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More "Gabble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1887, the Gov.-General published another decree with the same object, and sent a communication to the Archbishop to remind him of this obligation of his subordinates, and the urgency of its strict observance. But it had no effect whatever, and the poor-class villagers were only taught to gabble off the christian doctrine by rote, for it suited the friar to stimulate that peculiar mental condition in which belief precedes understanding. The school-teacher, being subordinate to the inspector, had no voice in the matter, and was compelled to follow the views of the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... moving with any deliberation. These were men seen generally alone, or at most in pairs. They were quiet, waxy pale, dressed always neatly in soft black hat, white shirt, long black coat, and varnished boots. In the face of a general gabble they seemed to remain indifferently silent, self-contained and aloof. To occasional salutations they responded briefly and ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... Mangan was to be a great poet, a great metaphysician, a great—I don't know what. Winstead was far too small a place for him; he was to go up and conquer London, and do great and wonderful things. And what is he now?—a reporter of the gabble of the House ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... said the Cap'n, eagerly, forgetting for the moment the presence of Constable Nute, "those wimmen might gabble a little at you and make threats and things like that—but—but—there isn't anything they can do, you understand!" He winked at Mr. Parrott. "You know what ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... the fragrance it stole in crossing a hayfield beyond the road, the bees darted in and out of their hives, and a peacock spread his iridescent feathers to catch the level yellow rays of the setting sun, and from the distant millpond came the gabble of geese, as the noisy fleet ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... (Lamb himself is, in England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate of Hook as a novelist ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... talk nonsense. What is still worse, instead of learning how to be silent when I have absolutely nothing to say, it is generally at such times that I have a violent inclination; and, endeavoring to pay my debt of conversation as speedily as possible, I hastily gabble a number of words without ideas, happy when they only chance to mean nothing; thus endeavoring to conquer or hide my incapacity, I rarely fail to ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... verse-jargon as to-night! Strange it is that the so-called 'poetical' trick of confusedly heaping words together regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid garrulity, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... skirted the great tributary marshes, alive with water-fowl of every description, whose gabble and flapping wings could be heard at a long distance. He camped in the vast hardwood forests that covered the western point of the peninsula that extends west from Lake Ontario to the river connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie. He shot big bustards and wild ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... "Gabble, gabble, gabble," said Ninny; which was goose-talk for "Oh! of course I do;" and she flapped her wings, and stretched out her long neck, and made more of a goose of herself than ever, and was so glad at getting the invitation, that she created quite a ...
— Baby Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... to picture Mrs. Nevill Tyson in Rome. Her presence in the Eternal City seemed something less than her footprint in its dust or her shadow on its walls. Nothing is more irritating than to have your dream of a place destroyed by the light-hearted gabble of some idiot who has seen it; but Mrs. Nevill Tyson spared your dreams. The most delicate ideal would have been undisturbed by the soft sweep of her generalities, or the graceful flight of her fancy from ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... framing a Constitution actually invited a foreign envoy, Jefferson, to take part with them in their work. Jefferson had sense enough to decline the invitation; but what gleam of sense, political or other, had the blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by such men is absurd. If it had existed when they met, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... mediums' gabble worry you, son. These psi-mediums have real powers, but they can't turn them off and on like a water tap. When they don't get anything, they don't like to admit it, and they invent things. Always generalities like ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... she intended, she went to work. In her younger days she had worked much at schools, and was really an able and spirited teacher, liking the occupation; and laying hold of the first book in her way, she requested Conrade to read. He obeyed, but in such a detestable gabble that she looked up appealingly to Fanny, who suggested, "My dear, you can read better than that." He read four lines, not badly, but then broke off, "Mamma, are not we to have ponies? Coombe heard of a pony this morning; ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... talking with Mr. Balfour to-day was his obviously unaffected interest in Ireland as a country rather than in Ireland as a cock-pit. It is the condition of Ireland, and not the gabble of parties at Westminster about the condition of Ireland, which is uppermost in his thoughts. This, I should say, is the best guarantee ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... discussions, that at the best are very second-rate eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying gabble, there are various forms of "ethical" teaching, advocated and practised in America and in the elementary schools of this country. For example, a story of an edifying sort is told to the children, and comments ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... everybody went to business:— everybody but Hugh and Holt, who had nothing to do. Class after class came up for repetition; and this repetition seemed to the new boys an accomplishment they should never acquire. They did not think that any practice would enable them to gabble, as everybody seemed able to gabble here. Hugh had witnessed something of it before,—Phil having been wont to run off at home, "Sal, Sol, Ren et Splen," to the end of the passage, for the admiration of his sisters, and so much to little Harry's ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... him less than any of the rest, and her first amusement was keeping silence to punish him for complaining of clack; but he explained that he did not mean quiet, sensible conversation—he only referred to those foolish women's raptures over the gabble they had been hearing ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... glad to see you." Ann came suddenly down to earth, and tried to focus her attention on. Miss Caroline's hospitable gabble. "Such a lot of people here this afternoon, too.... I'm so pleased. And a beautiful day, isn't it? Even Mr. Coventry has been tempted out of his shell. He'll be quite a social acquisition to the ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them. An event of the most deplorable sort, has awfully imposed silence upon the gabble of frivolity. ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... 'Gabble-gabble ... brethren ... gabble-gabble!' My window glimpses larch and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... logical mind there is something very distressing in this social law of gabble. Out of regard for Mrs. A, let us say, I attend some festival she has inaugurated. There I meet for the first time a young person of pleasant exterior, and I am placed in her company to deliver her at a ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Obstruct Heav'n Towrs, and in derision sets Upon thir Tongues a various Spirit to rase Quite out thir Native Language, and instead To sow a jangling noise of words unknown: Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud Among the Builders; each to other calls Not understood, till hoarse, and all in rage, As mockt they storm; great laughter was in Heav'n And looking down, to see the hubbub strange 60 And hear the din; ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... veritable savage delight that I hear a company of horsemen go furiously galloping past; they are Dyadin people endeavoring to overtake me for the kindly purpose of worrying me out of my senses, and to prevent me even eating a bite of bread unseasoned with their everlasting gabble. Although the road from Dyadin eastward leads steadily upward, they fancy that nothing less than a wild, sweeping gallop will enable them to accomplish their fell purpose; I listen to their clattering hoof-beats dying away in the dreamy distance, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... He here alludes to an odd fancy or trick of his own;—whenever he was at a loss for something to say, he used always to gabble over "1 2 3 4 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... over. Now, then, I'm going to gabble for five minutes gaily. [Settling herself comfortably in an armchair.] What jolly flowers you've got there! What have you been doing with yourself? Amos took me to the Caffe Quadri yesterday to late ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... their enemies, among which last the very worst, in their opinions, were their parents, guardians, and masters. "The character of Dick," said Hodgkinson more than once to this writer, "is not overcharged." Our youngsters were quite pat at stage gabble, and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... in the Reformed Church. For it was the Remonstrants who had possession of the churches at Rotterdam, and the printer's distich is valuable as pointing out that the name of Orange was beginning to identify itself with the Contra-Remonstrant faction. At this time, on the other hand, the gabble that Barneveld had been bought by Spanish gold, and was about to sell his country to Spain, became louder than a whisper. Men were not ashamed, from theological hatred, to utter such senseless calumnies against a venerable statesman whose long life ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Well, one had them, the types themselves, detected in the fact; and one had them together. Obsequiousness ran out of the first like wine out of a bottle, sullenness congested in the second. Obsequiousness was all smiles; he ran to catch your eye, he loved to gabble; and he had about a dozen words of beach English, and an eighth-of-an-inch veneer of Christianity. Sullens was industrious; a big down-looking bee. When he was spoken to, he answered with a black look and a shrug of one shoulder, but the thing would be done. I don't give him to ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... pioneering bravely, is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of the thing he vivisects, and so his book is no more than a compendium of mush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorous gabble about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such-like imaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that the lungs are "strongly expanded" during the act? My own casual observation inclines me to hold that the opposite ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... far removed from the planets of the Ages that sparkled like jewels in the vault of Night. A vagrant breeze whispered in the valley sedges to the placid lake. High in the air, invisible, migrating wavies winged into the south, the distant gabble of their passing ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... of voices, the rattle and clash of the dice-box in the distant parlor, reached his ear amidst the laughter and gabble of the common room. The night was a hard one ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The plot is not intricate, but there is a plot—good deal more, perhaps, than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes gave, as, for instance, in Mansfield Park. It is even rather artfully worked out—the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part twice in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient description and scenery—the Bath vignettes, especially ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... I allowed him to gabble away full tilt for an hour on this subject, unconscious that I had taken the measure of him, and was grinning broadly to myself. Then I diverted him by inquiring how long since the wire fence on our right had been put up. It bore evidence of recent erection, and had ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... yore![1]— Was it for this that back I went As far as Lateran and Trent, To prove that they who damned us then Ought now in turn be damned again? The silent victim still to sit Of Grattan's fire and Canning's wit, To hear even noisy Mathew gabble on, Nor mention once the Whore of Babylon! Oh! 'tis too much—who now will be The Nightman of No-Popery? What Courtier, Saint or even Bishop Such learned filth will ever fish up? If there among our ranks be one To take my place, 'tis thou, Sir John; ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the arrival of a governess? Was that apparition which had impressed me so unpleasantly to take the command of me—to sit alone with me, and haunt me perpetually with her sinister looks and shrilly gabble? ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... as much as, I deserved. I cared to learn of him; but I don't care for anything now,—no, not for drawing, which you taught me! There's no heart in it! The whole purpose is to get amazing numbers of marks and pass each other. All dates and words, and gabble gabble!' ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... yourself, if read it you must. And, in short, what must that man be made of, who does not prefer sitting by his own fire-side with his wife and children, reading to them, or hearing them read, to hearing the gabble and balderdash of a ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... when aw come to think on it, aw remember he didn't behave just as aw could ha' liked him if he'd just been wed to me, th' first day they wor wed, for he'd hardly a word to say to awr Emma at dinner time, but he could gabble fast enuff to that lass o' Amos's, an' if shoo wor a child o' mine aw'd awther tak' some o' that consait aght on her or else aw'd tak' th' skin ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... love Plain-dealing.' So she comes before us. A graceful, comely woman,[53] merry and buxom, with brown hair and bright eyes, candid, sincere, a brilliant conversationalist in days when conversation was no mere slipshod gabble of slang but cut and thrust of poignant epigram and repartee; warm-hearted, perhaps too warm-hearted, and ready to lend a helping hand even to the most undeserving, a quality which gathered all Grub Street round her door. At a period when any and every writer, mean or great, of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... us go to our ducks and hens," said the pope. "The people have made a bugbear of me, before which they fall upon the earth. But the good animals, who understand nothing of these things, they cackle and grunt, and gabble at me, as if I were nothing but a common goose-herd and by no means the sainted father of Christendom! Come, come to my dear brutes, who are so frank and sincere that they cackle and gabble directly in my face as soon as their beaks and snouts are grown. They are not so humble and devoted, so ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... getting into soliloquy; "or patients, either. A rich man who took to the profession simply for the love of it, can't complain on that score. But to have an interloping she-doctor take a family I've attended ten years, out of my hands, and to hear the hodge-podge gabble about physiological laws, and woman's rights, and no taxation without representation, they learn from her,—well, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one's ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn't a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth, yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked like a gentleman, though two buttons were off his coat and there was a patch ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... courtliness, Margaret, the Colonel, and Maclachlan fell over one another, so to speak, in telling the Prince who I was. For a few seconds there was a gabble of introductions, which made ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... must surprise, yes—shock, his family. She was Chinese, to them a heathen: they would be unable to comprehend any mitigating dignity of rank. Where they'd actually suffer, he realized, would be in the attitude of Salem, the stupid gabble, the censure and cold pity caused ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was reserved for our day and generation to gabble them over unthinking, carelessly unmindful of the fearful fate the ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... Rutherford Street, exactly as I expected he would. Business keeps me in this town, so I write to you to set the matter straight. I inclose with this the pages of feeble scribble-scrabble which the creature Sharpin calls a report. Look them over; and when you have made your way through all the gabble, I think you will agree with me that the conceited booby has looked for the thief in every direction but the right one. You can lay your hand on the guilty person in five minutes, now. Settle the case at once; forward your report to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... cries and chattering voices reaching to the most acute notes. Leaping up to the very highest branches of the trees they began to shower down upon us broken twigs, leaves, nuts and other fruits. They seemed to be holding a meeting overhead at which each one—and they were a multitude—tried to gabble out a speech and to make himself ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... other's arms. They both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn't get mellow enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... me (noting how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village which has not its factories of this description driven by milk-and-water power. I cannot conceive ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... hours of study, although they may enjoy distinctions, may be accorded titles, be authorized by official robes, and solemnly installed in the chairs of the elders. Just snatched from the cradle and hastily weaned, they mouth the rules of Priscian and Donatus; while still beardless boys they gabble with childish stammering the Categorics and Peri Hermeneias, in the writing of which the great Aristotle is said to have dipped his pen in his heart's blood. Passing through these faculties with baneful haste and a harmful diploma, they lay violent hands upon Moses, and sprinkling about ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em when their backs is turned," said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be obliged to ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... guinea-fowl when a hawk's in air! I must have snoozed; yet, I caught the gabble. There'll be A clatter all day now, with two women's tongues, Clack-clack against each other, in the house— Two pendulums in one clock. Lucky I'm deaf. But, I remember. Give me back the bairn. Nay: this is not the wench. ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by—say, a wife—he, or she, too, (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral communication?—can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?—away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmerman, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo, the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There won't be any Waterloo for another ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning,[387-96] but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... head aches badly!" said Henrietta. She wished to rid herself of this uncalled-for gabble, in order that she might devote ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... the old croakers who were getting into their trowsers would reply with—"Oh, stop your gabble, will you? don't be in such a hurry, now. You feel sweet, don't you?" with other exclamations, some of which were full ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... gravel beach near Walmer, a curious sound was heard through the quiet haze; it was distant and continuous, but like the gabble of 10,000 ducks, and, though staring hard through the binocular glass, one could only make out a confused jumble of lightish-coloured forms all in a row afar off. Soon, however, a bugle sounded the "Retire," and then it was plain that a whole regiment of soldiers was ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... time when they separated jerkily and became the hazy but definable figures of men in rough seaman's clothes. Johnny had never heard Breton French before; in his dazed condition the apparently insane gabble might well have been the tongue of another world and gave him little assurance. He hurt so badly and so generally that he could not have determined that he was lying down save for a view of ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... share without champagne Or muscadel, your frolic; The glad delirium of your joy, Your fun unapostolic; Your drunken jargon through the fields, Your bobolinkish gabble, Your fine Anacreontic glee, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... she had been standing at the fence, her elbows on the top rail, gazing pensively at the light in Kenny's window. A clump of honeysuckle bushes was between her and the unsuspecting servants. At first she had paid little or no attention to the gabble of the darkies, her thoughts being centred on her own serious affairs. She had been considerably shaken and distressed by the unpleasant experience of the early afternoon. Somehow she longed to take her troubles to Kenneth, to rid herself ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... like a conqueror ascending his triumphal car; then, sinking on the velvet cushion in an attitude of studied grace, remain in silent prostration for a certain time; then mutter over a Collect, and gabble through the Lord's Prayer, rise, draw off one bright lavender glove, to give the congregation the benefit of his sparkling rings, lightly pass his fingers through his well-curled hair, flourish a cambric handkerchief, recite a very short passage, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... at the Mendicant Friars and Jacobins, who are the two hemispheres of the Christian world; by whose gyronomonic circumbilvaginations, as by two celivagous filopendulums, all the autonomatic metagrobolism of the Romish Church, when tottering and emblustricated with the gibble-gabble gibberish of this odious error and heresy, is homocentrically poised. But what harm, in the devil's name, have these poor devils the Capuchins and Minims done unto him? Are not these beggarly devils sufficiently ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... are huge and sprout up in all directions. Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial passion in the current efforts to fit him into a German frame, and make him an agent of Prussian frightfulness in letters. Such childish gabble one looks for in the New York Times, and there is where one actually finds it. Even the literary monthlies have stood clear of it; it is important only as material for that treatise upon the patrioteer and his bawling which remains to ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... that. She sat on, silently regarding him. For a few minutes she honestly believed that he was a genuine specimen of the "little people" who were said to make green Erin their favorite home. But when he began to gabble in a hoarse, excited tone of how he had long been expecting this "find"; how he had watched his opportunity when all the household should be absent that he might disobey and use the explosive that would lessen his labor so greatly, she ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... Mathys," interrupted the royal lady, "and the quacks repeat it from their masters Hippocrates and Galen. Such parrot gabble does not please me. To my woman's reason, it seems rather that when the mind is ill we should try a remedy whose effect upon it has already been proved, and I think ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... pleasures, having no baby, apparently at loose ends with her husband, and through it all so cocksure of herself and her outrageous views about war, and smiling about them with such an air, and in her whole manner, such a tone of amused superiority. She talked about a world for the strong, bits of gabble from Nietzsche and that sort of rot; she spoke blithely of a Rome reborn, the "Wings of the Eagles" heard again. This part of it she had taken, no doubt, from her new Italian ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... They come over here in large numbers from other countries, chiefly from France; and in London abound in Leicester-square, and are constantly to be met with under the Quadrant in Regent-street, where they grin, gabble, chatter, and sometimes dance, to the no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... would drive an Englishman mad. A Boer farmer, sitting on his stoep, large and strong, but absolutely lethargic, is the very incarnation of the spirit of the veldt. At the same time, when one remembers the clatter and gabble of our civilisation, it is impossible to deny him a certain dignity, though it may be ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... mislead and torment the traveller on moor and in bog and swamp, and guide him to an untimely death amid desert solitudes. Ploss, Henderson, and Swainson have a good deal to say on the subject of Frau Berctha and her train, the Wild Huntsman, the "Gabble Retchet," "Yeth Hounds," etc. Mr. Henderson tells us that, "in North Devon the local name is 'yeth hounds,' heath and heathen being both 'yeth' in the North Devon dialect. Unbaptized infants are there buried in a part of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... that gabble an insult to you, walking along and minding your own business?" His heat was alarming; he shook his fist to ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... the nation in a war for a questionable right, and a possession of doubtful advantage; but his invective against his opponents is very coarse; he does not perform the work of dissection neatly: he mangles rather than cuts. When he applies the word "gabble" to the elocution of Chatham, we are tempted to compare him to one of the baser fowl, spoken of by an ancient poet, that clamour ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... yawp, yawp! Under the moon and sun. It's aye the rabble, And I to gabble, And hey! for the tale ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... all a-jangle from trail-strain and the depressing atmosphere of the Watts ranch, it seemed to Patty she must shriek aloud if the woman persisted in her ceaseless gabble. ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... close to Third Avenue, something reassuring in the sidewalk gabble, the air of cheap carnival, the white arc lights over open fruit stands, and the percussive roar of Elevated trains. Presently even Third Avenue would withdraw to over its shops, the sidewalks fall quiet and darken, pedestrians become sinister. She shivered against that lateness; stood for a ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... soubrette trilling snatches of her topical song as she creamed off her make-up, came to them through the sulky gloom of the corridor. Behind the closed door of Miss De Voe's dressing room, the gabble of the pink satin ponies was like hash in the chopping. Overhead, moving scenery created a remote sort of thunder. She stood looking up at him, her ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... wraps and drew a deep chair to the fire. "I move we get thawed out while we gabble," she proposed, with her deep, husky chuckle. "I'm so frozen that it'll take a week of Sundays to shed my icicles. This zero weather isn't particularly inspiring after the balmy breezes ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... done hurriedly, carelessly; we could not follow them. The last was the rubbing on of ashes—she had been a worshipper of Siva—also they covered the closed eyes with ashes and patted them down flat. And all the time the gabble of the women mocked at the silence of death. There was no reverence, no sense of solemnity; the ceremonial so full of symbol to its makers, the thinkers of Vedic times, was to them simply a custom, a set of customs, to be followed and got through as quickly as might ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... with us all, and especially with women—we don't think enough. The mass of young women trifle a great portion of their life away on the smallest imaginable things. They chatter like birds and gabble like geese, without the trouble of thinking. The things they see and hear every day awaken no consecutive thought. The stars shine above them, and they call them pretty things, but never ask the astronomic ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Speaker does— With nobody to help him except the trembling Sergeant, While still begin and never end the shout and scream and buzz? Oh, never any where, save in desert groves Brazilian, Was ever heard such endless and aimless gabble yet. For there the tribes of monkeys to the number of a million, Screech and chatter without ceasing, from the sunrise to the set. Rap! rap! rap! To quell the rising clamor; Order! order! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... ends into a mad, brawling dissonance: but he teaches them to know their places; and, "weak masters though they be," without such guidance, yet under his ordering they become powerful, and work together as if endowed with a rational soul and a social purpose; their insane gabble turning to speech, their savage ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the shrill ringing of a bell, the sound of feet and the gabble of a phonographic message. The man in yellow appeared. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. When his "apology" ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... between them. There was a little desultory talk and seeking of places, and then the four elder children, standing round the table, read a chapter, verse for verse. Then followed the recitation of the catechism in that queer, mechanical gabble that Bessie recollected so well. "If you stop to think you are sure to break down," was still the warning. After that Jack said the collect and epistle for the day, and Willie and Tom said the gospel, and the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... draggled, drenched, and with clinging garments, they were so slow in getting on, that it was no delusion that the water was higher, and the rocks lower; and even Gertrude had neither breath nor spirits to gabble when that grave anxious face met her, and a strong careful hand lifted and helped, first her, then Lance, up and down every difficulty; and when she perceived how the newcomer avoided point-blank looking at the bare ancles that had sometimes ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... A gabble of fierce tongues broke out; Chris pressed up to Dom Anthony's back, and looked out. The space was very narrow, and he could not see much more than a man's leg across a saddle, the brown shoulder of a horse in front, and a smoky haze beyond and over the horse's back. The leg shifted a little ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... incapable of motion for a moment. Then, as though galvanized into action, he began to gabble his inevitable oaths, while he leaped hurriedly for his rifle. He grabbed it from under the tarpaulin, jerked the lever, flung it to his ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... said, "never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... their life. In my youth, people learned to speak 'the language,' as the French was then called, just sufficient to explain a motto; enough of drawing to copy a pattern, and music enough to play a contre danse if it were wanted; but they did not learn, as now, to gabble about everything in the world; but they learned to think, and if they knew less of art and splendour, why, they had the art to direct themselves, and to leave ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... boots and a Spanish cloak. And yet, with all its glaring faults, it is a story the pages of which ought not to be skipped. So far as the narrative goes, one may skip a score of leaves at will; but in the midst of aimless and weary gabble, passages of extraordinary beauty and uncanny insight strike out with the force of a sudden blow. The influence of Dickens is once more clearly seen in the sickly little girl Nelly, whose strange caprices and flashes of passion are like Goethe's ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... wearied me, and just as soon as I had a reasonable pretext I ordered him out of the foc'sle. This wasn't as high-handed as it sounds, for Cockney had the gall one afternoon to leave the deck during his watch out, and break into my watch's rest with his obscene gabble. ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... party-coloured dress Of patch'd and pye-ball'd languages; 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think when he did gabble, Th' had heard three labourers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne'er be spent; And truly, to support that charge, He had supplies ...
— English Satires • Various
... to the heart by this cold and grinning kindness as much as by the harshness of Keller or the coarse German banter of Nucingen. The familiarity of the man, and his grotesque gabble excited by champagne, seemed to tarnish the soul of the honest bourgeois as though he came from a house of financial ill-fame. He went down the stairway and found himself in the streets without knowing where he was going. As he walked ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... horizon, the air was very cold, the wind was rising, and the waves of the noble Tagus began to be crested with foam. I told the boy that it was scarcely possible for the boat to carry so much sail without upsetting; upon which he laughed, and began to gabble in a most incoherent manner. He had the most harsh and rapid articulation that has ever come under my observation; it was the scream of the hyena blended with the bark of the terrier; but it was by no means an index of his disposition, which I soon ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... done well to ship him to America. At the opera, with Lord Ossory and Mr. Fitzpatrick, I talked through the round of the boxes, from Lady Pembroke's on the right to Lady Hervey's on the left, where Dolly's illness and Lady Harrington's snuffing gabble were the topics rather than Giardini's fiddling. Mr. Storer took me to Foote's dressing-room at the Haymarket, where we found the Duke of Cumberland lounging. I was presented, and thought his Royal Highness had far less dignity than the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... merriment. Hence many a war-spear Cold from the morning shall be clutched in the fingers, Heaved in the hand, no harp-music's sound shall 80 Waken the warriors, but the wan-coated raven Fain over fey ones freely shall gabble, Shall say to the eagle how he sped in the eating, When, the wolf his companion, he plundered the slain." So the high-minded hero was rehearsing these stories 85 Loathsome to hear; he ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... everything, in fact at once. This fellow C—— is an original, who knows how to make his Chinese slave with the greatest industry and sets them an admirable example himself. A rather desperate lot are these servants, although most of them are professed Roman Catholics, and can gabble French learned years ago at Monseigneur F——'s. And that reminds me: no one has thought of the gallant bishop during the past few days. That shows how indifferent the abnormal makes one; the French Legation has attempted once to get into communication with the distant cathedral and failed. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Rabble may appear inspir'd, By Coxcombs envy'd, and by Fools admir'd. I pity Madmen who attempt to fly, And raise their Airy Babel to the Sky. Who, arm'd with Gabble, to create a Name, Design a Beauty, and a Monster frame, Not so the Seat of Phoebus role, which lay In Ruins buried, and a long Decay. To Britany the Temple was convey'd, By Natures utmost force, and more than Human Aid. Built from the Basis by a noble Few, The stately Fabrick ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... were following him, of course, they would use a different scrambler circuit than the one which was plugged into his own unit, but he would be able to hear the gabble of voices, even if he couldn't understand what ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... without reply, she submitted to the banal boredom of this blustering dame's society gabble. Mrs. Gannette hooked her arm into the girl's and led her to a divan. "It's a great affair, isn't it?" she panted, settling her round, unshapely form out over the seat. "Dear me! I did intend to come in costume. Was coming as a tomato. Ha! ha! Thought ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and didn't he gabble out a whole parcel of purgatory talk? He's as sure gone as a stuck pig, I tell ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... flock of somewhat imposing ladies everywhere; to have two cabs full on all occasions; to be obliged to support the invalids to follow the caprices of the giddy, to gratify the demands of the curious, and to hear the gabble of the whole five day ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... characters of the play from a French novel, based on an Italian plot, and wove around the story a lot of glittering talk to please the lords and ladies who listened to the silly gabble of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... gen'lman bought a pebble of him, (This pebble i' sooth, sir, which I hold i' my hand) - And paid for't, LIKE a gen'lman, on the nail. "Did I o'ercharge him a ha'penny? Devil a bit. Fiddlepin's end! Got out, you blazing ass! Gabble o' the goose. Don't bugaboo-baby ME! Go double or quits? Yah! tittup! what's the odds?" There's the transaction view'd ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... had given him the clue to the unlocking of the door, emphasized the importance of something stored at the far end, an object or objects which must be used first. He had wondered about that tape. A sensation of urgency, almost of despair, had come through the gabble of alien words, the quick sequence of diagrams and pictures. The message might have been taped under a threat of ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... Moses. "While thou art pledging the book I shall have time to finish davening." He hitched up his Talith and commenced to gabble off, "Happy are they who dwell in Thy house; ever shall they praise Thee, Selah," and was already saying, "And a Redeemer shall come unto Zion," by the time Esther rushed out through the door with the pledge. It was a gaudily bound volume ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... social problems by the ordinary Downing-street methods had been startlingly impressed on him in Carlyle's writings; and in the parliamentary talk of that day he had come to have as little faith for the putting down of any serious evil, as in a then notorious city Alderman's gabble for the putting down of suicide. The latter had stirred his indignation to its depths just before he came to Italy, and his increased opportunities of solitary reflection since had strengthened and extended it. When he came therefore to think of his new story for Christmas ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... not. Niver did want to get back when he was away. But, say, Marjie Star-face, Fort Wallace away out on the Plains ain't Rockport; and rich men's homes and all that gabble they was desecratin' the Sabbath with at supper last night—" O'mie broke off and took the girl's trembling hand in his. "Oh! I can look after that rascal's good name, but I don't dare to fix things up for you two, no matter what I know." ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... wind is not so cold As the bright smile he sees me win, Nor the host's oldest wine so old As our poor gabble, sour and thin. ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... affect; It was a parti-color'd dress Of patch'd and piebald languages: 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three laborers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne'er be spent: And truly, to support that charge, He had supplies as vast and large, For he could coin or counterfeit New words with little ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... stale, flat and unprofitable.' Hamlet, act i. sc. 2. See ante, iii. 350, where Boswell is reproached by Johnson with 'bringing in gabble,' when he makes ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... had kept an unbroken silence. He was eating up de Spain with his eyes, and de Spain not only ached to hear him speak but was resolved to make him. Sandusky had stood motionless from the instant he entered the room. He knew all about the preliminary gabble of a fight and took no interest in it. He did not know all about de Spain, and being about to face his bullets he had prudence enough to wonder whether the man could have brought a reputation to Sleepy Cat without having done something to earn it. What Sandusky was sensibly intent ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... from that west of vast and burning color to the delicately dotted eggs in the tiny cradle—the same relief felt in descending from a mountain-top to the valley; in turning from the sweep of the sea to watch beach-fleas hopping over the sand; in giving over the wisdom of men for the gabble of my ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... anticipated.—"It may be redargued," saith he, "by those who have more spleen than brain, that forasmuch as the Archbishop preacheth in English, he will not thereby much edify the Turkish folk, who do altogether hold in a vain gabble of their own." But this (to use his own language) he "evites," by judiciously observing, that where service was performed in an unknown tongue, the devotion of the people was always observed to be much increased thereby; as, for instance, in the church of ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... tear you limb from limb! I've put enough of other people's private lives on the screen! My own stays off! I'm not going to have even a phoney screen-show built around Babs and me for people to gabble about!" ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... continue more and more to look for a junction between Peel and Stanley. God forbid, however, that we should have two parties established upon the principles of a religious opposition to each other; it would be the worst of evils, and yet the times appear to threaten something of the sort. There is the gabble of 'the Church in danger,' the menacing and sullen disposition of the Dissenters, all armed with new power, and the restless and increasing turbulence of the Catholics, all hating one another, and the elements of discord stirred up first by one and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... of the hill, and we returned together to the house, attempting on the way to make the boys speak English, but without success, for the eldest, who spoke nothing but English when I had left him two months before at Beaucaire, now chose to gabble in Provencal, which he had picked up from his nurse, regardless of his Aunt Caroline's efforts to make him talk in his native tongue. Subsequently, when he perceived that no one understood him, he quickly dropped his Provencal and replaced ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... all right, and must gabble a bit, now I know that I haven't lost an eye. You see, Fraser, the beast, although he was only ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... established custom, Herr Carovius failed to show the slightest interest in her gabble; at least he made no concessions to her. Nor did he fuss and fume; he gazed into space, and seemed to be thinking about many serious things all at the same time. His silence made Philippina raging mad. She jumped ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... and the landscape, as I describe it, had the crude coloring of the Newlyn school, which she abominates. She thinks Turner might approve of Suarez in his black and white stripes, but the Guanaco crater reminds her of Gustave Dore, who always exaggerated his tone values. I learn that sort of gabble by heart. Jennie's a good sort, yet ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... I'm glad to know one person in the country who doesn't gabble his head off. You haven't answered any of my questions, and you've made me feel as if you'd found a dangerous, wild woman that morning. It isn't very flattering, but I think you're ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... arrangement of slavery." Their watch-word was "A Free Union or Disintegration." The treatment of fugitive slaves by commanders in the field produced a clamor. Lincoln insisted on strict obedience to the two laws, the Fugitive Slave Act and the First Confiscation Act. Abolitionists sneered at "all this gabble about the sacredness of the Constitution."