summum Bonum ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... little farce, containing the humours of the Duke of Newcastle and his man Stone. The first event was a squabble between his grace and the Sheriff about holding up the head on the scaffold—a custom that has been disused, and which the Sheriff would not comply with, as he received no order in writing. Since that, the Duke has burst ten yards of breeches strings(1360) about the body, which was to be sent into Scotland; but it seems it is customary for vast numbers ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... any road, was not more than a mile from the Blooms-End cottages occupied by Fairway, Sam, Humphrey, and the Cantles. Moreover, fifty yards off stood a hut, built of clods and covered with thin turves, but now entirely disused. The simple outline of the lonely shed was visible, and thither he determined to direct his steps. As soon as he arrived he laid her down carefully by the entrance, and then ran and cut with his pocketknife an ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... disobeyed their laws, their administration was a farce and its disappearance called for in the interest of public safety. Accordingly it would be removed to the great garret of history, to lie side by side with innumerable other disused plans for ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... are yet alive; elderly women residing in Bradford. They retain a faithful and fond recollection of Charlotte, and speak of her unvarying kindness from the "time when she was ever such a little child!" when she would not rest till she had got the old disused cradle sent from the parsonage to the house where the parents of one of them lived, to serve for a little infant sister. They tell of one long series of kind and thoughtful actions from this early period to the last weeks of Charlotte Bronte's life; and, though ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... purposely or by accident made a movement which produced a prompt and instinctive reaction. Murray's fist met him as he rose, met him so squarely and with such force that he lost all interest in what followed. The other card-players silently gathered Mr. Denny in their arms and stretched him upon a disused roulette table; the bartender appeared with a wet towel and began to ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... Eaux an additional sorrow came upon her. Halfway up, on the right-hand side of the path, the wall was hollowed out, and here there was an excavation, some disused well, enclosed by a railing. During the last two days when passing she had heard the wailings of a cat rising from this well, and now, as she slowly climbed the path, these wailings were renewed, but so pitifully that they seemed instinct with the agony of death. The thought that ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... only two hours later, and just before midnight. I had had the man removed to a disused cabin, and when I got there the door was locked. Angrily I went on deck ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... with the sun. When dressed she drew a letter from a secret casket with manifold precautions as though she were surrounded with prying eyes, and, placing it in her reticule, hastened forth to seek the little lonely disused churchyard by the shore. She afterwards remarked that she could never forget in what agitation of spirits and with what strange presentiment of evil she was led to this activity at so unwonted an hour. The truth ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... steps of the educated animal which drew them, enabled them to go where anything else would flounder. The trail which they left upon the prairie was deeply cut, and remained for many years after they were disused. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... islanders believe to lie in wait in the ordinary passage."[766] Again, in Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, the corpses of children "must not be carried out of a door or window, but through a new or disused opening, in order that the evil spirit which causes the disease may not enter. The belief is that the Heavenly Dog which eats the sun at an eclipse demands the bodies of children, and that if they are denied to him he will bring certain calamity on the household."[767] ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... As time went on, the western porch beneath the tower was disused as a public entrance. The principal entrance of most churches is on the south side, west of the centre of the aisle wall, and is usually covered by a porch. There is a Saxon example of this at Bishopstone in Sussex, where, as at Bradford, room seems to have been left ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... the advantages of the new manager's energy, backed as he was in every respect by the owner. The work as laid down by the government inspector was carried out, and Mr. Brook having bought up for a small sum the disused Logan mine, in which several of the lower seams of coal were still unworked, the opening between the pits was made permanent, and the Logan shaft became the upcast to the Vaughan, thus greatly simplifying the ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... "They were at first designed to accommodate individuals, and laid out from house to house," and thus the traveller found himself quite as often landed in a farm-yard, as at the point aimed for. All about are traces of disused ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... put her together again above the falls, and so sail on up the old waterway to the South Sea and to the Indies. But the exploring spirit of the race is not what it used to be, and we simply ran Gadabout into a slip beside the