"Good old days" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you are content that a boy trusts you! Lovers were not so coldly contented in the good old days of the Paris pavements. Soul of the world! but there is no talk like Paris talk. La Mothe, you will never be a man till you hear it. Cling-clang go the feet, and cling-clang sing the flags under them, cling-clang, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... time coming, O Raja Vikram!—a queer time coming (said the Vampire), a queer time coming. Elderly people like you talk abundantly about the good old days that were, and about the degeneracy of the days that are. I wonder what you would say if you could but look forward a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... gentleman? The boy who shouted, "Shame, J. Steerforth!" was a gentleman, if one may pretend to have an opinion about a theme so difficult. The Dodger and Charley Bates are delightful boys—especially Bates. Pip, in the good old days, when he was the prowling boy, and fought Herbert Pocket, was not less attractive, and Herbert himself, with his theory and practice of the art of self-defence—could Nelson have been more brave, or Shelley (as in ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... need hardly say, Gertrude. You have married a pattern husband. I wish I could say as much for myself. But since Sir John has taken to attending the debates regularly, which he never used to do in the good old days, his language has become quite impossible. He always seems to think that he is addressing the House, and consequently whenever he discusses the state of the agricultural labourer, or the Welsh Church, or something quite improper of that kind, ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... such arguments," continued Ben, who sometimes spoke with a purity of diction that is much more common amongst seamen of the navy of to-day than it was in "the good old days" of our ancestors before education was much in vogue, "I hinted that nobody could say we might not pick up a slave-dhow down there on our own hook quite as good as the other one we could not go after; and ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... In the good old days, which poets praise As the best that man hath seen, The storm-king's hand might smite the land, But the sea remained serene; Blow east, blow west, its sun-kissed breast ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... away with his flail at the grain on the threshing-floor. The knock knocking of the flail went on through the reigns of how many kings and queens I do not know, they are all forgotten, God wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and when the corn laws starved half England—those were the times of the flail. Every barn—and there were then barns on every farm, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the good old days before the Monk-king reigned, kings and ealdermen had thus gone forth a-maying; but these merriments, savouring of heathenesse, that good prince misliked: nevertheless the song was as blithe, and the boughs were as green, as if king and ealderman ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of people considered it important. Flipping from the rear to page one, Wild Bill Star in the comics who had been blasting all the way to forty-first sub-space universe for decades was harking back to the good old days of Man's first star flight (which he had made himself through the magic of time travel), the editor was calling the man to make the jaunt the Lindbergh of Space, and the staff photographer displayed a still of a ...
— Measure for a Loner • James Judson Harmon
... very aggravating about the tendency of this race to laugh at the wrong time, and to persist in being disconsolate when every one can see that they ought to dance. Generation after generation of these perverse creatures in the good old days of slavery would insist on going in search of the North Pole under the most discouraging circumstances. On foot and alone, without money or script or food or clothing; without guide or chart or compass; without arms or friends; in the teeth ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... particular satisfaction that the recent discovery of some ancient rolls and documents relating mainly to the family of De Fortibus enables me to place before my readers a few of the posers that racked people's brains in the good old days. The selection has been made to suit all tastes, and while the majority will be found sufficiently easy to interest those who like a puzzle that is a puzzle, but well within the scope of all, two that I have included may perhaps be found ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... pardon me, Burke?—she was hasty; she was hasty. It is easier to set forces of love or hate moving than to check them in motion. Sometimes I think, Burke, that people were in certain ways less reckless in the good old days when they had perpetually before their eyes the vision of a hair-trigger God, always cocked and ready to shoot if they crossed the line of duty. But Nelly is coming bravely through a severe test of character. May I ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... before said, were the good old days of hospitality—and, as far as population went, of social intercourse also—when every man's cabin was the stranger's home, and every neighbor every neighbor's friend. There were no distinct grades of society then as now, from which an honest individual of moral worth must be excluded because ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... house is so big—Martin and I will find ourselves lost in one corner of it. And—" he frowned tremendously and shook Kirk's arm, "I absolutely forbid Kirk to stop his music. How can he study music without his master? How can he study without coming to stay with his master, as it was in the good old days of apprenticeship?" ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... another rule of the political game the new ministers had to seek re-election. LaFontaine was peaceably returned for his 'pocket borough,' the fourth riding of York, but the candidacy of Baldwin for Hastings had another issue. In those good old days of open voting an election was no such tame affair as walking into a booth and marking a cross on a piece of paper opposite a name. An election lasted for days or even weeks. There was only one polling-place for the district, and an ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... tell me if the plan is not a good one! To-morrow Valencia shall ride back to the rodeo, with a message to all from me, Don Andres Picardo. I shall proclaim a fiesta, Senor—such a fiesta as even Monterey never rivaled in the good old days when we were subject to his Majesty, the King. A fiesta we shall have, as soon as may be after the rodeo is over. There will be sports such as you Americanos know nothing of, Senor. And there openly, before all the people, you shall contest with Jose for a prize which I shall ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... good humour, and, when he sees a lumbering van or family cart making its way for many miles from one widely separated region to another, he accelerates his own motive power and leaves the good old ways of the good old days as far behind as he can, and recalls ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... Probably a dozen good old captains, sweeping the sea, each with his glass on his "captain's walk," had sighted our topsails while we were hull down and had cried out that Joseph Whidden was home again. Such was the penetration of seafaring men in those good old days when they recognized a ship and its master while as yet they could spy ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... anybody at the Yard had found out that there was something precisely in the nature of a sidedoor—it isn't a backdoor—to that chest. Well, there is one; there was one soon after I took the chest back from your rooms to mine, in the good old days. You push one of the handles down—which no one ever does—and the whole of that end opens like the front of a doll's house. I saw that was what I ought to have done at first: it's so much simpler than the trap at the top; and one likes to get a thing perfect for its own sake. ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... glow, Which faded with those "good old days," When winters came with deeper snow, And autumns with a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Milan, the severity of Trivulzio's rule, and the violence and rapacity of the French soldiery, led to increasing discontent among the people, who sighed for the good old days of Duke Lodovico, when at least their life and property, and the honour of their wives and daughters, were safe. Even on the day of the French king's entry, Marino Sanuto remarks that Louis was displeased to find how few of the people cried "France!" while the ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... gone ten minutes, while the General dozed in a chair. He was thinking of the past, of those good old days when he and Tom Meredyth, the girl's father, and George Alston, the lad's father, were all young fellows together. Ah, good old days, fine old days! When the young blood coursed strong and hot in the veins, when there was ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... man, "does this getting through college make you feel as though you had suddenly had your cellars taken away and your attics left foundationless in space? The question is 'what next?' That's what I used to ask you in the good old days when we played mumbly-peg together. What shall ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... and white tea-set on the pantry shelves—the children recognized it at once as having come out of the sandal-wood box—why it was almost worn out from the number of cups of tea the old doll and her little mother had taken together in the good old days! ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... war in Europe for the six-cent loaf; likewise for the fifteen-dollar shoe that formerly cost our wives six or seven; for the eleven pounds of sugar for a dollar, when twenty to twenty-two pounds was the standard in the good old days. Europe is too busy fighting to pay much attention to farming; the wheat farmers of Canada are somewhere in France instead of being at home 'tending to business; and it has been up to Uncle Sam and the Argentine Republic to feed the world, you might say. Naturally speculators have seized upon ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... mused on the good old days, and what had happed long ago, for he had seen Hagen, that did him stark service in his youth. Yet now that he was old, he lost by him many ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... is but scotched, not killed. It's the old prate of freedom of conscience, government by the people, and the like disgusting stuff (no offense to you, Major Carrington) that makes the trouble of the times both here and at home. I sigh for the good old days when, for eleven sweet years, no Parliament sat to meddle in affairs of state, when Wentworth kept down faction and the saintly Laud built up the Church which he adorned." And the Governor buried his woes in ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... one respect has there been a decided lack of progress in the domain of medicine, that is in the time it takes to become a qualified practitioner. In the good old days a man was turned out thoroughly equipped after putting in two winter sessions at a college and spending his summers in running logs for a sawmill. Some of the students were turned out even sooner. Nowadays it takes anywhere ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... and the Company, which is one of the smallest, worth an income of less than a thousand, has never built another. Then there are the Ratcliff Stairs—rather dirty and dilapidated to look at, but, at half-tide, affording the best view one can get anywhere of the Pool and the shipping. In the good old days of the scuffle-hunters and the heavy horsemen, the view of the thousand ships moored in their long lines with the narrow passage between was splendid. History has deigned to speak of Ratcliff Stairs. 'Twas by these steps that the gallant Willoughby ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... lay awake in my bedroom at the Metropolitan Hotel, wondering by what person of note it had been occupied in the "good old days," my attention was attracted to the musical tinkle of a cow-bell. Looking out of the window, I beheld the strange spectacle of a cow walking sedately down the middle of the street. No one was driving ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... confided somewhat ruefully to a neighbor that all he got for it himself was not more than three hundred pounds. Another neighbor, overhearing this remark, murmured to somebody else, "He forgets that in the good old days the same job was done ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... There's no stopping a fool when he starts to talk. But it is right you are that the good old days are gone. Those were the days of great heroes, like the father of her that is now Queen. They were fine men that stood beside him, and one was my own man. I said to him, "This is the time a brave man is sure ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... "even if a man is on a hot trail, he stops for a smoke! In the good old days, before the charge there was a smoke. At home, by the fireside, when the old men were asked to tell their brave deeds, again the pipe was passed. So come, let us smoke now to the memory of ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... Valley. It is true that Bridger seemed to have become pessimistic in many matters. For one, the West was becoming overcrowded and the price of furs was falling at a rate to alarm the most conservative trapper. He referred feelingly to the good old days when one got ten dollars a pound for prime beaver skins in St. Louis; but "now it's a skin for a plug of tobacco, and three for a cup of powder, and other fancies in the same proportion." And so, had his testimony been unsupported, they might have suspected he was underestimating ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... fellow-votary is a rare treat. As a rule you have to lure and humour your antagonist like a child. The wooing is as intricate and delicate as any wooing can well be. To quarrel now, indeed, requires an infinity of patience. The good old days of thumb-biting—"Do you bite your thumbs at us, sir?" and so to clash ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... In those "good old days," not so very far distant, the dredging nets were coarse and weighty, and the capstan of the clumsiest and most primitive description, so that the coral-seeking serfs under contract were worked like bullocks until they were ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... The trumpet at which the proud Van den Berg had hinted for six months later arrived on the 12th September. Maurice was glad to get his town. His "little soldiers" did not insist, as the Spaniards and Italians were used to do in the good old days, on unlimited murder, rape, and fire, as the natural solace and reward of their labours in the trenches. Civilization had made some progress, at least in the Netherlands. Maurice granted good terms, such as he had been in the habit of conceding to all captured ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dress of unornamented white wool. Lbera (lber), free from the restraints of boyhood. 2. lucifero lit. morning-star. Here poet. for die. 5. consul, e.g. Cincinnatus, who was called to be Dictator. 8. sed ... honor, i.e. in 'the good old days' worship, not amusement, was the chief object of the visit to Rome. 3-8. Ovid says one reason why the toga libera was assumed at the Liberalia (the Feast of Bacchus—the vintage, festival) was because it was the most crowded festival of ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... here interposed Endicott, who had most moderately partaken of a cup of hypocras, and whose eye and hand were as steady as heretofore. "Well said, pardi! ... My old friend the Marquis of Swarthmore used oft to say in the good old days of Goring's Club, that 'twas better to lose on a system, than to play on no system ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... cut himself clean adrift from the old associations. He told me that Bakkus and I were his only correspondents. Henceforth he would exist solely as Petit Patou, flinging General Lackaday dead among the dead things of war.... Besides, the great hotels of Marseilles cost the eyes of your head. The good old days of the comfortable car and inexpensive lodging had gone apparently for ever, and he had to fall back on the travel and accommodation of his ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... deeds by sinking the 'Amphion' and the 'Pathfinder', with hundreds of officers and men, the "protestants" found that their efforts were out of date and that their arguments could have held water in the good old days, before the declaration of war, but not after. For the silent determination of the London crowds, of both sexes and all colours, was so emphatic that one could almost read it in their thoughts, and see it, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... Grenadiere-les-St.