(3) But Lincoln was not to be moved. When General Hunter, taking a leaf from the book of Fremont, tried to force his hand, he did not hesitate. Hunter had issued a proclamation by which the slaves in the region ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Tom; "at least—I forgot—Una did. I suppose that's because you gabble such a lot of French to Marie, isn't it, Una? Marie talks as fast as seven cats all ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... but he would have been also a great reformer, so she stamped him down into nothingness under her iron heel. And for almost a score of years she had kept him in Ruscino, where he buried and baptized the old and new creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any ordinary country priest able to gabble through the ritual could have done as well as he. Some few of the more liberal and learned dignitaries of the Church did indeed think that it was waste of great powers, but he had the Sacred College against him, and no one ventured to speak ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... regarded as "a most excellent thing," in man at least, among the lower classes in Japan. The people speak at the top of their voices, and, though most words and syllables end in vowels, the general effect of a conversation is like the discordant gabble of a farm-yard. The next room to mine is full of stormbound travellers, and they and the house-master kept up what I thought was a most important argument for four hours at the top of their voices. I supposed it must be on the new and important ordinance granting local elective ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... There isn't time. If you start off jawing again, I'll shoot right in your stomach. See? But I know now-I know now! What we're going to do first, my man, is an examination for concealed arms—an examination for concealed arms. And look here! When I tell you to do a thing, don't start off at a gabble—do it brisk." ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... might like to have a pipe while I examine this gem at leisure. One does not gabble the common-places of life when in the presence of the supreme in art. I find that a really fine picture induces a feeling of reverence, an emotion akin to the influence of a mountain range, or a dim cathedral. Pray burn incense. I am almost ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... constant gabble, now talking to herself, now to the doll, hugging and kissing it with a great show ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... be superfluous to note that the "a" in "Gabler" should be sounded long and full, like the "a" in "Garden"—NOT like the "a" in "gable" or in "gabble." ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... faces, and beautiful eyes, stop in their spinning, holding the distaff suspended, while they examine us at leisure. At our left, as we turn from the church and its sunny piazza, where old women sit and gabble, down the ravine, is a snug village under the mountain by the shore, with a great square medieval tower. On the right, upon rocky points, are remains of round towers, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... speak, I infallibly talk nonsense. What is still worse, instead of learning how to be silent when I have absolutely nothing to say, it is generally at such times that I have a violent inclination; and, endeavoring to pay my debt of conversation as speedily as possible, I hastily gabble a number of words without ideas, happy when they only chance to mean nothing; thus endeavoring to conquer or hide my incapacity, I ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... all trees look alike to city gals, but don't stop to gabble. Find the axe. Pick up your basket. I feel so queer every little spell, an' I must get home. That shin-bone's broke, true as preachin', an' six seven my ribs, by the feel of 'em, for my foot wobbles 'round as if it was hung on a string, ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... roughly it made us sick and faint. There were other things done hurriedly, carelessly; we could not follow them. The last was the rubbing on of ashes—she had been a worshipper of Siva—also they covered the closed eyes with ashes and patted them down flat. And all the time the gabble of the women mocked at the silence of death. There was no reverence, no sense of solemnity; the ceremonial so full of symbol to its makers, the thinkers of Vedic times, was to them simply a custom, a set of customs, to be followed and got through as quickly as might be by heedless ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... stick forward like a weasel's; his form is square and supple, and he stands more than perpendicular. Ready and sharp is he for a joke, cold and unfeeling in manner, and troublesome as the varlet blackbirds that sit on a tree and gabble and moot, while other birds ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... by a gander and his flock of geese that stood round him; shook their wings and set up their goose-gabble. It was day then, although there was still a star in the sky. He threw furze-roots where there was a glow, and made a fire blaze up again. Then the dogs of the town came down to look at ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... horsemen go furiously galloping past; they are Dyadin people endeavoring to overtake me for the kindly purpose of worrying me out of my senses, and to prevent me even eating a bite of bread unseasoned with their everlasting gabble. Although the road from Dyadin eastward leads steadily upward, they fancy that nothing less than a wild, sweeping gallop will enable them to accomplish their fell purpose; I listen to their clattering ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... closed the door, and Nan saw then that there were at least twenty girls in the room. Some had joined the procession from other corridors. Now they all began to gabble at once, and Amelia ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... conversation is painful in the extreme to any one who wishes to retain a shred of respect for his own species. If you listen long, and then fix your mind so that you can pick out the exact significance of what you have heard, you become confounded. Take the scraps of "bar" gabble. "So I says, 'Lay me fours.' And he winks and says, 'I'll give you seven to two, if you like.' Well, you know, the horse won, and I stood him a bottle out of the three pound ten, so I wasn't much in." "'What!' says I; 'step outside along o' me, and bring your pal with you, and I'll spread your ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... four in the window, if you remember, all very much alike, and each one labelled in plain figures twenty marks. I don't pretend to speak German fluently, but I can generally make myself understood with a little effort, and gather the sense of what is said to me, provided they don't gabble. I went into the shop. A young girl came up to me; she was a pretty, quiet little soul, one might almost say, demure; not at all the sort of girl from whom you would have expected such a thing. I was never more surprised in ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the leading ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... succession; and you would suppose I was acquainted with its contents. But the commissioner (worthy man) spends his days in doing little else; and when we bear in mind the parallel case of the irreverent curate, we need not be surprised that he took the passage tempo prestissimo, in one roulade of gabble—that I, with the trained attention of an educated man, could gather but a fraction of its import—and the sailors nothing. No profanity in giving orders, no sheath-knives, Midway Island and any ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... me, and necessarily understands me—I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... that at the best are very second-rate eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying gabble, there are various forms of "ethical" teaching, advocated and practised in America and in the elementary schools of this country. For example, a story of an edifying sort is told to the children, and comments are elicited upon the behaviour of the characters. "Would you ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... gabble like a pack of old women," laughed Jack, as the friendly argument about the crackling fire grew ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... them, when they began slowly to walk towards the group who were plucking bunches of woodbine from the hedge across the little stream, at the risk of tumbling in, and distributing the flowers among the ladies, amidst a great deal of laughing and gabble. Then Miss Gertrude made Mr. Mervyn rather a haughty and slight salutation, her aunt thought, and so dismissed him; he, too, made a bow, but a very low one, and walked straight off to the first lady ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... tells us, and that badly dressed sturdy little boy with a sullen face is Louis. Pierre tries to make conversation in our own language to entertain us. "Are you to Australie going?" he asks. We tell him we are going first to Egypt. "Monter au chameau!" he cries excitedly, going off into a gabble of French and beseeching us to take him with us as "boy." We tell him that he is too small and that it costs much money. "Have you money—English?" he asks. He is very much interested when we show him half a crown and explain that it is equal ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... early dinner, again with the screaming gabble of the fat old Countess, the fidgeting and shoulder-raising of the unshaven priest, the smell of fried oil and stewed onions, Count Alvise made me get into the cart beside him, and whirled me along among clouds of dust, between the endless glister of poplars, acacias, and maples, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... They both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn't get mellow enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dialects in which a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to satisfy a sweetish ear. It is like the charming gabble of children, who love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes. Mr. Grout[L] and other missionaries note examples of this: Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile, is a sentence to illustrate this native disposition. The alliteration is sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... creed, and they gabble his. I do not think much of the Cardinal; Although he is a holy churchman, and I quite admit his dulness. Well, sir, from now We count you of our household [He holds out his hand for GUIDO to kiss. GUIDO starts back in horror, but at a gesture from COUNT MORANZONE, ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... gale that well-nigh blew me out to sea? How fierce that salt wind blew, a-yearn to drive me to the shore's edge and whirl me over! How fresh and tameless it beats against me yet, blowing the cobwebs from my brain as that real breeze outside the pier could never do! When my monitory friends gabble of change of air I inhale that wind and am strong. For the child is of the elements, elemental, and the man of the complexities, complex. And so that good salt wind blows across my childhood still, though it cannot sweep away the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village which has not its factories of this description driven by (milk-and-) water ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... was that several Acts should be kept by each undergraduate; for, to keep up the number (as it seemed), each student had to gabble through a ridiculous form "Si quaestiones tuae falsae sint, Cadit Quaestio:—sed quaestiones tuae falsae sunt, Ergo valent Consequentia et Argumentum." I have forgotten time and place ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... persons go to the theatres; the playbills, however, are not seductive. If you go in, you will find the house nearly empty; the actors gabble their parts with as little action as possible. You see they are bored, and they bore us. Sometimes when some actor, naturally comic, says or does something funny, the audience laughs, and then suddenly leaves off and looks more serious than before. Laughter seems out of place. ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... as the French was then called, just sufficient to explain a motto; enough of drawing to copy a pattern, and music enough to play a contre danse if it were wanted; but they did not learn, as now, to gabble about everything in the world; but they learned to think, and if they knew less of art and splendour, why, they had the art to direct themselves, and to leave the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... and Ganymedes exclaimed, "You gabble away about things that don't concern heaven or earth: and none of you cares how the price of grain pinches. I couldn't even get a mouthful of bread today, by Hercules, I couldn't. How the drought does hang on! We've had famine for a year. If the damned AEdiles ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... there clinging with all his might he was conscious of a wild gabble of voices in an unknown tongue, somewhere above him, and then as if out of a mist a stone fell, struck that to which he clung, and glanced off, to be heard no more. But another small stone came rattling down, in company with some earth, and opening his eyes he found ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... went so far (granting Davie sprung on them) would they not have gone so much further? But of course I knew they were a difficulty; determined to carry them through in a conversation; approached this (it seems) with cowardly anxiety; and filled it with gabble, sir, gabble. I have left all my facts, but have removed 42 lines. I should not wonder but what I'll end by re-writing it. It is not the technicalities that shocked you, it was my bad art. It is very strange ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... go bodily into half a quarter of it—would be swallowed up like a mouthful, and never seen again! Castle Warlock was twice as old—that was something! but why had not Lady Joan told him hundreds of stories about Cairncarque, instead of letting him gabble on about their little place? But she could not love her castle as he did his, for she had no such father in it! That must be what made the difference! That was why she did not care to talk about it! Was he actually ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... keeping it clasped in her hands she went inside the house and stood waiting to know his pleasure, surprise—almost apprehension at this unexpected summons—showing plainly in her face. "You were reciting some gabble on the steps a little bit ago. Say ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... since entering the schoolroom: it was really an effort for me to answer him; I felt as if I wanted only to be let alone, and I realised, without being able to control it, that my voice was very irritable as I said briefly, "One has got to be silent when you begin to gabble." ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... the cathedral before—indeed, we attended the service daily, and I had been appalled, rather than astonished, by what I saw and heard: the unintelligible service—the irreverent gabble of the choristers and readers—the scanty congregation—the meagre portion of the vast building which seemed to be turned to any use: but never more than that evening, did I feel the desolateness, the doleful inutility, of that vast desert nave, with its aisles and ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Jane was utterly ignorant what the gabble was about, except that Katharine had been in very odd company, and done very strange things with those boys, and she gave a melancholy little sound in the pause; but Kate, taking breath, ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Indeed, indeed, I have loved you all! You, the workers, all puffed up and dyspeptic and ready for the asylums; and you, the good-for-nothing lazy drones; you, the strong silent men, who have heads quite empty, like gourds; and you also, the frivolous, useless men that chatter and gabble to no purpose all day long. Even you, that, having begun to read this book, could get no further than page 47, and especially you who have read it manfully in spite of the flesh, I love you all, and give you here and now my final, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... anything; in a state of physical and mental inertia that would drive an Englishman mad. A Boer farmer, sitting on his stoep, large and strong, but absolutely lethargic, is the very incarnation of the spirit of the veldt. At the same time, when one remembers the clatter and gabble of our civilisation, it is impossible to deny him a certain dignity, though it may be ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Cap'n, eagerly, forgetting for the moment the presence of Constable Nute, "those wimmen might gabble a little at you and make threats and things like that—but—but—there isn't anything they can do, you understand!" He winked at Mr. Parrott. "You know what I ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Third Avenue, something reassuring in the sidewalk gabble, the air of cheap carnival, the white arc lights over open fruit stands, and the percussive roar of Elevated trains. Presently even Third Avenue would withdraw to over its shops, the sidewalks fall quiet and darken, pedestrians become sinister. She shivered against that lateness; stood ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Constitution actually invited a foreign envoy, Jefferson, to take part with them in their work. Jefferson had sense enough to decline the invitation; but what gleam of sense, political or other, had the blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by such men is absurd. If it had existed when they met, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... a deep and peculiar interest; very few remarks are made among themselves, and no one puts a single question to me or ventures upon any remarks. All this is in strange contrast to the everlasting gabble and the noisy and persistent importunities of the Persians. The Afghans are plainly full of speculations concerning my mission, who I am, and what I am doing in their country; although they regard the bicycle with great curiosity, the machine is evidently ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... I ain't got a quarrel with 'em, the Lord knows. I go to church like clockwork, and pay my pew-rent, too, which is more than some do that gabble the most about salvation. If I pay for the preacher's keep it's only fair that I should get some of the good that comes to him hereafter; that's how it looks to me; so I don't trouble my head much about the ins and the outs of getting ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... audience, too. Frambord came out with half a column in the Critique des Arts with a pretty compliment to Alice's executive energy, and added 'that it was one of the rare soirees of the season.' He must have been drunk when he wrote it. I played badly—I never can play when they gabble. It was as garrulous as a fish market in front. Enfin! It was over and we telegraphed his reverence the result; from a money standpoint it ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... even the ambitious among them set out with the deliberate purpose of becoming the beggars of men's votes; of winning an office the chief worth of which, in their eyes, lies in its emoluments?