disused canal and stopped. An anchor went plump into the water, making a wave-circle that spread and spread till it filled the whole basin—a great round water-period to end ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... retreat and storehouse for stuff that it was necessary to conceal. No one knew of it save Bough Van Busch and the draggle-tailed woman. It was in the great stone-built chimney of the disused, half-ruined farmhouse kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared by the stout hands of the old voortrekkers of 1836, its walls, three feet in thickness, embracing the wide hearth about which the family life of the homestead had concentrated ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... may be visited. The Whirlpool, between the waters of the lake and river, has been called O'Sullivan's Punch Bowl. Drohid-na-Brickeen, "The Bridge of Little Trout," or Brickeen Bridge, and Doolah, where the disused marble quarries and copper mines are still pointed out, are within a short distance. At the estuary of the Devil's Stream, which flows through the ravines on the mountain side, is the Devil's Island—almost inaccessible—on which a few stunted ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... you, but it's so. Bells formerly played quite an important part in the forbidden science. The art of predicting the future with their sounds is one of the least known and most disused branches of the occult. Gevingey had dug up some documents, and wished to verify ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... precept; a soft luxurious course of habitual indulgence, is the practice of the bulk of modern Christians: and that constant moderation, that wholesome discipline of restraint and self-denial, which are requisite to prevent the unperceived encroachments of the inferior appetites, seem altogether disused, as the exploded austerities ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... the expense of the government than at their own. It was probably out of complaisance to this great company, that the government agreed to render this law perpetual. Should the custom of weighing gold, however, come to be disused, as it is very likely to be on account of its inconveniency; should the gold coin of England come to be received by tale, as it was before the late recoinage this great company may, perhaps, find that they have, upon this, as upon some other occasions, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... more ascend the hill and make our way along an old, disused road, probably an ancient British track, in preference to keeping to the highway—in the first place because it is by far the shortest, and secondly because we intend to go somewhat out of our way to inspect two ancient barrows, the resting-place of the chiefs of old, of whom Ossian (or was it Macpherson?)[5] ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... of the courtyard a fountain issuing from the wall had once poured its water through a lion's head into a vast tank of moss-grown granite. But it had been disused for some time, and the pipe in the lion's mouth was dry. The tank, however, was more than half full of water, which, during the late untenanting of the castle, had turned foul and stagnant. To drown Lanciotto ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... exist these two forces—and our souls are, so to speak, placed on guard between them. The one set of atoms is prepared to maintain the equilibrium of health and life, but if through the neglect and unwatchfulness of the sentinel Soul any of them are allowed to become disused and effete, the other set, whose business it is to disintegrate whatever is faulty and useless for the purpose of renewing it in better form, begins to work—and this disintegrating process is our conception of decay and death. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... had quite a menagerie in the way of pets. They kept them in a disused stable, in neat cages with wire fronts, most of which had been made by Ralph and Leonard. There were silky-haired, lop-eared rabbits, that could be hugged in small arms without offering any remonstrances; ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... beneath the West End of London was rediscovered in our own time when the foundations for the Carlton Hotel and his Majesty's Theatre were laid. It is a network of old cellars, subterranean passages and, it may even be, of disused conduits, extended from the corner of Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, away to the confines of St. James' Park—and, as more daring explorers aver, to the river Thames itself. Here is a very town of tunnels ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... was wide and cold, and, oh, so clean—"fearful clean," thought the new pupil with a sigh, as she stepped gingerly over the polished oilcloth and gazed awesomely at spotless wood and burnished brass. The drawing-room had none of the splendour of that disused apartment at Knock Castle, but it was bright and home-like, with an abundance of pretty cushions and tablecloths, a scent of spring flowers in the air, and a fire dancing cheerily in the grate. Pixie's prejudices ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the present day. Even the flower vases which formerly adorned the table, and the more decorative dishes used for fancy sweetmeats and confections, have changed, leaving in the process many of the older pieces, relegated to the store-cupboard, where disused glass so often remains until in due time it is rescued from oblivion by the collector of household curios. Among the eighteenth-century cut glass jugs and trifle bowls are many beautiful vessels, for the making of which certain ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... moneys