-Cyr, in the village of Sacche-les-Azay-le-Rideau, at Marmoustiers, Veretz, Roche-Cobon, and the certain storehouses of good stories, which storehouses are the upper stories of old canons and wise dames, who remember the good old days when they could enjoy a hearty laugh without looking to see if their hilarity disturbed the sit of your ruffle, as do the young women of the present day, who wish to take their pleasure gravely—a custom which suits our Gay France as much as a water jug would the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... not to be entirely put to shame by one or two unblushing French windows and other trifling barbarities of that description, more especially when it is kept in countenance by a little church of still greater age, nestling under its wing in a manner that recalled the good old days when the lord of the manor was lord of the souls and bodies of his tenants. Even old Mr. Lane had been mellowed by the influence of his new home, and before his death had come to play the part of Squire far more respectably ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... difficulties, disputes between the two parties, and the couple separate. In the good old days that seldom happened. Is it not so?" asked the lawyer of the two merchants, evidently trying to ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... In the good old days of Hester Prynne they published a faithless wife by sewing a scarlet "A" upon the bosom of her dress. Nowadays the word is pronounced "co-respondent," and it may be affixed to any woman's name by any newspaper, or any plaintiff in ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... told him all of my secrets, And he kept them without fail, With never a sign that he knew them But a wag of his short, stump tail. Long years have passed since I heard them.— The sound of his gruff bow-wows, As he tagged my heels in the good old days When we ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... young friend," answered Cooke gravely, "is the bane of the present unenlightened age. In the good old days when everybody was either a Greek or a Roman or a barbarian, and so didn't have to ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... am told, takes this high-handed attitude. Perhaps she dimly realizes that her time for tyranny is short. To make the man a suppliant is the delight of her soul. After marriage the positions are reversed. But in the good old days, most women, not absolutely desiccated by age or ironed out by life's vicissitudes, found a sort of secondary sexual delight in these shopping assaults on the gentlemanly party on the other side of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... of them think that. It might have been so, too, in the good old days when there was only one college graduate for each town and he had to do the heavy thinking for the whole community. But, pshaw! the easiest job in the world nowadays is to stuff your storage battery full of Greek verbs ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... companies, an accountant, a lawyer, Marlow, and myself. The director had been a Conway boy, the accountant had served four years at sea, the lawyer—a fine crusted Tory, High Churchman, the best of old fellows, the soul of honour—had been chief officer in the P. & O. service in the good old days when mail-boats were square-rigged at least on two masts, and used to come down the China Sea before a fair monsoon with stun'-sails set alow and aloft. We all began life in the merchant service. Between the five of us there was the strong ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... suppose we shall be able to make any new additions to your collection of negro songs.[202] They sing but very little nowadays to what they used to. Do you remember those good old days when the Methodists used to sing up in that cotton-house at Fuller's? Wasn't it good? They never sing any of them at the church, and very few ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... to see him that I sat him down in front of the sideboard and left orders that I was at home to no one. We had been class-mates and room-mates at college, and two better friends never lived. We spent the whole night in recounting the good old days, sighed a little over the departed ones, and praised or criticized the living. Hadn't they been times, though? The nights we had stolen up to Philadelphia to see the shows, the great Thanksgiving games in New York, the commencements, and ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... But he is generally an ignorant, shiftless fellow, forever lamenting about his freedom, flaying the Yankees for taking him away from his master, who took care of him. He still likes to sit around on the back steps of the whites' residences to talk about good old days when he was free from the responsibility of "keerin' fer mase'f." Or, in higher walks of life, from pulpit and public rostrum, he's bewailing the shortcomings of his own people and magnifying the virtues of the ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... secret is discovered. The lowly and almost extinct horseshoe nail will sell cracked black walnuts. I have the reputation among local hardware dealers of having more horses than any man in Oklahoma. Black walnuts and horseshoe nails are reminiscent of the good old days down on the farm. The big fat meats of improved cracked walnuts peering through the sides of one or two pound cellophane bags pinned shut with a couple of horseshoe nails is a temptation few people can resist. Leave a few packages with your grocer or ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... to trace through the distant haze My byegone life in the good old days; I see in my vision a field of wheat— I knew I was there that the world might eat— I drank of the showers and the morning dew; In the noonday sun I throve and grew— Grew on the verge of a sunny crest, Just as fast as ...
— A Little Book for A Little Cook • L. P. Hubbard
... and even married; all that the Church required was that children should be free when they came of age (at the ages of fourteen and twelve!) to repudiate the contract if they so desired. Nothing seems to separate modern England from the good old days so plainly as the case of little Grace de Saleby, aged four, who for the sake of her broad acres was married to a great noble, and on his death two years later to another, and yet again, when she was eleven, to a third, who paid three hundred marks down ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... tailor-made to the Commissioner's specifications, and his specifications had provided him with two rather exact duplicates of the two types of Scout fighting ships in which Squadron Commander Tate had made space hideous for evildoers in the good old days. Nobody as yet had got up the nerve to point out to him that private battlecraft definitely were not allowable in ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... pig of the good old days still prevails in certain sheltered vales and glades. He, too, used to have his vogue at holiday times. Because the gods did love him he died young—died young and tender and unspoiled by the world—and then everybody else did love him too. For he ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... little poems is a finger-post, in fact, at the parting of the ways for Roman civilization. It was upon a tablet let into the wall of the temple of Hercules, and commemorates the triumphant return to Rome of Mummius, the conqueror of Corinth. It points back to the good old days of Roman contempt for Greek art, and ignorance of it, for Mummius, in his stupid indifference to the beautiful monuments of Corinth, made himself the typical Philistine for all time. It points forward to the new Greco-Roman ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... I to my chum, "those good old days are gone by, now, and Israel worships strange gods. Old Nassau will never be what she was before the fire of '55. Those precious heirlooms of our day are sunk from sight forever, dear and mossy as they were,—swept down, like cobwebs, before the flame-besom. 'Fuit Ilium!' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... of the Restoration in 1867-8 was, at any rate in part, to restore the constitution of 645 A.D. The object of the constitution of 645 A.D. was to restore the form of government that had prevailed in the good old days. What the object was of those who established the government of the good old days, I do not profess to know. However that may be, the country before 645 A.D. was given over to feudalism and internal strife, while the power ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... a long way off from his door, the prophetic mortgage failed to lay its blight upon his lands, his crops were bountiful, his acreage spread as the years went by,—and so his uncles, his cousins and his aunts were never so happy as when wishing for the good old days when his father was alive and running the farm as it should be run! If David had married some good, sensible, thrifty, hard-working farmer's daughter,—Well, it might not have meant an improvement in the crops but it certainly would have spared him ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... buxom angel of stucco known as the "Genius of Bourbonism." In the good old days it used to ornament the town hall, fronting the entrance; but now, degraded to a museum curiosity, it presents to the public its back of ample proportions, and the curator intimated that he considered this attitude quite appropriate— historically speaking, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... it is customary to begin a book by an Introduction, Preface, or Foreword. In the good old days of the eighteenth century this generally took the form of a burst of grovelling adoration aimed at some most noble or otherwise highly important person. This fulsome fawning on the great was later changed into propitiation ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... few years of practice in Frederick City, Francis Scott Key removed to Georgetown, now West Washington. Here at the foot of what is known as M Street, but was Bridge Street in the good old days before Georgetown had given up her picturesque street names for the insignificant numbers and letters of Washington, half a block from the old Aqueduct Bridge, stands a two-storied, gable-roofed, dormer-windowed house, bearing ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... of apple butter discounted all the nectar and ambrosia of the books and left its marks upon the character as well as the features of the recipient. The mouth waters even now as I recall the bill of fare plus the appetite. But if I were going back to the good old days I'd like to take some of the modern improvements along with me. It thrills me to consider the modern school credits for home work with all the "57 varieties" as an integral feature of the good old days. Alas, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... at Kelat is a renowned fire-eater) gave the rebels such a warm reception that there has been no outbreak since. My genial old host had himself given a good deal of trouble to the Kelat Government in his younger days, and told me with evident pride that he had led many a chupao in the good old days. The savage and predatory character of the Baluchi was formerly well exemplified in these lawless incursions, when large tracts of country were pillaged and devastated and the most unheard-of cruelties practised. Chupaos are now a thing of the ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... hundred years. Edgar could do no more than evade difficulties and temporize with problems which imperceptible growth alone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are not drawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and an unconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory in political controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, had satirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a description ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... forgive George, and you know it. He was the soul of honor and had no idea of there being an engagement between us, when he married you. I am as sure of this as though George himself had told me. In those good old days in Paris when we were all of us art students, George and I were great chums. I could read him like a book and there never lived a more ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... distract your mind for the sake of your health. Perfectly true! Excellent! In a day or two I am taking a holiday and am going away for a sniff of a different atmosphere. Show that you are a friend to me, let us go together! Let us go for a jaunt as in the good old days." ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... brick or stone only six or seven thousand years, I suppose, and so the cave, if you judge by the length of time, is our true home. Hence I'm filled with a just enthusiasm at the thought of going back speedily to the good old ways and the good old days. It's possible, Tayoga, that our ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... be regretted that the moving picture show and the soda water fountain have such an influence in breaking up old-fashioned family evenings at home when everyone gathered around the evening lamp to enjoy homemade dainties. In those good old days the young man was expected to become acquainted with the young woman in the home. The girl took pride in serving solid and liquid culinary goodies of her own construction. Her mother, her all-sufficient guide, mapped out the sure, safe, and orthodox ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... considerable curiosity. It is much gone to decay now, and a very different person occupies it. There are persons still living in the village who knew Hanz, and never pass the place without recurring to the many happy hours spent under his roof. That was in the good old days, before Nyack began to put on the airs of a big town. There is the latticed arch leading from the gate to the door; the little veranda, where the vines used to creep and flower in spring; the moss-covered roof, and the big arm chair, made ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... rated sacrilege at nine ducats, murder at seven, witchcraft at six, and so on. Ever since the time of Innocent VIII. immunity from purgatory could be bought. It was his chamberlain who used to say, 'God willeth not the death of a sinner, but that he should pay and live.' Ha! ha! Those were good old days, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... old days, which were, of course, the days when you and I were boys and girls together at Biddeford, Me., our civilization knew nothing of that miserable invention which is now foisted upon the modern house under the name of butler's pantry. In those good old days we used to have pantries and china closets and butteries and all that sort of thing, ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... be done away with. All secret payments and transactions were to be unearthed and prohibited for the future. The entire financial business of the town was to be placed in the care of the Corporation. In short, everything was to be turned upside-down, and the good old days to cease. That was what was to happen if Wallingford went ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... gifts of gloves, rings, and scarfs were expected for those attending; and the air of depression so common in a twentieth century funeral was certainly not conspicuous. It may have been because death was so common; for the death rate was frightfully high in those good old days, and in a community so thinly populated burials were so extremely frequent that every one from childhood was accustomed to the sight of crepe and coffin. Man is a gregarious creature and craves the assembly, and as church meetings, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... at the end of the season, told us plainer than words that these animals, formerly so plentiful east of Kadiak Island, and along the coast of Cook's Inlet, were almost extinct. Two of our hunters were famous shots, and they liked to talk of the good old days, when sea otter and bear were plenty. One of them, Ivan, it is claimed, made $3,000 in one day. The amount paid a native is $200 or more for each sea otter pelt. They are much larger than a land otter, a good skin measuring six feet in length ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... some far-away bursts, presumably meant for him. He was young enough to remember the good old days (you would doubtless call them the bad old days) when the music-halls produced hearty, if vulgar, humour, and he murmured "Archibald, certainly not!" The name clung, and as Archibald the A.-A. gun will go down to posterity. You can take it or ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... the Chateau and the family are fictitious; marechal du camp general commanding a brigade; le bon vieux temps the good old days; late King Louis XVI, guillotined in 1793; en attendant for the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... age is supplementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride, where we formerly walked: live better, and lie softer—and shall be wise to do so—than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return—could you and I once more walk our thirty miles a-day—could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see them—could the good old one shilling gallery days return—they ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... good old days, which were, of course, the days when you and I were boys and girls together at Biddeford, Me., our civilization knew nothing of that miserable invention which is now foisted upon the modern house ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... eighties, and discovered that it had been turned into a dressmaker's, he grew very melancholy, and only cheered up a little when a lovely magenta fog came on and showed him that some things were still going along as in the good old days. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... were more able than ours to believe in the good old days. We, knowing more of the past than our forefathers did, can find in it no golden age. But our eyes do not rest even upon the present. In the nineteenth century men thought they were at the end of a process, and their evolutionary creed was often only a polite method of saying ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... sedentary businessman, the "old timers," remembering the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s, became completely disenchanted with the slow, heavy, "make shift" orb. They left their love and were contented to talk wistfully about the "good old days." ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... In those good old days of simplicity and sunshine, a passion for cleanliness was the leading principle in domestic economy, and the universal test of an ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... tendency, which was fostered, no doubt, by daily studying the "Lives of the Saints." While reading the accounts of martyrs who had died at the stake rather than resign their faith, the child often regretted that she had not lived in those "good old days," so happy a thing it seemed to her to die for one's principles. This privilege was granted her in after-years, strangely enough; and she proved as courageous in reality as she had in childhood imagined herself capable ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... entertainment. Burr's lawyers were very willing to treat the populace to a taste of oratory, which, in the guise of legal discussion, might produce remote political effects, for office-seeking was a fine art in the good old days of Jackson and Clay. Colonel Allen arose to insist that the investigation go on or else be abandoned finally and entirely, and to this the judge seemed to assent. Daviess, fearful that the court and the balance of public opinion ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... meals for an appetite, I question whether his memory is not to the full as much loved as the living Czar. I know, at least, that whenever the latter attempts a reform, the good Muscovites shrug up their shoulders, and mutter, 'We did not do these things in the good old days of Ivan IV.'" ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more ado than a hundred other fairs on the line. Not many complaints are made now, for delays and disappointments are things of the past. Yet, I dare say there are some who, still attending the fair, look back with regret on the disappearance of the good old days. ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... their ways, by levelling up or levelling down, developed strong cohesive power; besides (owing to the difficulties of inter-communication) creating a feeling of independence and a disinclination to obey the central power. The emperors who used in the good old days to summon the vassals—a matter of a week or two in that small area—to chastise the wicked tribes on their frontiers, gradually found themselves unable to cope with the more distant Tartar hordes, the eastern barbarians of the coast, the Annamese, Shans, and other unidentified tribes ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... given him, he would have preferred having his tough little Victory and the other stout ships of his fleet, to all the new-fangled contrivances." The admiral, it was evident, had still a hankering for the good old days when he first ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... dancing, as you know, is nothing to brag of: I think the young ladies were quite satisfied with the little I did. I'm sure I was. You also know my views on round dances. Why dancing should be done exclusively by couples arranged strictly on the basis of contrasted sexes...! I think of the good old days of the Renaissance in Italy, when women, if they wanted to dance, just got up and danced—alone, or, if they didn't want to dance alone, danced together. I like to see soldiers or sailors dance in pairs, as a straightforward outlet for superfluous ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... The Past — N. the past, past time; days of yore, times of yore, days of old, times of old, days past, times past, days gone by, times gone by; bygone days; old times, ancient times, former times; fore time; the good old days, the olden time, good old time; auld lang syne[obs3]; eld|. antiquity, antiqueness[obs3], status quo; time immemorial; distance of time; remote age, remote time; remote past; rust of antiquity [study of the past] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... bearing the date of 1780, and the Santa Lucia gate, with the inscription of 1781. These gates were closed every night, and some of the massive machinery used for this purpose may be seen lying near by—a reminder of those good old days when the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... of reason, in perfect equality and perfect amity, without property, or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of another kind might see nothing in the doctrines of the philosophers but anarchy and atheism, might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret the good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the growing heresies of Provence. A wise man would have seen with regret the excesses into which the reformers were running; but he would have done justice to their genius and to their philanthropy. He would have censured their errors; but he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... encouraging. As we rose again to the main level of the country I recognized over the horizon a certain humped mountain. Often in the "good old days" I had approached this mountain from the south. Beneath its flanks lay my friend's ranch, our destination. Five hours earlier in my experience its distance would have appalled me; but my standards had changed. Nevertheless, it seemed far enough away. I ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... drooping mustache, and ropy black hair, was none other than Bowdoin, the artist—the only American who had taken a medal at Munich for landscape, but who was now painting portraits and starving slowly in consequence. He mounted to this eyry every Friday night, so as to be reminded of the good old days at Schwartz's. The short, big-mustached, bald- headed man swinging the cane, was Bianchi—Julius Bianchi—known to the Skylarkers as "The Pole," and to the world at large as an accomplished lithographer and maker of mezzotints. Bianchi ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... healthy, and so prosperous, that this affectation of depression had somewhat of a ludicrous air to men who knew the world and had acquaintance with real and pressing anxieties. Ned Talbot looked across the table at the handsome youngster, and heaved a sigh to the memory of the good old days when he also was happy enough to invent troubles, and philosophise darkly concerning unknown woes. He had come south with a heart heavy with care, yet with an expectation of comfort which had taken away half the sting, but that hope had been doomed to disappointment, and on the morrow ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the Showfield was decorated in a gorgeous fashion. Flags, streamers, and bunting, with scores of appropriate mottoes and devices, were numerously in evidence, and trees were planted on each side of the road and decked with all sorts of fairy lamps. Yes; those were the good old days of the Keighley Show; thousands of people flocked from all parts of a not very limited area to attend the annual event. But the principal thoroughfares of the town were not the only places which received attention at the hands of the decorators, for the residents of such places as the Pinfold ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... I look for a garrison to make such a defence as you and your Squire have done? When I saw the spot, and looked at the numbers, and heard how long you had held out, methought I was returned once more to the good old days of Calais. And here this youth of mine, not yet with his spurs, though I dare say full five years older than you, must needs look sour upon it, because he has to sleep on a settle for one night—and that, too, when he has let Oliver de Clisson slip through his fingers, without ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looks began to be directed towards himself. He was an Englishman, a Southron, and it was a foul shame and dishonour that such as he should pay a Highland chief only twenty-seven shillings and sixpence for beasts that had cost ten pounds each. That was not the way in the good old days when the hardy men of the north descended from the mountains with broadsword and shield, lifted the cattle of the Saxon, and drove them to ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... heavy work, which had in some sort conquered his folly and pride, and it is possible that he might have been saved. But he has been entirely ruined in the seminary...." This humorous description proves to us well that even in the good old days not ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... and in many ways better. Children are apt to be an echo of their ancestors. We are apt to put a halo around the Forefathers, but I suspect that at our age they were very much like ourselves. People are not wise when they long for the good old days. ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various |