—when even the glorious and far-sounding voice of fame for them means only the gabble and cackle ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the respect due to his faith or his profession—greedy for preferment, yet without a thought of the duties of his office. It was the common practice of this man to leap from his horse at the church door on a holiday, after following a pack of hounds, huddle on his surplice, and gabble over the service with the most indecent mockery of religion. Do I speak with acrimony? I have reason. It was this chaplain who first led my lord to Newmarket; it was he who first taught my lord to drink. Then he was a wit—an insufferable ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... will do so with pleasure if you think it necessary, but I dread, on your account as well as my own, the newspaper talk and gabble that will follow. It might embarrass you with others. With the modern facility of dictating you can converse with me without restraint, and all letters passing between us can be returned to the writer. In conclusion ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the types themselves, detected in the fact; and one had them together. Obsequiousness ran out of the first like wine out of a bottle, sullenness congested in the second. Obsequiousness was all smiles; he ran to catch your eye, he loved to gabble; and he had about a dozen words of beach English, and an eighth-of-an-inch veneer of Christianity. Sullens was industrious; a big down-looking bee. When he was spoken to, he answered with a black look and a shrug of one shoulder, but the thing would be done. I don't ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Under the moon and sun. It's aye the rabble, And I to gabble, And hey! for the tale that is ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... "pacing and repacing in austerest thought" that foolish Street; which to him was a true Delphic avenue, and supernatural Whispering-gallery, where the "Ghosts of Life" rounded strange secrets in his ear. O thou philosophic Teufelsdrockh, that listenest while others only gabble, and with thy quick tympanum hearest ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... blue bundles lying on shelves aloft. Anon the bundles stir, talk and puff smoke. Above is a loft six feet square: a ladder brings it in communication with the ground floor. Mongolians are ever coming down, but the gabble of tongues above shows that a host is still left. Like an omnibus, a Chinese house is never full. Nor is it ever quiet. At all hours of the night may be heard their talk and the clatter of their wooden shoes. A Chinaman does not retire like an American, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... of the friends began to tell her together. But the little old woman with the bent back and rheumatic limbs understood one thing, if she made nothing else out of the general gabble. The strange boy had been in the water, ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... consecutive good lines." He would only admit two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sent for him. Some kind of a gabble-fest on the star-star level, I gather. Otherwise we're almost ready to blast. And we know what kind of cargo to ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... I share without champagne Or muscadel, your frolic; The glad delirium of your joy, Your fun unapostolic; Your drunken jargon through the fields, Your bobolinkish gabble, Your fine Anacreontic ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... much at schools, and was really an able and spirited teacher, liking the occupation; and laying hold of the first book in her way, she requested Conrade to read. He obeyed, but in such a detestable gabble that she looked up appealingly to Fanny, who suggested, "My dear, you can read better than that." He read four lines, not badly, but then broke off, "Mamma, are not we to have ponies? Coombe heard of a pony this morning; it is to be seen at the 'Jolly ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... husband at the foot of the hill, and we returned together to the house, attempting on the way to make the boys speak English, but without success, for the eldest, who spoke nothing but English when I had left him two months before at Beaucaire, now chose to gabble in Provencal, which he had picked up from his nurse, regardless of his Aunt Caroline's efforts to make him talk in his native tongue. Subsequently, when he perceived that no one understood him, he quickly dropped his Provencal and replaced ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... heard of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. When his "apology" is ended, Balaustion replies, censuring ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... rocks, and reached the party in good time; for draggled, drenched, and with clinging garments, they were so slow in getting on, that it was no delusion that the water was higher, and the rocks lower; and even Gertrude had neither breath nor spirits to gabble when that grave anxious face met her, and a strong careful hand lifted and helped, first her, then Lance, up and down every difficulty; and when she perceived how the newcomer avoided point-blank looking at the bare ancles that had sometimes to make long stretches, a burning ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... case, for he was like the rest of the tribe, always ready to fight with words, not acts; but in the midst of his gabble Joan interrupted with the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., Godson ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... himself was probably a person who, like Franz, preferred the enjoyment of solitude and his own thoughts to the frivolous gabble of the guides. And his appearance had nothing extraordinary in it; but the hesitation with which he proceeded, stopping and listening with anxious attention at every step he took, convinced Franz that he expected the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... queer," Hughie explained to his friend. "When he sits there with his feet on the stove smoking away and reading something or other, and letting them all gabble like a lot of ducks, it just makes me mad. But when he wakes up he puts the fear of death on you, and when he reads he makes you shiver through and through. You know that long rigmarole, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen'? I used to hate it. Well, sir, ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... Of patch'd and pye-ball'd languages; 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think when he did gabble, Th' had heard three labourers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne'er be spent; And truly, to support that charge, He had supplies as vast as ...
— English Satires • Various
... smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? Yet ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... her wraps and drew a deep chair to the fire. "I move we get thawed out while we gabble," she proposed, with her deep, husky chuckle. "I'm so frozen that it'll take a week of Sundays to shed my icicles. This zero weather isn't particularly inspiring after the balmy breezes of ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... Meanwhile, amid this gabble of 'sects and schisms,' this disputation which makes a simple mind take refuge in the epigram attributed to Swift on Handel and Bononcini,[234] criticism and popular intelligence have been unanimous upon two points, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... surely, Lady Sophy, surely you are not so unjust as to place any faith in the irresponsible gabble of the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... as I know Rudolph Musgrave. And so I prophesy that he will not marry Clarice Pendomer, because he is inevitably tired of her by this. He will marry money, just as all the Musgraves do. Moreover, I prophesy that we will gabble about this mess until we find a newer target for our stone throwing, and be just as friendly with the participants to their faces as we ever were. So don't let me hear any idiotic talk about whether or no I am going to ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... get rid of her—be alone. She was tired of the running in of the girls who had taken Blue Bonnet up; their incessant gabble; their whispered conversations during the visiting hour. To be sure, Blue Bonnet had tried, time and time again, to draw her into these conversations, but she had no desire to be drawn in. She hated Annabel Jackson—the ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... quilt. Charlie was as rude and as ugly as ever; having teased his sister for a long time in vain, to play out of doors with him, the spoiled boy hissed at her, and said, "You are an ugly old cat!" Then slamming the door after him, he went into the barn-yard, where the screaming of the pigs, the gabble of the geese, and the clucking of the hens, soon proclaimed that he was venting his ill-temper on the dumb creatures who had their home there. Poor Charlie! the indulgence of his mother, and the almost constant absence of his father from home, had made him a very ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... waist and piled them in that. She sat on, silently regarding him. For a few minutes she honestly believed that he was a genuine specimen of the "little people" who were said to make green Erin their favorite home. But when he began to gabble in a hoarse, excited tone of how he had long been expecting this "find"; how he had watched his opportunity when all the household should be absent that he might disobey and use the explosive that would lessen his labor so greatly, she ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... everything to sell, bright beads and looking-glasses and little lacquered trays, coloured boxes, red and green and yellow, lace and silk and cloths of every colour, purple and crimson and gold. From all these men there rose a deafening gabble. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... jingle-jangle of verse-jargon as to-night! Strange it is that the so-called 'poetical' trick of confusedly heaping words together regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... "Well, I'm glad to know one person in the country who doesn't gabble his head off. You haven't answered any of my questions, and you've made me feel as if you'd found a dangerous, wild woman that morning. It isn't very flattering, but I think you're ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... lightly, or interfere with you unduly. I know, my dear friend, what a serious fellow you are; but do tell me, just tell me, how can you justify the Mass, as it is performed abroad; how can it be called a 'reasonable service,' when all parties conspire to gabble it over as if it mattered not a jot who attended to it, or even understood it? Speak, man, speak," he added, gently shaking ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... the blinds, that God's eye may not look upon the iniquity, nor his finger trace upon the frescoed walls the fateful Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin! Save thy breath, good doctor, to cool thy dainty broth; for, mad with pride, thy master hears nor heeds the gabble of the goose beneath his walls, nor the watchdog's warning. Gnaw thy bone in peace, for the people, schooled to patience and amused with panaceas, will scarce resent the trampling of one more parvenu upon their necks, be she ever so broad of beam. If some years hence they ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... huts was a hasty meal, with a gabble of full-mouthed and excited talking. Hubert Penrose and his chief subordinates snatched their food in a huddled consultation at one end of the table; in the afternoon, work was suspended on everything else and the fifty-odd men and women of the expedition concentrated their efforts on the ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... Benyon's sagacity and enthusiasm. The bitterness of the foe told the same story; unless a man is feared, he is not caricatured in a comic paper in the guise of a juggler keeping three balls in the air at once, the said balls being each of them legibly inscribed with one of the three words, "Gas—Gabble—Grab." Such a straining of the usual amenity of controversy witnesses to grave apprehension. Miss Quisante in her pension at Florence ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... dialect, Which learned pedants much affect; It was a parti-color'd dress Of patch'd and piebald languages: 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three laborers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne'er be spent: And truly, to support that charge, He had ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the waves of the noble Tagus began to be crested with foam. I told the boy that it was scarcely possible for the boat to carry so much sail without upsetting, upon which he laughed, and began to gabble in a most incoherent manner. He had the most harsh and rapid articulation that has ever come under my observation in any human being; it was the scream of the hyena blended with the bark of the terrier, though it was by no means an index of his disposition, which I soon ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... ends only when all retire for the night. No privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other conveniences. Even such retirement ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... winter of 1893-4, and of which he told me he was the writer, he had given a character sketch of what he called 'The Rhetoricians.' Their performances since the Union were summarised in the phrase 'a century of unremitting gabble,' and he regarded it as a sad commentary on Irish life that such brilliant talents so largely ran to waste in ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... ace o' spades—that's death—was turned uppermost. So they goes chatterin' an' chitterin' as 'ow the old chap 'ad been playin' cards wi' the devil, an' got a bad end. But Miss Tranter, she don't listen to maids' gabble,—she's doin' well, devil or no devil—an' if any one was to talk to 'er 'bout ghosteses an' sich-like, she'd wallop 'em out of 'er bar with a broom! Ay, that she would! She's a powerful strong woman Miss Tranter, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... was present to teach the notes of its kind, so that in default it learned the complete vocabulary of the domestic poultry, besides the more familiar calls and exclamations of its mistress, the varied barks of two dogs, the shrieks of many cockatoos, the gabble of ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... whenever she shows any sign of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to be suspicious of even so trivial a thing as a hearty response to a connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such suspicions, there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal less cold-mutton formalism and boredom ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... rot you do gabble, Murray!" suddenly cried Alan Hawke, dropping a double barrier of the newest Times, as he prepared to leave the clubroom in disgust. "Hugh Johnstone was only called down to Calcutta on some important financial ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his wife? She would gabble on to Leonora about forgiveness—treating the subject from the bright, American point of view. And Leonora would treat her like the whore she was. Once she said to Florence in ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... wrote to Mr. Crabbe of her brother's early life. 'As regards spiritual advantages out of the house he had none; for our Pastor was one of the old sort, with a jolly red nose caused by good cheer. He used to lay his Hat and Whip on the Communion Table and gabble over the service, running down the Pulpit Stairs not to lose the opportunity of being invited to a good dinner at the Hall.' It was with reference to his sister's husband that FitzGerald in conversation with Tennyson used the expression 'A ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... although, within the space of a few weeks only, he passed through the regular gradations of crawling, tottering, and toddling, to normal pedestrianism of the most active kind. His progress in other accomplishments was almost parallel with this. From inarticulate gabble he trained his tongue to definite speech; his vocabulary expanded with astonishing rapidity, and, contrary to his previous habit, he made incessant use of it. He was now as remarkable for loquacity as formerly for the opposite characteristic; and his ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... him. A regular German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one's ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn't a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth, yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked like a gentleman, ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... laughs himself to slumber? Ma'am, are you going to leave us?" he asked, seeing that Mrs. Cranceford was on her feet. "But of course you have duties to look after, even though you might not be glad to escape an old man's gabble. I call it gabble, but I know it to be wisdom. But I ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... go to our ducks and hens," said the pope. "The people have made a bugbear of me, before which they fall upon the earth. But the good animals, who understand nothing of these things, they cackle and grunt, and gabble at me, as if I were nothing but a common goose-herd and by no means the sainted father of Christendom! Come, come to my dear brutes, who are so frank and sincere that they cackle and gabble directly in my face as soon as their beaks and snouts are grown. They are not so humble and devoted, ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... to gabble away full tilt for an hour on this subject, unconscious that I had taken the measure of him, and was grinning broadly to myself. Then I diverted him by inquiring how long since the wire fence on our right had been put up. It bore evidence of recent erection, and had ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... vendor's quality. He says a gen'lman bought a pebble of him, (This pebble i' sooth, sir, which I hold i' my hand)— And paid for 't, like a gen'lman, on the nail. "Did I o'ercharge him a ha'penny? Devil a bit. Fiddlepin's end! Get out, you blazing ass! Gabble o' the goose. Don't bugaboo-baby me! Go double or quits? Yah! tittup! what's the odds?" —There's the transaction viewed ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... does— With nobody to help him except the trembling Sergeant, While still begin and never end the shout and scream and buzz? Oh, never any where, save in desert groves Brazilian, Was ever heard such endless and aimless gabble yet. For there the tribes of monkeys to the number of a million, Screech and chatter without ceasing, from the sunrise to the set. Rap! rap! rap! To quell the rising clamor; Order! order! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... forbid, however, that we should have two parties established upon the principles of a religious opposition to each other; it would be the worst of evils, and yet the times appear to threaten something of the sort. There is the gabble of 'the Church in danger,' the menacing and sullen disposition of the Dissenters, all armed with new power, and the restless and increasing turbulence of the Catholics, all hating one another, and the elements of discord stirred up first ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... come to think on it, aw remember he didn't behave just as aw could ha' liked him if he'd just been wed to me, th' first day they wor wed, for he'd hardly a word to say to awr Emma at dinner time, but he could gabble fast enuff to that lass o' Amos's, an' if shoo wor a child o' mine aw'd awther tak' some o' that consait aght on her or else aw'd tak' th' skin ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... Now in Paris, from the last house in the faubourg Saint-Germain to the last in the rue Saint-Lazare, between the heights of the Luxembourg and the heights of Montmartre, all that clothes itself and gabbles, clothes itself to go out and goes out to gabble. All that world of great and small pretensions, that world of insolence and humble desires, of envy and cringing, all that is gilded or tarnished, young or old, noble of yesterday or noble from the fourth century, all that sneers at a parvenu, all that fears to commit ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... the party in good time; for draggled, drenched, and with clinging garments, they were so slow in getting on, that it was no delusion that the water was higher, and the rocks lower; and even Gertrude had neither breath nor spirits to gabble when that grave anxious face met her, and a strong careful hand lifted and helped, first her, then Lance, up and down every difficulty; and when she perceived how the newcomer avoided point-blank looking at the bare ancles that had sometimes to make long stretches, a burning ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been seen permanently retaining too much love of improvement, and too much of the habit of a useful employment of their minds, to sink, in their ordinary daily occupations, into that wretched inanity we were representing; or to consume the free intervals of time in the listlessness, or worthless gabble, or vain sports, of which their neighbors furnished ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... superfluous to note that the "a" in "Gabler" should be sounded long and full, like the "a" in "Garden"—NOT like the "a" in "gable" or in "gabble." ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... following their flight. At night as he lay in bed, watching the feeble, automatic procession of ideas, he noticed that they arrived in an order that was not the order of sanity, that if he took note of the language they clothed themselves in, he found he was listening as it were to the gabble of idiocy or aphasia. At such moments he trembled ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... much affect; It was a parti-color'd dress Of patch'd and piebald languages: 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three laborers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne'er be spent: And truly, to support that charge, He had supplies as vast and large, For he could ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... worked much at schools, and was really an able and spirited teacher, liking the occupation; and laying hold of the first book in her way, she requested Conrade to read. He obeyed, but in such a detestable gabble that she looked up appealingly to Fanny, who suggested, "My dear, you can read better than that." He read four lines, not badly, but then broke off, "Mamma, are not we to have ponies? Coombe heard of a pony this morning; it is to be seen at the 'Jolly Mariner,' and he will ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... night. No privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... a-jangle from trail-strain and the depressing atmosphere of the Watts ranch, it seemed to Patty she must shriek aloud if the woman persisted in her ceaseless gabble. ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... from Northern Russia. They had everything to sell, bright beads and looking-glasses and little lacquered trays, coloured boxes, red and green and yellow, lace and silk and cloths of every colour, purple and crimson and gold. From all these men there rose a deafening gabble. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... blab, cackle, gabble, murmur, prattle, blurt, chat, gossip, palaver, tattle, blurt out, chatter, jabber, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... masters, are you mad? or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an ale-house of my lady's house, that ye squeak out your coziers' catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... it at your leisure, and your wife can read it as well as yourself, if read it you must. And, in short, what must that man be made of, who does not prefer sitting by his own fire-side with his wife and children, reading to them, or hearing them read, to hearing the gabble and balderdash of a club or a ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... here alludes to an odd fancy or trick of his own;—whenever he was at a loss for something to say, he used always to gabble over "1 2 3 4 5 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... feeling that had come over me since entering the schoolroom: it was really an effort for me to answer him; I felt as if I wanted only to be let alone, and I realised, without being able to control it, that my voice was very irritable as I said briefly, "One has got to be silent when you begin to gabble." ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... dumb, your whole being dwarfed yet transfigured; and in the glory of that moment you can even forget the gabble of the lady tourist alongside of you who, after searching her soul for the right words, comes right out and gives the Grand Canon her cordial indorsement. She pronounces it to be just perfectly lovely! But I said at the outset I was not going to undertake to describe the Grand Canon—and ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... day at the Hotel Bellevue there was much running to and fro. Musical managers went upstairs smiling and came down raging; musical managers rushed in raging and fled roaring. Madame Stock drove a hard bargain, and, during the chaffering and gabble about dates and terms, Hilda went out for a long walk. Unter den Linden is hardly a promenade for privacy, but this girl was quite alone as she trod the familiar walk, alone as if she were the last human on the pave. She did not notice that she was being followed; when she turned ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... above. In such cases it is a matter of business, a question of money; and the unctuous air of solemn faith they then put on contrasts curiously with the bored and sleepy look apparent on their faces as they gabble through a midnight mass, in the presence of some such limited and unimportant audience as a single ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village which has not its factories of this description ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... What did you expect? I suppose the man who sent you here thought, because you were an engaging young woman and I an old dotard, I would gabble to you the results of a life's work. Oh, no, no, no; but I am not an old dotard. I have many ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... solitude! SOLITUDE!" he repeated, with a laugh. "Why, I hold daily conversations with any blessed thing in this house, from the veranda to the chimney-stack, with any stick of furniture, from the footstool to the towel-horse. I get more out of it than the gabble at the Club. You look surprised. Listen! I took this thing up in my leisure hours in the Department. I had read much about the conversation of animals. I argued that if animals conversed, why shouldn't inanimate ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... 1789 its Committee for framing a Constitution actually invited a foreign envoy, Jefferson, to take part with them in their work. Jefferson had sense enough to decline the invitation; but what gleam of sense, political or other, had the blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by such men is ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... you should be called. You have been moistening your own throat to some purpose, and using it to gabble tunes very suitable to the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... severities of language.' I confess that I cannot remember quite 'a thousand.' It is at least difficult to imagine more unmitigated expressions of contempt and aversion. Mackintosh, says Mill, uses 'macaroni phrases,' 'tawdry talk,' 'gabble'; he gets 'beyond drivelling' into something more like 'raving'; he 'deluges' us with 'unspeakable nonsense.' 'Good God!' sums up the comment which can be made upon one sentence.[562] Sir James, he declares, 'has got into an intellectual state so thoroughly depraved that I doubt whether ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... at housekeeping for herself,—we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the drawing of the claymore," with a lofty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... look at him. A regular German—rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one's ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn't a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth, yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... simple question Kate showed considerable alarm. "Gracious heavens!" she cried, "you must not stop talking to him; he will turn you inside out, and I shall be undone. Nay, you must gabble these words out, and then run away as hard as you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... honey hive from plant and weed. Yea, from the varied history of the world, From the experience of all times, all men, The wise man learneth wisdom. Folly learns From his own bruises if he learns at all. The fool—born wise—what need hath he to learn? He needs but gabble wisdom to the world: Grill him on a ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the skin, and the great rain-drops that fell from his broad-brimmed hat added to the forlornness of his condition. The ducks by the roadside ran to their ponds quacking as he approached; and even the geese seemed to pity his condition, for they awoke to gabble him out a salutation, and having shook their feathers, they would sail in the same direction, so long as there was water, and then take leave of him with a loud gabbling. But this homage brought him no consolation: indeed, the bleak earth seemed sending a deeper chill to his heart; and the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... language,' as the French was then called, just sufficient to explain a motto; enough of drawing to copy a pattern, and music enough to play a contre danse if it were wanted; but they did not learn, as now, to gabble about everything in the world; but they learned to think, and if they knew less of art and splendour, why, they had the art to direct themselves, and to leave the world ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... time Lady Jane was utterly ignorant what the gabble was about, except that Katharine had been in very odd company, and done very strange things with those boys, and she gave a melancholy little sound in the pause; but Kate, taking breath, ran on ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rail at the Mendicant Friars and Jacobins, who are the two hemispheres of the Christian world; by whose gyronomonic circumbilvaginations, as by two celivagous filopendulums, all the autonomatic metagrobolism of the Romish Church, when tottering and emblustricated with the gibble-gabble gibberish of this odious error and heresy, is homocentrically poised. But what harm, in the devil's name, have these poor devils the Capuchins and Minims done unto him? Are not these beggarly devils sufficiently wretched already? ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... arms. They both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn't get mellow enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... but obeyed at once, and they walked softly on into the darkness ahead, for from apparently close behind them—though the speakers had not yet reached the mouth of the low cavern—there came the confused angry gabble of many voices, and on looking back Ned saw the mouth of the place darkened, and it seemed as if the enemy were about to come in; but some were apparently hesitating, and protesting against ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... range. The fox once eyed with strict regard From day to day, a poultry-yard; But though a most accomplish'd cheat, He could not get a fowl to eat. Between the risk and appetite, His rogueship's trouble was not slight. 'Alas!' quoth he, 'this stupid rabble But mock me with their constant gabble; I go and come, and rack my brains, And get my labour for my pains. Your rustic owner, safe at home, Takes all the profits as they come: He sells his capons and his chicks, Or keeps them hanging on his hook, All dress'd and ready for his cook; But I, adept in art ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... in Helen's car was enjoyable, especially for Aunt Alvirah. How that old lady did smile and (as she herself laughingly said) "gabble" her delight! Being shut inside the house so much, the broader sight of the surrounding country and the now peacefully flowing Lumano River was ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... to the theatres; the playbills, however, are not seductive. If you go in, you will find the house nearly empty; the actors gabble their parts with as little action as possible. You see they are bored, and they bore us. Sometimes when some actor, naturally comic, says or does something funny, the audience laughs, and then suddenly leaves ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... for the females with their young to pass over, the males could be seen bending down a branch of the opposite tree, so as to bring it nearer, and assist them in crossing. All these movements were performed amidst a constant gabble of conversation, and shouting, and chattering, and the noise of branches ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... would. Business keeps me in this town, so I write to you to set the matter straight. I inclose with this the pages of feeble scribble-scrabble which the creature Sharpin calls a report. Look them over; and when you have made your way through all the gabble, I think you will agree with me that the conceited booby has looked for the thief in every direction but the right one. You can lay your hand on the guilty person in five minutes, now. Settle the case at once; forward your report ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... he shot his angry questions, like bullets, from the fireside. "Haven't they done anything yet, eh? How much longer do you reckon that roomful of old women will gabble in Richmond? Why, we might as well put a flock of sheep ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... loud howl arose from the crew of the canoe, who incontinently flung themselves down on their knees and began to kow-tow energetically. But they were quickly interrupted by Oahika, who shouted angrily at them, and then, as soon as he had secured their attention, proceeded to gabble to them a long string of what seemed to be instructions, in a language quite unintelligible to me. When he had finished, the occupants of the canoe waved their hands, as if to indicate that they understood, then seized their paddles and began ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... of 1893-4, and of which he told me he was the writer, he had given a character sketch of what he called 'The Rhetoricians.' Their performances since the Union were summarised in the phrase 'a century of unremitting gabble,' and he regarded it as a sad commentary on Irish life that such brilliant talents so largely ran to ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... 'em gabble like a pack of old women," laughed Jack, as the friendly argument about the crackling ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning,[387-96] but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... reserved for our day and generation to gabble them over unthinking, carelessly unmindful of the ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... and faint. There were other things done hurriedly, carelessly; we could not follow them. The last was the rubbing on of ashes—she had been a worshipper of Siva—also they covered the closed eyes with ashes and patted them down flat. And all the time the gabble of the women mocked at the silence of death. There was no reverence, no sense of solemnity; the ceremonial so full of symbol to its makers, the thinkers of Vedic times, was to them simply a custom, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... a sad fault with us all, and especially with women—we don't think enough. The mass of young women trifle a great portion of their life away on the smallest imaginable things. They chatter like birds and gabble like geese, without the trouble of thinking. The things they see and hear every day awaken no consecutive thought. The stars shine above them, and they call them pretty things, but never ask the astronomic story of ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... of this soviet gabble loose these days. It all leads to the same thing, and you've got to choke it for ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... carried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... do, Clementina, my head aches badly!" said Henrietta. She wished to rid herself of this uncalled-for gabble, in order that she might devote herself to ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... as ugly as ever; having teased his sister for a long time in vain, to play out of doors with him, the spoiled boy hissed at her, and said, "You are an ugly old cat!" Then slamming the door after him, he went into the barn-yard, where the screaming of the pigs, the gabble of the geese, and the clucking of the hens, soon proclaimed that he was venting his ill-temper on the dumb creatures who had their home there. Poor Charlie! the indulgence of his mother, and the almost constant absence of his father from home, had made ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... House to plunge on in the dark, it becomes a government of chance and not of design. The imputation was one of those artifices used to despoil an adversary of his most effectual arms; and men of mind will place themselves above a gabble of this order. The last session of Congress was indeed an uneasy one for a time: but as soon as the members penetrated into the views of those who were taking a new course, they rallied in as solid a phalanx ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... himself bestowed on it, as it excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., Godson to ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... cared." And so on. There are curious and worthless creatures enough in any pot-house all day long; and there is incessant talk in omnibus, train, or street by we know not whom, about we care not what. Yet if a printer and a bookseller can be induced to make this gabble as immortal as print and publication can make it, then it straightway is literature, and in due time it ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of the thing he vivisects, and so his book is no more than a compendium of mush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorous gabble about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such-like imaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that the lungs are "strongly expanded" during the act? My own casual observation inclines me to hold that the opposite ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... ordinary Downing-street methods had been startlingly impressed on him in Carlyle's writings; and in the parliamentary talk of that day he had come to have as little faith for the putting down of any serious evil, as in a then notorious city Alderman's gabble for the putting down of suicide. The latter had stirred his indignation to its depths just before he came to Italy, and his increased opportunities of solitary reflection since had strengthened and extended it. When he came therefore to think of his new story for ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... time the youngster's monologue became a sort of soothing hum, for which the other was grateful. "I was cross and sleepy and chilly and nervous," Brunner explained, "and the boy's gabble rested me." ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... wishes to retain a shred of respect for his own species. If you listen long, and then fix your mind so that you can pick out the exact significance of what you have heard, you become confounded. Take the scraps of "bar" gabble. "So I says, 'Lay me fours.' And he winks and says, 'I'll give you seven to two, if you like.' Well, you know, the horse won, and I stood him a bottle out of the three pound ten, so I wasn't much in." "'What!' says I; 'step outside along o' me, and bring your pal with you, and I'll spread ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... to incessant conversations between their elders of which they could gather but the vaguest glimmering. They played about, busy in their own absorbing occupations, lending an absent but not wholly unattentive ear to the gabble of their elders, full of odd and ridiculous-sounding words like Single-tax, and contrapuntal development, and root-propagation, and Benthamism, and Byzantine, and nitrogenous fertilizers, and Alexandrine, and chiaroscuro, and surviving archaisms, and ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... bein' found dead in 'is bed with 'is 'ands a-clutchin' a pack o' cards. An' the ace o' spades—that's death—was turned uppermost. So they goes chatterin' an' chitterin' as 'ow the old chap 'ad been playin' cards wi' the devil, an' got a bad end. But Miss Tranter, she don't listen to maids' gabble,—she's doin' well, devil or no devil—an' if any one was to talk to 'er 'bout ghosteses an' sich-like, she'd wallop 'em out of 'er bar with a broom! Ay, that she would! She's a powerful strong woman Miss Tranter, an' many's ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... think of something better than that. A young lady generally aspires to be a governess. But then she must know everything—music, drawing, French, German, Latin, mathematics, algebra; all that she must have at her finger-ends, and be able to gabble political economy, science, and metaphysics to boot. All that is beyond you—unattainable as the stars. But you needn't break your heart about it. She doesn't get much. Her wages are about equal to those of a kitchen-maid, who can't spell, but only peel potatoes. And the more ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... printed (there are many errors, one or two gross ones), ill written, ill thought! But in fine it is off my hands: that is a fact worth all others. As to its reception here or elsewhere, I anticipate nothing or little. Gabble, gabble, the astonishment of the dull public brain is likely to be considerable, and its ejaculations unedifying. We will let it go its way. Beat this thing, I say always, under thy dull hoofs, O dull Public! trample it and tumble it into all sinks and kennels; if thou canst kill it, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... right. That's over. Now, then, I'm going to gabble for five minutes gaily. [Settling herself comfortably in an armchair.] What jolly flowers you've got there! What have you been doing with yourself? Amos took me to the Caffe Quadri yesterday to late breakfast, to cheer me up. ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... some pride, various large presses, set in the wall, and piled to the top with clean and comfortable children's clothing. We came presently to where the boys were reciting their catechism. An ecclesiastic was hearing them;—they seemed ready enough with their answers, but were allowed to gabble off the holy words in a manner almost unintelligible, and quite indecorous. They were bright, healthy-looking little fellows, ranging apparently from eight to twelve in age. They had good play-ground set off for them, and shady galleries to walk up and down in. Coming from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... and Totty throned between them. There was a little desultory talk and seeking of places, and then the four elder children, standing round the table, read a chapter, verse for verse. Then followed the recitation of the catechism in that queer, mechanical gabble that Bessie recollected so well. "If you stop to think you are sure to break down," was still the warning. After that Jack said the collect and epistle for the day, and Willie and Tom said the gospel, and the lesser ones said psalms and ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... July, 1863, through Indiana and Ohio, was one of the most romantic episodes of the war. But it ended in his defeat and capture. While his gallant troopers rode to their destruction, the men who loved to swear by Arcturus and to gabble about the Pleiades showed the fiber to be expected of such people, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... of this world differ in pathos and pitch as the stars differ, one from another, in glory. There is a style for every taste, a melody for every ear. The gabble of geese is music to the goose; the hoot of the hoot-owl is lovlier to his mate than the nightingale's lay; the concert of Signor "Tomasso Cataleny" and Mademoiselle "Pussy" awakeneth the growling old bachelor from his dreams, and he throweth his boquets ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... frogs in the swamp and the shrill trumpeting of the mosquito army attacking his face and hands were not agreeable lullabies. As the darkness deepened, a medley of doleful noises pervaded the horrible wilderness. An unearthly gabble of strange water-fowl broke out suddenly, was kept up for a few seconds only, and then ceased. Only once in the night did Arlington hear that demoniac gabble; but he lay awake for hours expecting and dreading to hear it again. The owls ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... addressed the House in a brief speech, the spirit of which was heartily responded to by my constituents and the people of the loyal States generally. They believed in a vigorous prosecution of the war, and were sick of "the never-ending gabble about the sacredness of the Constitution." "It will not be forgotten," I said, "that the red-handed murderers and thieves who set this rebellion on foot went out of the Union yelping for the Constitution which they ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... did. They come over here in large numbers from other countries, chiefly from France; and in London abound in Leicester-square, and are constantly to be met with under the Quadrant in Regent-street, where they grin, gabble, chatter, and sometimes dance, to the no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... "Don't you call that gabble an insult to you, walking along and minding your own business?" His heat was alarming; he shook his ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... well-nigh blew me out to sea? How fierce that salt wind blew, a-yearn to drive me to the shore's edge and whirl me over! How fresh and tameless it beats against me yet, blowing the cobwebs from my brain as that real breeze outside the pier could never do! When my monitory friends gabble of change of air I inhale that wind and am strong. For the child is of the elements, elemental, and the man of the complexities, complex. And so that good salt wind blows across my childhood still, though it cannot sweep away the mist that ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Warra Swamp at noon, and camped for dinner in a shady "bangalow" grove, so as not to disturb the ducks, whose delightful gabble and piping was plainly audible. We grilled our birds, and made our tea. Whilst we were having a smoke, a truly magnificent white-headed fish eagle lit on the top of a dead tree, three hundred yards away—a splendid shot for a rifle. It remained ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... the air was very cold, the wind was rising, and the waves of the noble Tagus began to be crested with foam. I told the boy that it was scarcely possible for the boat to carry so much sail without upsetting, upon which he laughed, and began to gabble in a most incoherent manner. He had the most harsh and rapid articulation that has ever come under my observation in any human being; it was the scream of the hyena blended with the bark of the terrier, though it was by no means an index of his disposition, which ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... not surpass the present gabble of a West India market. The loud and everlasting chatter of the black women, old and young (for black ladies can talk as well as white ones); the screams of children, parrots, and monkeys; black boys and ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even more barbarous than they are if Greek were a sealed book to them. However this may be, it is, at least, well to find out in a school what boys are worth instructing ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... of pride lingered on his lips; outside the solitary lascar told off for night duty in harbor, perhaps a youth fresh from a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck listening to the endless drunken gabble. His heart would be thumping with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes,—beings with weird intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... in the 'tween decks of a large ship. The air was dim and close. From the row of heavy guns and great ports, several of which were open, I knew her to be a battleship and of large size. From the gabble of talk all round me I ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... than the whole town put together. The Chevalier de Valois, who had taken refuge on the Sacred Mount of the upper aristocracy, now passed his life at the d'Esgrignons. He listened to the gossip and the gabble, and he thought day and night upon his vengeance. He meant to strike du ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... say I, candidly, looking down at my feet as they trip quickly along through the limp winter grass, "there is no use blinking the fact that I have no conversation—none of us have. We can gabble away among ourselves like a lot of young rooks, about all sorts of silly home jokes, that nobody but us would see any fun in; but when ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... his established custom, Herr Carovius failed to show the slightest interest in her gabble; at least he made no concessions to her. Nor did he fuss and fume; he gazed into space, and seemed to be thinking about many serious things all at the same time. His silence made Philippina raging mad. She jumped up and left without saying good-bye to ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... to howld um whilst Burrage toied um hand an' fut, an' phwin we'd dhrug um into th' shtore we seed 'twuz Creed hissilf. Twuz two days befoor th' sheriff come fer um, an' in th' mane toime he'd gabble an' yell about th' greener comin' afther um, an' how he come out av th' ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... with her consent he left for Vienna in hopes of giving his music journal a broader field. The effort was not a success; Schumann found Vienna no less trivial in its tastes than many other places, and wrote home that people could "gabble and gossip quite as much as in Zwickau." His sojourn there had one important result in his discovery of Schubert's beautiful C major Symphony, which he sent to Mendelssohn for performance at ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... "yer allers glad ob a 'casion ter gabble! How's a pusson gwine ter hab religion when dey's persecuted by sich a born debil; wurs 'en dem in de scripture as was ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... with a shrug: "It is bondmaids' gabble. There is little need to say that a dwarf cursed Eric's sword, to explain how it comes that he has been three times exiled for manslaughter, and driven from Norway to Iceland and from Iceland to Greenland. He quarrelled and slew ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... is an extreme humility that makes her always play second to me; and as I am apt to gabble, I take the lead; and I am froth in comparison. I can reverence my superiors even when tried by intimacy with them. She is the next heavenly thing to heaven that I know. Court her, if ever you come across her. Or have you a man's horror of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate of Hook as a novelist seems ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... lies in his last lair, He'll gabble rhyme, nor sing nae mair, Cauld poverty, wi' hungry stare, Nae mair shall fear him; Nor anxious fear, nor cankert care, E'er mair come ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... ill-affected toward them. But I forewarn you, my son, that they be not over well liked of the Church and the dignitaries thereof. They go about setting men by the ears, bringing down to the minds of the commoner sort high matters that are not meet for such to handle, and inciting them to chatter and gabble over holy things in unseemly wise. Whereso they preach, 'tis said, the very women will leave their distaffs, and begin to talk of sacred matter—most unbecoming and scandalous it is! I avise you, my son, to have none ado with such, and to keep to the wholesome ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... Heaven forbid that you should ever take a sincere part in their gabble! That lot are about the worst we shall have to deal with. Decent simpletons you can ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... toast Soma's brother smiled, cold and sarcastic behind his blue spectacles; Manilof, his neck pushed forth, his swollen eyebrows emphasizing his wrinkle, seemed to be asking himself if that "big barrel" would soon be done with his gabble, while Bolibine, perched on the box, was twisting his comical yellow face, wrinkled as a Barbary ape, till he looked like one of those villanous little monkeys squatting on ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... often been in the cathedral before—indeed, we attended the service daily, and I had been appalled, rather than astonished, by what I saw and heard: the unintelligible service—the irreverent gabble of the choristers and readers—the scanty congregation—the meagre portion of the vast building which seemed to be turned to any use: but never more than that evening, did I feel the desolateness, the doleful inutility, of that vast desert nave, with its aisles and transepts—built for some purpose ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... acute notes. Leaping up to the very highest branches of the trees they began to shower down upon us broken twigs, leaves, nuts and other fruits. They seemed to be holding a meeting overhead at which each one—and they were a multitude—tried to gabble out a speech and to make himself heard above ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... With slaver of the times of yore![1]— Was it for this that back I went As far as Lateran and Trent, To prove that they who damned us then Ought now in turn be damned again? The silent victim still to sit Of Grattan's fire and Canning's wit, To hear even noisy Mathew gabble on, Nor mention once the Whore of Babylon! Oh! 'tis too much—who now will be The Nightman of No-Popery? What Courtier, Saint or even Bishop Such learned filth will ever fish up? If there among our ranks be one To take my place, 'tis thou, Sir John; Thou who like me art dubbed Right Hon. Like ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... been thus busied, her mamma had not been idle. She and her friends, who were so fond of music, had frequently in full gabble joined the con strepito chorus, and quite completed that kind of harmony in which our concert excelled. Add to which there was the rattling of the card tables, placed ready by her order during the music; for she was too good ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... for a moment. Then, as though galvanized into action, he began to gabble his inevitable oaths, while he leaped hurriedly for his rifle. He grabbed it from under the tarpaulin, jerked the lever, flung it ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... furnished, as before said, with a blazing flambeau of bog-fir, all streaming down the mountain sides, along the roads, or across the fields, and settling at last into one broad sheet of fire. Many a loud laugh might then be heard ringing the night echo into reverberation; mirthful was the gabble in hard guttural Irish; and now and then a song from some one whose potations had been, rather copious, would rise on the night-breeze, to which a chorus was subjoined by a dozen voices from ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... you limb from limb! I've put enough of other people's private lives on the screen! My own stays off! I'm not going to have even a phoney screen-show built around Babs and me for people to gabble about!" ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... sundry times against the seats at the side. Babies, vociferous babies, are playing with their mothers' noses, or squalling in appalling concert. If you stir, your foot treads heavily upon the bulbous toes of some recumbent passenger; if you essay to sleep, the gabble of those around you, or the noisy gurgle of a lock, arouses you to consciousness; and then, if you are of that large class of persons in whom the old Adam is not entirely crucified, then you swear. Have you any desire for literary entertainment? Approach the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... hear them gabble about Mount Lassen, and his lip would curl with scorn over the weakness of their metaphors. He would grind his teeth when they called his glass prison "cute," and wondered if anybody really lived there. He would hear some man trying to explain what he did ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... simply, refused to picture Mrs. Nevill Tyson in Rome. Her presence in the Eternal City seemed something less than her footprint in its dust or her shadow on its walls. Nothing is more irritating than to have your dream of a place destroyed by the light-hearted gabble of some idiot who has seen it; but Mrs. Nevill Tyson spared your dreams. The most delicate ideal would have been undisturbed by the soft sweep of her generalities, or the graceful flight of her fancy from the matter ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... gives an inquisitive glance at the nigh leader's foot, that he shod only yesterday. A flock of geese, startled from a mud-puddle through which the coach dashes on, rush away with outstretched necks, and wings at their widest, and a great uproar of gabble. Two school-girls—home for the nooning—are idling over a gateway, half swinging, half musing, gazing intently. There is a gambrel-roofed mansion, with a balustrade along its upper pitch, and quaint ogees of ancient joinery over the hall-door; and through the cleanly scrubbed parlor-windows ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... jests which Pompeian idlers scribbled on the walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the great ones, and how healthy the constitution ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Their great warrior, the chieftain of their forces in the House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens, was wont to say, in his defiant iconoclastic style, that there was no longer any Constitution, and that he was weary of hearing this "never-ending gabble about the sacredness of the Constitution." Yet somewhat inconsistently these same men held as an idol and a leader Secretary Chase; and he at the close of 1860 had declared: "At all hazards and against ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... is at an end, and I have done nothing but gabble. I have many and more important things to write to you about. Lord, forgive me! I am not in a mood for it today. I shall soon write again. My best greetings to Zigesar. Truly this warm, true heart does me much good. Farewell for today, noblest ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... learn of him; but I don't care for anything now,—no, not for drawing, which you taught me! There's no heart in it! The whole purpose is to get amazing numbers of marks and pass each other. All dates and words, and gabble gabble!' ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... memory crammed to disease with all sorts of heterogeneous diet can form no test of genius, taste, judgment, or natural capacity. Competitive Examination takes for its norma: 'It is better to learn many things ill than one thing well'; or rather: 'It is better to learn to gabble about everything than to understand anything.' This is not the way to discover the wood of which Mercuries are made. I have been told that this precious scheme has been borrowed from China: a pretty fountain-head ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... crossing a hayfield beyond the road, the bees darted in and out of their hives, and a peacock spread his iridescent feathers to catch the level yellow rays of the setting sun, and from the distant millpond came the gabble of geese, as the noisy fleet breasted ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... footmarks and oyster-shells. Running away was her pet principle; the only system, she maintained, by which you can live long and easily and lose nothing. If you run away when you see danger, you can come back when all is safe. Run quickly, return slowly, hold your head high, and gabble as loud as you can, and you'll preserve the respect of the Goose Green to a peaceful old age. Why should you struggle and get hurt, if you can lower your head and swerve, and not lose a feather?! Why in the world should any one spoil the pleasure of life, or ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Cleena's apron from her waist and piled them in that. She sat on, silently regarding him. For a few minutes she honestly believed that he was a genuine specimen of the "little people" who were said to make green Erin their favorite home. But when he began to gabble in a hoarse, excited tone of how he had long been expecting this "find"; how he had watched his opportunity when all the household should be absent that he might disobey and use the explosive that would lessen his labor so greatly, she came back ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... commissioner (worthy man) spends his days in doing little else; and when we bear in mind the parallel case of the irreverent curate, we need not be surprised that he took the passage tempo prestissimo, in one roulade of gabble—that I, with the trained attention of an educated man, could gather but a fraction of its import—and the sailors nothing. No profanity in giving orders, no sheath-knives, Midway Island and any other port the master may direct, not to exceed six calendar months, and to this port to be paid ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... French hypocrites,—ye Uncle Tom's Cabin hypocrites,—ye Beecher hypocrites,—ye Rhode Island Consociation hypocrites! Oh, your holy twaddle stinks in the nostrils of God, and he commands me to lash you with my scorn, and his scorn, so long as ye gabble about the sin of slavery, and then bow down to me, and buy and spin cotton, and thus work for me as truly as my slaves! O ye fools and blind, fill ye up the measure of your folly, and blindness, and shame! And this ye are doing. ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... "looking like a stork," "staring like a caulf," "a face like a ghaist's." "Do you call that manners?" she said; or, "I soon put him in his place." " 'MISS CHRISTINA, IF YOU PLEASE, MR. WEIR!' says I, and just flyped up my skirt tails." With gabble like this she would entertain herself long whiles together, and then her eye would perhaps fall on the torn leaf, and the eyes of Archie would appear again from the darkness of the wall, and the voluble words deserted her, and she would lie still and stupid, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on it from her third year? It was the condition most frequently discussed at the Faranges', where the word was always in the air and where at the age of five, amid rounds of applause, she could gabble it off. She knew as well in short that a person could be compromised as that a person could be slapped with a hair-brush or left alone in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of these ordeals was in general held to have too little effect. But the first thing was to ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... the moon and sun. It's aye the rabble, And I to gabble, And hey! for the tale that is ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... began on the little stage amid a universal gabble which made it impossible for anything save pantomime to be intelligible beyond the footlights. Star after star, whose services had cost $1,000 each for one hour, appeared without commanding the slightest attention. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... hold your tongue?" interrupted Aaron, angrily; "you gabble gabble till you make my ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... "I can read and write all I've any need for. But as for you, with all your gabble and talk ... I'm ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... Derette's amazement, knelt and prayed for some time. Derette herself took scarcely five minutes to her prayers. Why should she require more, when her notion of prayer was not to make request for what she wanted to One who could give it to her, but to gabble over one Creed, six Paternosters, and the doxology, with as much rapidity as she could persuade her lips to utter the words? Then, in another five minutes, after a few rapid motions, Derette drew the woollen rug over her, and very ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... colour and in sentiment. A light white frost was melting, in the first rays of the sun, to a silver dew, that twinkled on grass and bush and twig. Now and then a beech leaf, prematurely gold, came spinning down in the still air; from high places of heaven a tiny gabble of music, cold, and shrill, and sweet, told of the songs of the larks at those heavenly gates within which Larry's and ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the General. His conversation was evidently based on the theory that the English language is a dark mystery, insoluble by system, but likely to be blundered into fortuitously, at any moment, if the searcher gabble with sufficient steadiness and persistence. His costume, consisting merely of the ordinary blue denim overalls of commerce, would have been positively commonplace were it not for the wings of bright pink tissue paper, which he wore ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... I object to in polite people is their bad manners. It is this I have suffered from, as, I suspect, have many thousands of my fellows, to whom life is real and earnest, and gabble not its goal. As a rule, the politer the person the worse are his (or more often, perhaps, her) manners. The limit is reached when the amateur is sunk entirely in the professional, and that curious product of "Society" is developed, the professional ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... ... gabble-gabble!' My window glimpses larch and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or thanksgiving ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... you're English! Then in Heaven's name, speak English—not that gabble." And then he repeated his order, "Speak English," in English, and continued in that language, which he spoke ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... with the screaming gabble of the fat old Countess, the fidgeting and shoulder-raising of the unshaven priest, the smell of fried oil and stewed onions, Count Alvise made me get into the cart beside him, and whirled me along among clouds of dust, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... he said, "learned it like a sulphur-crested cockatoo learns to gabble 'Pretty Polly scratch a poll'; why in the name of Moses you can't make your hands do what your tongue says 'as me beat. You, Donovan, that's Number Three, let me hear you repeat the drill ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... sot up. Sure, that's what goes agin' me, to be so far gratifyin' her, and herself as mischevious, harm-hopin' an ould toad as iver I hated the sight of—Och, bejabers, didn't I tell you so? It's herself comin' gabble-gobblin' up." ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... all streaming down the mountain sides, along the roads, or across the fields, and settling at last into one broad sheet of fire. Many a loud laugh might then be heard ringing the night echo into reverberation; mirthful was the gabble in hard guttural Irish; and now and then a song from some one whose potations had been, rather copious, would rise on the night-breeze, to which a chorus was subjoined by a dozen voices from ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... at your leisure, and your wife can read it as well as yourself, if read it you must. And, in short, what must that man be made of, who does not prefer sitting by his own fire-side with his wife and children, reading to them, or hearing them read, to hearing the gabble and balderdash of a club or ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... like a caulf," "a face like a ghaist's." "Do you call that manners?" she said; or, "I soon put him in his place." " 'MISS CHRISTINA, IF YOU PLEASE, MR. WEIR!' says I, and just flyped up my skirt tails." With gabble like this she would entertain herself long whiles together, and then her eye would perhaps fall on the torn leaf, and the eyes of Archie would appear again from the darkness of the wall, and the voluble words deserted ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "or patients, either. A rich man who took to the profession simply for the love of it, can't complain on that score. But to have an interloping she-doctor take a family I've attended ten years, out of my hands, and to hear the hodge-podge gabble about physiological laws, and woman's rights, and no taxation without representation, they learn from her,—well, it's ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... occupying the other, and Totty throned between them. There was a little desultory talk and seeking of places, and then the four elder children, standing round the table, read a chapter, verse for verse. Then followed the recitation of the catechism in that queer, mechanical gabble that Bessie recollected so well. "If you stop to think you are sure to break down," was still the warning. After that Jack said the collect and epistle for the day, and Willie and Tom said the gospel, and the lesser ones ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... faubourg Saint-Germain to the last in the rue Saint-Lazare, between the heights of the Luxembourg and the heights of Montmartre, all that clothes itself and gabbles, clothes itself to go out and goes out to gabble. All that world of great and small pretensions, that world of insolence and humble desires, of envy and cringing, all that is gilded or tarnished, young or old, noble of yesterday or noble from the fourth century, all that sneers at a parvenu, all that ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... as fast as 'e could gabble, 'here's five or six shillings. If the other one comes and won't go away tell 'er I've gone to the Pagoda Music-'all and you'll take 'er to me, keep 'er out all the evening some'ow, if you can, if she comes back too soon keep 'er in ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... the Warra Swamp at noon, and camped for dinner in a shady "bangalow" grove, so as not to disturb the ducks, whose delightful gabble and piping was plainly audible. We grilled our birds, and made our tea. Whilst we were having a smoke, a truly magnificent white-headed fish eagle lit on the top of a dead tree, three hundred yards away—a splendid shot for a ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... came to nothing; and, indeed, the Channel where they were was much too wide to be crossed except in a small vessel or in a large boat. Jack was beginning to speak French pretty well, and Bill was able to gabble away with considerable fluency, greatly to the delight of Jeannette, who was his usual instructress. He tried to teach her a little English in return, but she laughed at her own attempts, and declared that she should never be able to pronounce so ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... twinkled. "Well, I'm glad to know one person in the country who doesn't gabble his head off. You haven't answered any of my questions, and you've made me feel as if you'd found a dangerous, wild woman that morning. It isn't very flattering, but I think ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... of a governess? Was that apparition which had impressed me so unpleasantly to take the command of me—to sit alone with me, and haunt me perpetually with her sinister looks and shrilly gabble? ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... full midday beam; purging and scaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... history. The jests which Pompeian idlers scribbled on the walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the great ones, and how healthy the constitution of the race is, how sound its digestion, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Readers with a Description of the Customs and Manners of these Barbarians, who are in every respect scarce one degree above Brutes, having no Language among them but a confused [Gabble [3]] which is neither well ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... good time; for draggled, drenched, and with clinging garments, they were so slow in getting on, that it was no delusion that the water was higher, and the rocks lower; and even Gertrude had neither breath nor spirits to gabble when that grave anxious face met her, and a strong careful hand lifted and helped, first her, then Lance, up and down every difficulty; and when she perceived how the newcomer avoided point-blank looking at the bare ancles that had sometimes to make long stretches, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... proper people. And Eliza Provost won't hear of a man! I tell Sophie it's their own fault when they complain about society to-day. It's the fault of this charity work and athletics, too; both extremely levelling. Hundreds of women wind bandages or go to the hunt races and gabble about votes for no reason under heaven but ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... invited a foreign envoy, Jefferson, to take part with them in their work. Jefferson had sense enough to decline the invitation; but what gleam of sense, political or other, had the blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... dyspeptic and ready for the asylums; and you, the good-for-nothing lazy drones; you, the strong silent men, who have heads quite empty, like gourds; and you also, the frivolous, useless men that chatter and gabble to no purpose all day long. Even you, that, having begun to read this book, could get no further than page 47, and especially you who have read it manfully in spite of the flesh, I love you all, and give you here ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... They are, if you understand me, technically reverent; they have startled the whole place with their curtsies and crossings in church; but they gabble up to the very porch; and the familiarity with which they discuss High Mass, as they are pleased to call it! I was obliged to silence them, and I must say they ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shrug: "It is bondmaids' gabble. There is little need to say that a dwarf cursed Eric's sword, to explain how it comes that he has been three times exiled for manslaughter, and driven from Norway to Iceland and from Iceland to Greenland. He quarrelled and slew wherever he settled, because he ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... melodramatic villain, who ought to have worn patent-leather boots and a Spanish cloak. And yet, with all its glaring faults, it is a story the pages of which ought not to be skipped. So far as the narrative goes, one may skip a score of leaves at will; but in the midst of aimless and weary gabble, passages of extraordinary beauty and uncanny insight strike out with the force of a sudden blow. The influence of Dickens is once more clearly seen in the sickly little girl Nelly, whose strange caprices and flashes of passion ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... begins with the eight o'clock breakfast and ends only when all retire for the night. No privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other conveniences. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... amply stored as to continue brilliant through decades of much speaking, and the sparkle of Mrs. Orr's conversation was gradually shrouded in the weariness of what a blunt neighbor termed her "inveterate gabble." As it must be, this woman of exceptional opportunities early lost true sensitiveness, and, both as guest and hostess, ignored the offense of inconsiderate and self- seeking interruptions. She broke into the speech of others with crude abandon. The itch to lead and preempt the conversation ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... mad? or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an alehouse of my lady's house, that ye squeak out your coziers' catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time, ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... her companion, who followed with some reluctance, seeming to listen to her gabble, while she ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Maggie exclaimed joyfully that, of course, he would go—he ought to go, to show proper respect! Father Duff said no then, very decidedly; that nothing could hire him to go, and that he had no respect to show. He declared that he had no use for gossip and gabble and unwholesome eating; and he said that he should not think Maggie would care to go, either,—unless she could be in the kitchen, where it ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... would submit themselves. But most commonly a sudden impulse sent Jacob leaping away into some antic or active amusement, when, instead of following the recitation he would return upon the foregoing words most ready to his tongue, and mouth or gabble, with a see-saw suited to the action of his limbs, a verse on which Mordecai had spent some of his too scanty heart's blood. Yet he waited with such patience as a prophet needs, and began his strange printing again undiscouraged on the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... night because her hoss fell and got crippled, and there wasn't a hoss I'd trust at night with her, it was storming so hard, and slippery—and at daylight I put her on the gentlest one we had, and took her home. That's all there is to it. There's nothing to gabble about, and if the Pilgrim goes around shooting off his face—" Billy clicked ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... voices, the rattle and clash of the dice-box in the distant parlor, reached his ear amidst the laughter and gabble of the common room. The night was a hard one in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... friendship because circumstances happened to have thrown you together fairly frequently—and one of us has a beautiful house and the other an excellent cook—these people press upon my spirit like a strait-waistcoat. I gabble the conventional small-talk of polite sociability, and I thank God when they are gone! They are called "friends," but we have absolutely nothing ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Just then Miss Gabble came up our steps, and shortly after entered the parlor. She was one of those dreaded beings, who always filled me with the direst confusion. She sat right down by my side and squeezed ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... Which learned pedants much affect; It was a parti-color'd dress Of patch'd and piebald languages: 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three laborers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne'er be spent: And truly, to support that charge, He had supplies as vast and large, For he could coin or counterfeit New words ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... and oyster-shells. Running away was her pet principle; the only system, she maintained, by which you can live long and easily and lose nothing. If you run away when you see danger, you can come back when all is safe. Run quickly, return slowly, hold your head high, and gabble as loud as you can, and you'll preserve the respect of the Goose Green to a peaceful old age. Why should you struggle and get hurt, if you can lower your head and swerve, and not lose a feather?! Why in the world should any one spoil the pleasure of life, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... badly dressed sturdy little boy with a sullen face is Louis. Pierre tries to make conversation in our own language to entertain us. "Are you to Australie going?" he asks. We tell him we are going first to Egypt. "Monter au chameau!" he cries excitedly, going off into a gabble of French and beseeching us to take him with us as "boy." We tell him that he is too small and that it costs much money. "Have you money—English?" he asks. He is very much interested when we show him ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... the experiment of Democracy at housekeeping for herself,—we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the Barracks, around the corner, through the cloistered walk, came Captain Lemuel, whistling. He was in good spirits; ready to join his "Squad" beside the fountain and have an evening's "gabble" with the youngsters. They had been abnormally good that day. Wholly obedient to his restrictions in the length of their rides, eager to improve in their shooting—which was so far removed from "sharp"; and in every respect so "decent" ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... vulgar, empty, and fallacious; yet they at first confounded me by their novelty, filled me with doubt and perplexity, and interrupted that peace which I began to feel from the sincerity of my repentance, without substituting any other support. I listened a while to his impious gabble, but its influence was soon overpowered by natural reason and early education, and the convictions which this new attempt gave me of his baseness completed my abhorrence. I have heard of barbarians, who, when tempests drive ships upon their coast, decoy them to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... with her eyes on it from her third year? It was the condition most frequently discussed at the Faranges', where the word was always in the air and where at the age of five, amid rounds of applause, she could gabble it off. She knew as well in short that a person could be compromised as that a person could be slapped with a hair-brush or left alone in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of these ordeals ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... the door, and Nan saw then that there were at least twenty girls in the room. Some had joined the procession from other corridors. Now they all began to gabble at once, and Amelia ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... emergency. The cold had become intense. We had not wasted words at any time, and on remounting, preserved as profound a silence as if we were on a forlorn hope, even the natives intermitting their ceaseless gabble. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... of which he told me he was the writer, he had given a character sketch of what he called 'The Rhetoricians.' Their performances since the Union were summarised in the phrase 'a century of unremitting gabble,' and he regarded it as a sad commentary on Irish life that such brilliant talents so largely ran to waste ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... she wrote to Mr. Crabbe of her brother's early life. 'As regards spiritual advantages out of the house he had none; for our Pastor was one of the old sort, with a jolly red nose caused by good cheer. He used to lay his Hat and Whip on the Communion Table and gabble over the service, running down the Pulpit Stairs not to lose the opportunity of being invited to a good dinner at the Hall.' It was with reference to his sister's husband that FitzGerald in conversation with Tennyson used the expression 'A Mr. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... favourites, and satirized their enemies, among which last the very worst, in their opinions, were their parents, guardians, and masters. "The character of Dick," said Hodgkinson more than once to this writer, "is not overcharged." Our youngsters were quite pat at stage gabble, and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... son, that they be not over well liked of the Church and the dignitaries thereof. They go about setting men by the ears, bringing down to the minds of the commoner sort high matters that are not meet for such to handle, and inciting them to chatter and gabble over holy things in unseemly wise. Whereso they preach, 'tis said, the very women will leave their distaffs, and begin to talk of sacred matter—most unbecoming and scandalous it is! I avise you, my son, to have none ado with such, and to keep to ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... think I came here for solitude! SOLITUDE!" he repeated, with a laugh. "Why, I hold daily conversations with any blessed thing in this house, from the veranda to the chimney-stack, with any stick of furniture, from the footstool to the towel-horse. I get more out of it than the gabble at the Club. You look surprised. Listen! I took this thing up in my leisure hours in the Department. I had read much about the conversation of animals. I argued that if animals conversed, why shouldn't inanimate things communicate with each other? You cannot prove that animals don't converse—neither ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... many a war-spear Cold from the morning shall be clutched in the fingers, Heaved in the hand, no harp-music's sound shall 80 Waken the warriors, but the wan-coated raven Fain over fey ones freely shall gabble, Shall say to the eagle how he sped in the eating, When, the wolf his companion, he plundered the slain." So the high-minded hero was rehearsing these stories 85 Loathsome to hear; he lied as to ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... shillings 8 pence, and had been slightly damaged since it came into her hands. She knew also that Mrs Clere would confess the fraud to the priest, would probably be told to repeat the Lord's Prayer three times over as a penance for it, would gabble through the words as fast as possible, and would then consider her sin quite done away with, and her profit of 7 shillings 4 pence cheaply secured. She knew also that the Mayoress, in all probability, was aware that Mrs Clere's protestation about ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... I was reading by main force to Mrs. Eagleton's sick girl, came Sarah all in a hurry with, I was wanted, Miss. But I would finish my chapter, and O how hard the devil tried to make me gabble it; so I clenched my teeth at him, and read it as if I was spelling it; and then ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... world differ in pathos and pitch as the stars differ, one from another, in glory. There is a style for every taste, a melody for every ear. The gabble of geese is music to the goose; the hoot of the hoot-owl is lovlier to his mate than the nightingale's lay; the concert of Signor "Tomasso Cataleny" and Mademoiselle "Pussy" awakeneth the growling old bachelor from ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... showed considerable alarm. "Gracious heavens!" she cried, "you must not stop talking to him; he will turn you inside out, and I shall be undone. Nay, you must gabble these words out, and then run away as hard as you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... alike, and each one labelled in plain figures twenty marks. I don't pretend to speak German fluently, but I can generally make myself understood with a little effort, and gather the sense of what is said to me, provided they don't gabble. I went into the shop. A young girl came up to me; she was a pretty, quiet little soul, one might almost say, demure; not at all the sort of girl from whom you would have expected such a thing. I was never more surprised in ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... that," said he, "I can read and write all I've any need for. But as for you, with all your gabble and talk ... I'm ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... need even to think about it, for his eyes wandered over his folded hands as though in methodical search for somebody. They reached Form I, and Robert, who saw them coming, broke instinctively into a panic-stricken gabble. Of all the poems which Christine had read aloud to him, Casablanca was the only one he could remember, and he had got as far as "whence all but he had fled" before he saw that it was of no good. The ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... I, candidly, looking down at my feet as they trip quickly along through the limp winter grass, "there is no use blinking the fact that I have no conversation—none of us have. We can gabble away among ourselves like a lot of young rooks, about all sorts of silly home jokes, that nobody but us would see any fun in; but when it ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... to moral discussions, that at the best are very second-rate eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying gabble, there are various forms of "ethical" teaching, advocated and practised in America and in the elementary schools of this country. For example, a story of an edifying sort is told to the children, and comments are elicited upon the behaviour of the characters. "Would you have ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Avenue, something reassuring in the sidewalk gabble, the air of cheap carnival, the white arc lights over open fruit stands, and the percussive roar of Elevated trains. Presently even Third Avenue would withdraw to over its shops, the sidewalks fall quiet and darken, pedestrians become sinister. She shivered ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... idea was that several Acts should be kept by each undergraduate; for, to keep up the number (as it seemed), each student had to gabble through a ridiculous form "Si quaestiones tuae falsae sint, Cadit Quaestio:—sed quaestiones tuae falsae sunt, Ergo valent Consequentia et Argumentum." I have forgotten time and place when ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... endeavouring to sing. No cultured relative was present to teach the notes of its kind, so that in default it learned the complete vocabulary of the domestic poultry, besides the more familiar calls and exclamations of its mistress, the varied barks of two dogs, the shrieks of many cockatoos, the gabble of scrub fowls. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? Yet ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... contrivance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the leading journals, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... unprofitable.' Hamlet, act i. sc. 2. See ante, iii. 350, where Boswell is reproached by Johnson with 'bringing in gabble,' when he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the Earl of Chatham:—'This surely is a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall at last dismiss him to nameless obscurity, with that equipoise of blame ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... and I ain't got a quarrel with 'em, the Lord knows. I go to church like clockwork, and pay my pew-rent, too, which is more than some do that gabble the most about salvation. If I pay for the preacher's keep it's only fair that I should get some of the good that comes to him hereafter; that's how it looks to me; so I don't trouble my head much about the ins and the outs of getting saved or damned. I've ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... he had his foot, so to speak, in Paris. There, of course, everybody worships him. But the first thing he does is to summon the government. "What have you been doing with my children the soldiers?" he said to the lawyers. "You are nothing but a lot of poll-parrots, who fool the people with your gabble, and feather your own nests at the expense of France. It is not right; and I speak in the name of all ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... him good: and Miller can fetch the luggage afterwards. You do as I tell you. Take the Times. Sit down in that chair with your face to the light and read me the leading articles and the rest of the news on Page 7. Don't gabble: read distinctly if you can—you're supposed to be an ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... "The Horse Fair" when twenty-eight. It was the largest canvas ever attempted by an animal-painter. It was exhibited at the Salon in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, and all the gabble of jealous competitors was lost in the glorious admiration it excited. It became the rage of Paris. All the honors the Salon could bestow were heaped upon the young woman, and by special decision all her work henceforth was declared exempt ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... and burning color to the delicately dotted eggs in the tiny cradle—the same relief felt in descending from a mountain-top to the valley; in turning from the sweep of the sea to watch beach-fleas hopping over the sand; in giving over the wisdom of men for the gabble of my ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... have heard some such sentimental gabble as this before from my slaves, my lord," said Abrazza to Media. "It has the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn't get mellow enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and I told ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... o' them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em when their backs is turned," said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be obliged to listen ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... has not seldom occurred to me (noting how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village which has not its factories of this description driven by milk-and-water power. I cannot conceive ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... piled to the top with clean and comfortable children's clothing. We came presently to where the boys were reciting their catechism. An ecclesiastic was hearing them;—they seemed ready enough with their answers, but were allowed to gabble off the holy words in a manner almost unintelligible, and quite indecorous. They were bright, healthy-looking little fellows, ranging apparently from eight to twelve in age. They had good play-ground set off for them, and shady galleries to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... him. Some kind of a gabble-fest on the star-star level, I gather. Otherwise we're almost ready to blast. And we know what kind of ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... an Englishman mad. A Boer farmer, sitting on his stoep, large and strong, but absolutely lethargic, is the very incarnation of the spirit of the veldt. At the same time, when one remembers the clatter and gabble of our civilisation, it is impossible to deny him a certain dignity, though it may be only ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... bodily into half a quarter of it—would be swallowed up like a mouthful, and never seen again! Castle Warlock was twice as old—that was something! but why had not Lady Joan told him hundreds of stories about Cairncarque, instead of letting him gabble on about their little place? But she could not love her castle as he did his, for she had no such father in it! That must be what made the difference! That was why she did not care to talk about it! Was he actually going to see her again? and would she be to him the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... same story; unless a man is feared, he is not caricatured in a comic paper in the guise of a juggler keeping three balls in the air at once, the said balls being each of them legibly inscribed with one of the three words, "Gas—Gabble—Grab." Such a straining of the usual amenity of controversy witnesses to grave apprehension. Miss Quisante in her pension at ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... looking-glasses and little lacquered trays, coloured boxes, red and green and yellow, lace and silk and cloths of every colour, purple and crimson and gold. From all these men there rose a deafening gabble. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... that has no brains. These demoniacs let me dub With the name of Legion[3] Club. Such assemblies, you might swear, Meet when butchers bait a bear: Such a noise, and such haranguing, When a brother thief's a hanging: Such a rout and such a rabble Run to hear Jackpudding gabble: Such a crowd their ordure throws On a far less villain's nose. Could I from the building's top Hear the rattling thunder drop, While the devil upon the roof (If the devil be thunder proof) Should with poker fiery red Crack the stones, and melt the lead; Drive them down on every skull, When the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... are the two hemispheres of the Christian world; by whose gyronomonic circumbilvaginations, as by two celivagous filopendulums, all the autonomatic metagrobolism of the Romish Church, when tottering and emblustricated with the gibble-gabble gibberish of this odious error and heresy, is homocentrically poised. But what harm, in the devil's name, have these poor devils the Capuchins and Minims done unto him? Are not these beggarly devils sufficiently wretched already? ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... dross and rubbish we have.... His tenaciousness of what is grand and lofty, is more praiseworthy than his delight in what is low and disagreeable. His pedantry accords better with didactic pomp than with illiterate and vulgar gabble; his learning engrafted on romantic tradition or classical history, looks like genius.... His tragedy of the Fall of Sejanus, in particular, is an admirable piece of ancient mosaic.... The depth of knowledge and gravity ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... be wrong that made me miss this pleasure. You and me conversing affable here. Not a bit like it was in the old days before I rose to being the chief glory of Calderside. Conversation was one-sided then, and all on your side instead of mine. 'Here again, Martlow,' you'd say, and then they'd gabble the evidence, and you'd say 'fourteen days' or 'twenty-one days,' if you'd got up peevish and that's all there was to our friendly intercourse. This time, I make no doubt you'll be asking me to stay ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... pretty fellow of these days will sometimes condescend to bestow on a country miss, when there is no prettier or more fashionable woman present. The manner indeed was different, for the etiquette of those times did not permit Sir Piercie Shafton to pick his teeth, or to yawn, or to gabble like the beggar whose tongue (as he says) was cut out by the Turks, or to affect deafness or blindness, or any other infirmity of the organs. But though the embroidery of his conversation was different, the groundwork was the same, and the high-flown and ornate compliments ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... there is something very distressing in this social law of gabble. Out of regard for Mrs. A, let us say, I attend some festival she has inaugurated. There I meet for the first time a young person of pleasant exterior, and I am placed in her company to deliver her at a dinner-table, or dance ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... comprehend the man. This dry, unconcerned, business-sort of gabble was not the language of a suddenly-bereaved parent, and one, too, who had lost a considerable annuity by his son's death. What could it mean? I was ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... the wind was rising, and the waves of the noble Tagus began to be crested with foam. I told the boy that it was scarcely possible for the boat to carry so much sail without upsetting, upon which he laughed, and began to gabble in a most incoherent manner. He had the most harsh and rapid articulation that has ever come under my observation in any human being; it was the scream of the hyena blended with the bark of the terrier, though it was ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... learning how to be silent when I have absolutely nothing to say, it is generally at such times that I have a violent inclination; and, endeavoring to pay my debt of conversation as speedily as possible, I hastily gabble a number of words without ideas, happy when they only chance to mean nothing; thus endeavoring to conquer or hide my incapacity, I ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... he would have been also a great reformer, so she stamped him down into nothingness under her iron heel. And for almost a score of years she had kept him in Ruscino, where he buried and baptized the old and new creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any ordinary country priest able to gabble through the ritual could have done as well as he. Some few of the more liberal and learned dignitaries of the Church did indeed think that it was waste of great powers, but he had the Sacred College against him, and no one ventured to speak in his favour at the Vatican. ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... raided and suppressed his "Jurgen," and at once he was a made man. Old book-shops began to be ransacked for his romances and extravaganzas—many of them stored, I daresay, as "picture-books," and under the name of the artist who illustrated them, Howard Pyle. And simultaneously, a great gabble about him set up in the newspapers, and then in the literary weeklies, and finally even in the learned reviews. An Englishman, Hugh Walpole, magnified the excitement with some startling hochs; a single hoch from the Motherland ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... up to the air for a quarter of an hour's spell and made their announcement, and then the copper helmets were clapped into place again, and once more like a pair of uncouth sea monsters they slowly and clumsily faded away into the depths. A gabble of excited Italian kept pace to the turning of the air-pumps, and of that language Kettle knew barely a score of words. Practically these people might have weaved any kind of plot noisily and under his very nose without his ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... schoolroom: it was really an effort for me to answer him; I felt as if I wanted only to be let alone, and I realised, without being able to control it, that my voice was very irritable as I said briefly, "One has got to be silent when you begin to gabble." ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... wide for the females with their young to pass over, the males could be seen bending down a branch of the opposite tree, so as to bring it nearer, and assist them in crossing. All these movements were performed amidst a constant gabble of conversation, and shouting, and chattering, and the noise of branches springing back to ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... me with a deep and peculiar interest; very few remarks are made among themselves, and no one puts a single question to me or ventures upon any remarks. All this is in strange contrast to the everlasting gabble and the noisy and persistent importunities of the Persians. The Afghans are plainly full of speculations concerning my mission, who I am, and what I am doing in their country; although they regard the bicycle with great curiosity, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... went to business:— everybody but Hugh and Holt, who had nothing to do. Class after class came up for repetition; and this repetition seemed to the new boys an accomplishment they should never acquire. They did not think that any practice would enable them to gabble, as everybody seemed able to gabble here. Hugh had witnessed something of it before,—Phil having been wont to run off at home, "Sal, Sol, Ren et Splen," to the end of the passage, for the admiration ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... of course, they would use a different scrambler circuit than the one which was plugged into his own unit, but he would be able to hear the gabble of voices, even if he couldn't understand ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... taste. "Shakespeare," he said, "never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her eyes industriously. "It must be all right, or Bruce wouldn't have brought us. I like it. The floor is sanded, Judy! And those people at the snippy little tables under the stairs are French—just hear them gabble to the waiter." ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... too far, Hanover," Bertie replied. "You fellows make me tired. You're all open-shop men. You've eroded my eardrums with your endless gabble for the open shop and the right of a man to work. You've harangued along those lines for years. Labour is doing nothing wrong in going out on this general strike. It is violating no law of God nor man. Don't you talk, Hanover. You've been ringing the changes too ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... circles they evidently cared for nothing. Then the several chiefs of the other caravans had in turn to relate their experiences of the road; and the noise of tongues was loud and furious. But as we approached, all this loud-sounding gabble ceased, and my caravan chiefs and guides rushed to me to hail me as "master," and to salute me as their friend. One fellow, faithful Baruti, threw himself at my feet, the others fired their guns and acted like madmen suddenly become frenzied, and a general cry of "welcome" ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... to the rapidity of existence in New York that evening. She was aware of statements being made in language which rang familiarly in her ears, but they had no more coherence in her clogged understanding than the gabble ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... some matter which must be read to a sick person, do it slowly. People often think that the way to get it over with least fatigue to him is to get it over in least time. They gabble; they plunge and gallop through the reading. There never was a greater mistake. Houdin, the conjuror, says that the way to make a story seem short is to tell it slowly. So it is with reading to the sick. I have often heard a patient say to such a mistaken reader, "Don't ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... injustice—these were things far removed from the planets of the Ages that sparkled like jewels in the vault of Night. A vagrant breeze whispered in the valley sedges to the placid lake. High in the air, invisible, migrating wavies winged into the south, the distant gabble of their passing falling ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... seemed for the moment to be a matter of little importance, for the portion of his conversation in the cabin which I had overheard was an indictment both of my teaching and my integrity. His eyes, thanks to the gabble of this mischievous visitor, were now open. He would want to know everything and I found myself placed in the position of being obliged to choose between a frankness which would be hazardous and a deception which would be intolerable. The time had suddenly come for generous revelations. I had ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... faint. There were other things done hurriedly, carelessly; we could not follow them. The last was the rubbing on of ashes—she had been a worshipper of Siva—also they covered the closed eyes with ashes and patted them down flat. And all the time the gabble of the women mocked at the silence of death. There was no reverence, no sense of solemnity; the ceremonial so full of symbol to its makers, the thinkers of Vedic times, was to them simply a custom, a set of customs, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... ar' onlucky enough to come in his way, besides scalping them and marking them with his mark. The Injuns call him Jibbenainosay, or a word of that natur', which them that know more about the Injun gabble than I do, say, means the Spirit-that-walks; and if we can believe any such lying devils as Injuns (which I am loath to do, for the truth ar'nt in 'em), he is neither man nor beast, but a great ghost or devil that knife cannot harm ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... eating up de Spain with his eyes, and de Spain not only ached to hear him speak but was resolved to make him. Sandusky had stood motionless from the instant he entered the room. He knew all about the preliminary gabble of a fight and took no interest in it. He did not know all about de Spain, and being about to face his bullets he had prudence enough to wonder whether the man could have brought a reputation to Sleepy Cat without having done something to earn ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... residence in heaven, and travesties his own matchless dramas by weak quotations from them, as if he had been cogitating only his own words through the new scenes of glory which had opened before him. Our great Shakspeare has grown none in the passing centuries—comes from the empyrean to gabble like a dotard of the visions of his youth? ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... point, both at home and abroad. In one of his gossipy, confidential letters Fisher Ames remarked that Hammond was a most "petulant, impudent" man, habitually railing against the conduct of our government "with a gabble that his feelings render doubly unintelligible." But Pinckney, our representative in England, was equally undiplomatic. He was "sour and also Gallican"; although calm in manner, "he had prejudices, ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... do gabble, Murray!" suddenly cried Alan Hawke, dropping a double barrier of the newest Times, as he prepared to leave the clubroom in disgust. "Hugh Johnstone was only called down to Calcutta on some important financial business some days ago, and he went there simply to rearrange ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... There is a great family of African dialects in which a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to satisfy a sweetish ear. It is like the charming gabble of children, who love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes. Mr. Grout[L] and other missionaries note examples of this: Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile, is a sentence to illustrate this native disposition. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... this town, so I write to you to set the matter straight. I inclose with this the pages of feeble scribble-scrabble which the creature Sharpin calls a report. Look them over; and when you have made your way through all the gabble, I think you will agree with me that the conceited booby has looked for the thief in every direction but the right one. You can lay your hand on the guilty person in five minutes, now. Settle the case at once; forward your report to me at this place, and tell Mr. Sharpin that he is suspended ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... to slip out before the end of the service on any good or bad excuse: they had to see after the dinner or the guest-house, their gardens needed weeding, or they did not feel well. But the most common fault of all was to gabble through the services as quickly as they could in order to get them over. They left out the syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the dipsalma or pause between two verses, so that one side of the choir was beginning the second half ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... this gabble of 'sects and schisms,' this disputation which makes a simple mind take refuge in the epigram attributed to Swift on Handel and Bononcini,[234] criticism and popular intelligence have been unanimous upon two points, first, in manifesting a general ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... much of the habit of a useful employment of their minds, to sink, in their ordinary daily occupations, into that wretched inanity we were representing; or to consume the free intervals of time in the listlessness, or worthless gabble, or vain sports, of which their neighbors furnished ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... you keep 'em, pay their keep, But gabble's the short cut to ruin; It's gratis, (gals half-price,) but cheap At no rate, ef it henders doin'; Ther' 's nothin' wuss, 'less 't is to set A martyr-prem'um upon jawrin': Teapots git dangerous, ef you shet Their lids down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... a Duck and they don't sing," said Rap; "they gabble and squawk and swim in the water, but they can fly as quick as Swallows, for all they look so heavy." "I wish he would begin with this little mite of a thing, that isn't much bigger than a bee," said Nat, showing Rap ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... of a soubrette trilling snatches of her topical song as she creamed off her make-up, came to them through the sulky gloom of the corridor. Behind the closed door of Miss De Voe's dressing room, the gabble of the pink satin ponies was like hash in the chopping. Overhead, moving scenery created a remote sort of thunder. She stood looking up at him, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... has just heard of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. When his "apology" is ended, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... himself to slumber? Ma'am, are you going to leave us?" he asked, seeing that Mrs. Cranceford was on her feet. "But of course you have duties to look after, even though you might not be glad to escape an old man's gabble. I call it gabble, but I know it to be wisdom. But I beg pardon for ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... came out with half a column in the Critique des Arts with a pretty compliment to Alice's executive energy, and added 'that it was one of the rare soirees of the season.' He must have been drunk when he wrote it. I played badly—I never can play when they gabble. It was as garrulous as a fish market in front. Enfin! It was over and we telegraphed his reverence the result; from a money standpoint it ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... British officers, and when we got close up he nodded smilingly at the men in the mandarin's colours, and then, as if astounded at the little crowd standing fast, he burst out into a furious passion, shouting at them in a wild gabble of words, with the effect of making them give way at once, ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... Charlies-hope.—Aweel, sir, and then the inferior sort o' people, ye'll observe, are kend by sorts o' by-names some o' them, as Glaiket Christie, and the Deuke's Davie, or maybe, like this lad Gabriel, by his employment; as for example, Tod Gabble, or Hunter Gabble. He's no been lang here, sir, and I dinna think onybody kens him by ony other name. But it's no right to rin him doun ahint his back, for he's a fell fox-hunter, though he's maybe no just sae clever as some o' the ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... my head aches badly!" said Henrietta. She wished to rid herself of this uncalled-for gabble, in order that she might devote ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... white cap, with a black silk handkerchief over it, tied under her chin. At her feet sat the grandfather of all the cats; and opposite her sat, on two benches, twelve or fourteen neat, rosy, chubby little children, learning their Chris-cross-row; and gabble enough ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... over trifles had always been a source of infinite refreshment, was talking of things which he, after a solid year of monotonous warfare far from home, knew nothing. He cared to know less. He wanted the old exchange of personalities, the dear domestic gabble. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... your gabble, you boys!" blustered the doughty engineman, speaking to everybody and with a show of authority. "Bucks, notify the ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
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