and the better part of his clothes by a gang of ruffians who had followed him out of the town. Then a good woman—the old wife, turned into the servant of a Moor who had married a young one—had taken pity on his condition and given him a disused Moorish jellab. His misfortune had not been without its advantage. Being forced to travel the rest of his way home in the disguise of a Moor, he had heard himself discussed by his own people when they knew nothing of his presence. Every evil that had befallen them had been attributed ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... too manifest; but Mr. Featherston silenced them, and proposed to Father O'Flaherty to accompany him to the investigation of the mystery. Accordingly they solemnly proceeded towards the scene of alarm, the 'Squire having provided himself with a long-disused sword which hung over his mantel-piece, and the priest, more spiritually, brandishing his cross, and muttering "Vade retro, Satanas!" and such other exorcisms as occurred to him on the way. The whole body of ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... about them, giving protection to the varied industries of the homestead, illustrate the most perfect type of family life. Each member had a share in the day's work, therefore to each it was home. To the old homestead many a successful business man returns to show his grandchildren the attic with its disused loom and spinning-wheel; the shop where farm-implements were made, in the days of long winter storms, to the accompaniment of legend and gossip; the dairy, no longer redolent of cream. These are reminders of ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... familiar horn was heard the children would bring out their stores, and trade as best they could with the itinerant merchant, with the result that the closets which in our towns to-day have become the receptacles of all kinds of, disused lumber were kept then swept and garnished. Now, what I want to know is why can we not establish on a scale commensurate with our extended needs the rag-and-bone industry in all our great towns? That ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... a nation in mourning, and have, as I said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class, except a small part of the resident titled nobility (a great part of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of the city ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... us is called Ellersdeane Hollow," he remarked. "It's not just one depression, you see—it's a tract of unenclosed land. It's dangerous to cross, except by the paths—it's honeycombed all over with disused lead-mines—some of the old shafts are a tremendous depth. All the same, you see, there's some tinker chap, or some gipsies, camped out down there and got a fire. That old ruin, up on the crag there, is called Ellersdeane Tower—one of Lord ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... I recognised that the little waxen heads and hands must be part of the raw material for a Nascita, and in my mind I identified certain figures in the museum which Conte Pepoli was then arranging in the disused convent of the Annunziata as remains of old examples of the Nascita and of the Nativita. Nothing would do for it then but I must see a Nascita, and the difficulty was how to proceed. One cannot very well go round knocking at all the doors in ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... indescribable gratitude and trust as only her eyes could express. He, for the first time, looked neither more nor less than a man. Her shrinking from our presence, too, had disappeared, and her look of recognition now was unmistakable and cordial. She had resumed her original garb, long disused as if to avoid remark at the ports we visited, and its glowing colors seemed to heighten the contrast between the pallid cheek and the long, dark lashes that drooped languidly over them, as, wearied at length by the unusual exertion, she sank heavily on her companion, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... diversified characters impelled by strong motives which insure a lively conflict of passions,—all these are what the average novel-reader demands, and finds in Miss Marlitt's works. A great rambling German house, with suites of disused apartments shut away from sunshine and air and haunted by vanished forms and silent voices, while its open rooms are tenanted by a nest of gentlefolks of all degrees of relation,—some united by love, and others at swords'-points,—offers a lively field ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... his father's residence, and held the commission of a colonel. He served in several Parliaments for Huntingdonshire, voting, in 1660, for the restoration of the monarchy; and as he knew the name of Cromwell would not be grateful to the Court, he disused it, and assumed that of Williams, which had belonged to his ancestors; and he is so styled in a list of knights of the proposed Order of the Royal Oak. He died at Huntingdon, 3rd August, 1673. (Abridged from Noble's "Memoirs of the Cromwells," vol. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of Shaftesbury's house, is paved with such tiles, whereon are annealed or enamelled the coate and quarterings of Horsey. It is pity that this fashion is not revived; they are handsome and far more wholesome than marble paving in our could climate, and much cheaper. They have been disused ever since King Edward the Sixth's time. [Aubrey would have rejoiced to witness the success which has attended the revived use of ornamental paving tiles within the last few years. Messrs. Copeland and Garrett, and Mr. Minton, of Stoke- upon-Trent, as well as the Messrs. Chamberlain ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... bankruptcies, its civic commotions, and its social unhappiness, do not make us discontented with our own condition. Before the Evolution we had completed the round of your inventions and discoveries, impelled by the force that drives you on; and we have since disused most of them as idle and unfit. But we profit, now and then, by the advances you make in science, for we are passionately devoted to the study of the natural laws, open or occult, under which all men have their being. Occasionally an emissary returns with ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... Disused Martello Tower on the Irish coast, fifty miles from a police barrack, offered cheap as an appropriate basis of observation to psychic enthusiasts anxious to study the ways ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... entry into Bloemfontein Lord Roberts sent out a small mounted column under Amphlett to Sannah's Post, where the water which supplied the capital was drawn from the Modder River. This had been cut off by the enemy, and the Army was dependent upon the disused and tainted wells within the city. The Boer commandos, which under the command of Olivier had retreated from the Cape Colony to Ladybrand and Clocolan, now began to threaten Broadwood, who, when French was sent to Glen, succeeded to the command of the mounted column. Broadwood ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... became shy. There were women enough who would have supported a far worse and a far uglier man; Herrick never met or never knew them: or if he did both, some manlier feeling would revolt, and he preferred starvation. Drenched with rains, broiling by day, shivering by night, a disused and ruinous prison for a bedroom, his diet begged or pilfered out of rubbish heaps, his associates two creatures equally outcast with himself, he had drained for months the cup of penitence. He had known what it was to be resigned, what it was to ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... walking on the telegraph wires. A little farther on a large crowd indicates further thrills. Presently there is a splash and Charley Chaplin has disappeared into a fountain with two policemen in pursuit. Once while we were motoring we came to a disused railway spur, and were surprised to find a large and fussy engine getting up steam while a crowd blocked the road for some distance. A lady in pink satin was chained to the rails—placed there by the villain, who was smoking ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... in a yard, with a rope and a windlass, and an old wooden bucket all over trailing green mosses. Off the yard there was a blacksmith's shop, with a disused anvil and disused tools in it, and a cold hearth covered with scattered slack and iron filings. A dog, whose chain allowed him to come within a yard of the door of this workshop, woke up at the clank of the tools and barked. The child cried until ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... no doubt, to see a man cased in armour, such as hath been for above a whole century disused in this and every other country of Europe; and perhaps they will be still more surprised, when they hear that man profess himself a novitiate of that military order, which hath of old been distinguished in Great Britain, as well as through all Christendom, by the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... term, and because the associations connected with it are not easily eradicated, whilst most of the trite objections to the true doctrine of morals turn upon its narrow meanings, he thinks it should be as much as possible disused. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... the Bee cannot take possession of them; in autumn, they are outside, exposing their layers of figs and peeled peaches to the sun; but by that time the Osmiae have long disappeared. If, however, during the spring, an old, disused hurdle is left out of doors, in a horizontal position, the Three-horned Osmia often takes possession of it and makes use of the two ends, where the reeds lie truncated ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... later, a careful and thoughtful grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being dismissed as "a cockscomb" because he tried to enlarge our national vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old libraries for glossaries of disused terms in order to display them in their own writings. This was not quite an idle charge; it is to be noted as one of the symptoms of active Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with the diction commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... into decay, a skeleton of a hut with only two rotting walls, and a riddled thatch for a roof. And it was worse than no habitation at all, for what might have been a green and lovely vale was made desolate and rank with disused things, rusting among the lumber of bricks and nettles. It was enough to have been there once never to go again. And Hobb had been ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... change, acting according to some law of contrast as yet imperfectly understood, especially characterises civilised man. After a long continuance of one mood he wants to throw himself into another for the pleasure of setting faculties into action that have been long disused, but not yet paralysed by disuse, and which have become fidgety for employment. He has so many opportunities for procuring change, and has so complex a nature that he easily learns to neglect a more deeply-seated feeling that innovation ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... Saxons, who delighted in guttural sounds, sometimes aspirated the l at the beginning of words, as hlaf, a loaf, or bread; hlaford, a lord; but this pronunciation is now disused. ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... to be expected, but he soon regained good nature while Katharine related to him all that her father had once told her of the famous Don Quixote for whom he had nicknamed her. Then, in turn, he pointed out to her the old meeting-house and graveyard, long since disused, where the Marsdenites had repaired ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... assembled without, in front of the house, to receive the corpse; and so the dead man was borne on the shoulders of his peers, with funeral pomp of taper and dirge, to the church selected by him before his death. Which rites, as the pestilence waxed in fury, were either in whole or in great part disused, and gave way to others of a novel order. For not only did no crowd of women surround the bed of the dying, but many passed from this life unregarded, and few indeed were they to whom were accorded the lamentations ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that this was a disused chapel: far from it. In the dusk of the summer evening a murmuring chant like the musical hum of bees pervaded the vast old mansion, which was otherwise hushed in perfect silence. It was the Rosenkranz (or rosary) repeated by the household in the chapel. The Hofbauer knelt on one side near ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... station by the genial and respected chaplain, on a Sunday morning two or three years ago. As we went along, H. told us a humorous story of an Assistant in the Public Works Department, who got mauled by a leopard at Dengra Ghat, Dak Bungalow. It had taken up its quarters in a disused room, and this young fellow burning, with ardour to distinguish himself, made straight for the room in which he was known to be. He opened the door, followed by a motley crowd of retainers, discharged ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... a passing soldier, was having its last day in billets prior to going into the trenches again. They were billeted at a disused brewery at the other end of the town. I went on down the squalid street and ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... his last earthly abiding-place, had been his home for the past year. It was a disused monastery, which had been established in 1633 by the daughter of Philip III of Spain on taking up her residence in Vienna after her marriage. The original building was destroyed in one of the wars of that turbulent time, but was rebuilt at the end of the ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... having machine guns turned on us. But now that we are making the dry parapets I advocated, things are much better in every way, and everyone is more cheery. In building these parapets, the materials have to be carried across drains and even disused trenches, the ground in some places being seamed with old diggings. Last night I saw two men fall into these ditches in the dark, and we had to fish them out. One fell about six feet into about four feet of water. The whole thing was most ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Anthony kept a good look-out for a place to turn aside; and a hundred yards from the turning saw what he wanted. On the left-hand side a little path led into the wood; it was overgrown with brambles, and looked as if it were now disused. Anthony gave the word and turned his horse down the entrance, and was followed in single file by the others. There were thick trees about them on every side, and, what was far more important, the road they ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... subsisted through such a length of ages, when both the populace and many of the learned too have lost sight of the object to which they had been originally directed. This, among many other ceremonies of the heathen worship, became disused in some places and retained in others, but still continued declining after the promulgation of the Gospel. In short, there seems great reason to conclude that this feast, which was once sacred to Apollo, was ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... distinctly and ascertaining their numbers. His old father-in-law, Ali Atar, was by his side, who, being a veteran marauder, was well acquainted with all the standards and armorial bearings of the frontiers. When the king beheld the ancient and long-disused banner of Cabra emerging from the mist, he turned to Ali Atar and demanded whose ensign it was. The old borderer was for once at a loss, for the banner had not been displayed in battle in his time. "In truth," ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... no such fittings as "fixture insulators" were known. It was the common practice to twine the electric wires around the disused gas-fixtures, fasten them with tape or string, and connect them to lamp-sockets screwed into attachments under the gas-burners—elaborated later into what was known as the "combination fixture." As a result it was no uncommon thing to see bright sparks snapping between ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... from rain), and seats where, especially on summer nights, a King might have wished to sit and smoke, and call it his. Such a Bauergut (Copyhold) had Gretchen given her veteran; whose sinewy arms, and long-disused gardening talent, had made ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Dorry—not then the protegee of London, nor yet famed in story, but a mere insignificant hamlet, consisting of an old castle and a disused graveyard. It was this latter site that the unlucky English commander selected for his camp, with, as might be expected, the most disastrous results. Fever broke out, the water proved to be poisonous, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless |
