"Bootblack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thing to it. And I ain't like the rest of you, I know; and don't need Dud Fielding to tell me. But just let me get a good start and I'll show folks what Dan Dolan can do. I'll be ready for something better than a newsboy or a bootblack." ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... the grades and the high school was intermittent. Often he had to stop for months at a time to earn money for their living. In turn he was newsboy, bootblack, and messenger boy. He drove a delivery wagon for a grocer, ushered at a theater, was even a copyholder in the proofroom of a newspaper. Hard work kept him thin, but he was like a lath ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... After a few tasks bunglingly performed, he was tried on messenger service and started with his carfare to deliver a box containing a funeral piece. He had no idea where he was to go, or what car line to take. In his extremity a bootblack came to his aid. He safely delivered the box at a residence where the owner was leaving his door for his car. He gave Junior half a dollar. Junior met the first friendly greeting he had encountered in Multiopolis, ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... difference that Maud was still a vulgar and ignorant girl—for Azalea was not the person to perceive or appreciate these defects. She saw her, with mute wonder, blooming out before her very eyes, from a stout, stocky, frowzy child, with coarse red cheeks and knuckles like a bootblack, into a tall, slender girl, whose oval face was as regular as a conic section, and whose movements were as swift, strong, and graceful, when she forgot herself, as those of a race-horse. There were still the ties of habit and romance between them. Azalea, whose brother ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... of a bedroom and a sitting room for study and entertaining. "Scouts" are a kind of servant attached to one student or a small number of students. They run errands, bring meals from the kitchen, and take care of clothing. A bootblack called the "boots" takes care of footwear. A charwoman called ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day likely to become ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... The book-keeper drums it, It's whistled by all on the street; The hand-organ grinds it, The music-box winds it, It's sung by the "cop" on the beat. The newsboy, he spouts it, The bootblack, he shouts it, The washwoman sings it all wrong; And I laugh, and I weep, And I wake, and I sleep, To the tune ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... her lorgnette and gazed at him skeptically from the spot just behind his left ear where the barber had clipped him too short, to the edge of his right heel that the bootblack had neglected to polish. Apparently she did not even see ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... tailor, a bootblack, a physician, and a detective are standing on the street corner as you pass by. What will each one be most likely ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... stopped at the Waldorf Asthoria, an' while th' barber was powdhrin' his face with groun' dimons Jawn tol' him to take th' money he was goin' to buy a policy ticket with an' get in on th' good thing. He tol' th' bootblack, th' waiter, th' man at th' news-stand, th' clerk behind th' desk, an' th' bartinder in his humble abode. He got up a stereopticon show with pitchers iv a widow-an-orphan befure an' afther wirin', an' he put an advertisement in all th' pa-apers tellin' how his stock wud make ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... study them—but I have no opportunities at anything. It is a new experience to me to be so—so disregarded by the general scheme of things. I seem to be of no more consequence in this place than a bootblack was in the world, or a paralytic person. It seems useless for me to fly in the face of fate, since this is fate. I have no hope of being able to reach my wife. You have privileges in this condition which are evidently far superior to mine. I have ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... the papers that a Chinaman has invented a typewriter which writes in the Celestial language," said the Observer, handing the bootblack a nickel and shaking hands with the crowd. "This bright Oriental, who is known as Tap-Key, has undertaken a very large contract, for the Chinese language, as most people know, is composed entirely of word symbols, each of which represents ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman
... between his paws, took it to bed with him, ate it in the night, and searched for it so longingly next day that I had to go out and buy him the man with the scythe. After that we had everything of note, the bootblack boy, the toper with bottle, the woolly rabbit that squeaks when you hold it in your mouth; they all vanished as inexplicably as the lady, but I dared not tell him my suspicions, for he suspected also and his gentle heart would have ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... each of the four diverging streets) and drew up before a flat-faced building with the name "Hotel Splendide" stretching across its dim, yellow front. Inside a big, open doorway, stairs went steeply up, past piles of commercial travellers' show trunks, and an Arab bootblack who clamoured for custom. At the top Max Doran and his charge came into a hall, whence a bare-looking restaurant and several other rooms opened out. On a gigantic hatrack like a withered tree hung coats and hats in dark bunches, brightened with a few military coats and gold-braided ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... An Italian bootblack who already owns several bootblacking establishments in this country, was trained to a beggar's life in Italy, and ran away. "Now and then I had heard things about America—that it was a far-off country where everybody ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... existed in the real, sober, level-headed West a contempt for the West-struck man who was not really bad, but who wanted to seem "bad." Singularly enough, men of this type were not so frequently local products as immigrants. The "bootblack bad man" was a character recognized on the frontier—the city tough gone West with ambitions to achieve a bad eminence. Some of these men were partially bad for a while. Some of them, no doubt, even left behind them, after their sudden ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... with a determination altogether different. He believed with Lord Brougham, that if he were a bootblack he would strive to be the best bootblack in England. He began in a store as a window-cleaner, and washed windows so well that they sparkled like diamonds under the sun. As a clerk, no customer was too insignificant to be greeted with a smile ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... by such purchases we shut out books we admit to be really better, and when we honestly reflect upon the purpose of the public library. The sanest piece of advice that I ever heard given to those librarians who argue in favor of buying all the bootblack stories the boys want, was that of Miss Haines at a recent institute for town libraries. She asked that those men and women who enjoyed Alger and "Elsie" in childhood and who are arguing in their favor on the strength of the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... bootblack had given his restored and resplendent russets a final loving rub, and had deftly inserted a new lace where the old one had been, Mr. Green decided that he needed a manicure and he moved across the shop, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... ply their trades upon the sidewalk. My hatter—the fellow who cleans my straw hat each Spring—is a partner of a bootblack. Over his head as he putters with his soap and brushes, there hangs a rusty sign proclaiming that he is famous for his cleaning all round the world. He is so modest in his looks that I have wondered whether he ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks |
