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More "Musty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into the musty little hallway, and Gering with some difficulty drew back the bolts. The door creaked open and they stepped out into ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... before—before—" with a sharp glance over at her daughter, "a few months back. He's a good lad, and I thought as he'd make quite a companion for Hervey. An' it 'ud do 'em a deal of good to air them spare rooms. I'm sure they're smelling quite musty. What say?" ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... up a flight of dark and twisting stairs, along a musty hall. She paused before a door at ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... relative extricated himself from his precarious position will never be known, as, at this juncture, Ben and La Salle, respectively, weary of playing a limited repertoire of psalm-tunes on the concertina, and reading the musty records of a long-forgotten "Sederunt of the quarterly Synod," as detailed in an old number of the Presbyterian Witness, interrupted the prolonged passage at arms by an invitation, to all so disposed, "to take ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... Reuben! He is book-mad; and it is my opinion, that when he gets into that musty old library, among the dusty books, he will ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... are caused by accidentally wet cases or damp cellars and ice houses. The moldy egg is most frequently a spot rot. In the musty egg proper the meat is free from foreign organisms, but has been tainted by the odor of mold growth upon the shell or ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... as rancid as an old oil-cask, eggs that would have been chickens to-morrow, and wine—but the wine may atone for the rest—it is old Peralta, or the patrona is perjured. I have had the table spread under the tree, in hopes that fresh air may sweeten musty viands, and in order that we may see the ball-play of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... at Langeais there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourist's weak- ness of dawdling; for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds and ends of, antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and musty, indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all apartments should be through which the insatiate American wanders in the rear of a bored domestic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry or to read the name on the frame of some ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... open the box, and lifting up some musty old deeds and parchments, he feasted his eyes ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... Farm—at the same time showing Jack's seal and signature at the bottom of the deed. Jack, being called upon by the justices to show cause, pulled out of his pocket an old memorandum-book—very greasy, musty, and ill-flavoured—and which, from the quantity of dust and cobwebs with which it was overlaid, had obviously been lying on the shelf for half a century at least. This he placed in the hands of his friend Snacks the attorney, pointing out to him a page ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... man or ship it is not so easy to right again. Remember me most sincerely to the remnant of most excellent fellows whom I have the good luck to know in Cambridge—I mean Whitley and Watkins. Tell Lowe I am even beneath his contempt. I can eat salt beef and musty biscuits for dinner. See what a ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... over to the companion ladder, and found my way down to the door of the cabin. I knocked with my knuckles, but no voice answered, and I went within. The man still sat at the table, without turning at my entrance. The atmosphere was cold and musty; there was no fire in the stove, although yet another man sat crouched before it. I went behind the man at the table and ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... our masters?" she screamed out in her lisping voice. "What is it to you that they took me in, brought me up, and gave me meat and drink? Can't you bear to see another's good fortune, eh? Who asked you to come here? You fusty, musty, black-faced villain with a moustache like a beetle's!" Here Pufka indicated with her thick short fingers what his moustache was like; while Nurse Vassilievna's toothless mouth was convulsed with laughter, re-echoed in the ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, gray, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely motionless save for the rolling of their red eyes or an occasional snap of their rat-trap ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were men of every country, and costumes of all kinds. There was an indescribable mistiness in the air, or a premature twilight, in which all the figures looked ghostly and unreal. The ship was of a model such as I had never seen, and the rigging had a musty odor, so that the whole craft smelled like a ship-chandler's shop grown mouldy. The figures glided rather than walked about, and I perceived a strong smell of cabbage issuing ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... have blonde hair. They are naked, with scrolls or ribbons wreathed round them, adding to the airiness of their continual dance. Some of the loveliest are in a room used to stow away the lumber of the church—old boards and curtains, broken lanterns, candle-ends in tin sconces, the musty apparatus of festival adornments, and in the midst of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... gross external idolatry are exposed by the advancing light of these progressive years, but this musty old form has taken new life and now receives the service of the race. The whole world is running pell-mell after this idol. It stands in the market places, it is not a stranger in the courts of justice, and is in high favor in legislative halls. Solon ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... cedar buds was in the air about them; and wafted out on this, as though it might have been just now brought up from the musty depths of some old cedar chest, they heard the thin voice of Miss Liz scolding one of the servants. Otherwise, the morning seemed to have no life except the lazy ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... soapbox evangelist is rather slight. The night is cold. The wind bites and the street has a dismal air. The evangelist stands around the corner from the old book store in whose windows thousands of musty volumes are piled like the bones of hermits. The man who owns this curious book store is a sun-worshipper. And the evangelist on the soapbox is ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Mrs. Rachel Ellis. Their real acquaintanceship began one Sunday forenoon when Captain Zelotes and Olive had gone to church. Ordinarily he would have accompanied them, to sit in the straight-backed old pew on a cushion which felt lumpy and smelt ancient and musty, and pretend to listen while old Mr. Kendall preached a sermon which was ancient ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... supped miserably; a little barley from the convent and some musty hay furnished by the woman of the house, but which even in his hunger he refused to eat, left him ill-compensated for a hard day's walk, and he turned his head to me now and then with a coaxing whinney which was as plain a supplication for something to eat as I could ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... assembly is the only organ by which their sentiments can be expressed, is, to me, truly surprising. For where, in the name of wonder, should the house acquire the necessary knowledge or intelligence? Is it by turning these musty old volumes, or by rummaging these gaudy boxes which lie on your table? No! they contain none of these mysteries. How then are they to be explored? Is there any virtue or inspiration in these benches or cushions, by which they ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... would be done, the 'curse' to the contrary notwithstanding. People who have pet projects about portraits would not like to have all their neat and logical arguments knocked on the head, but where SHOULD we ALL be if no Shakspeare at all were found, but only a bundle of musty old MSS. in Lord Bacon's 'fine Roman hand'? After all, I am rather nervous about the result of such an exhumation. But, seriously, I see no reason why it should not be made. A legal friend here ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... manufacture of the article, the beer is never palatable or wholesome.—Barrels should be well cleaned with boiling water; and if the bung-hole will admit, they should be scrubbed inside with a hard brush. If they have acquired a musty scent, take out the heads, and let them be well scrubbed with sand and fuller's earth. Then put in the head again, and scald it well; throw in a piece of unslaked lime, and close up the bung. When the cask has stood some time, rinse it well with cold water, and it will ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... reflections. The prejudices of her early years suffered a vehement concussion. Her respect for establishments was undermined. At this period occurred a misunderstanding upon public grounds, with one of her early friends, whose attachment to musty creeds and exploded absurdities, had been increased, by the operation of those very circumstances, by which her mind had been rapidly advanced ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to ice creams, jellies, or sillabubs, or regaled them with 10 musty almonds, moldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy, substantial fare. The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... entered; the usual mildewed walls, with the colour wash flowing away in streaks from the unsympathetic beam above; the same device, "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!" scribbled in charcoal above the black iron stove; the usual musty, close atmosphere, the usual smell of onion and stale cheese, the usual hard straight benches and central table with its ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You mustn't give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors, because they come for you from the coffee-house. This is my little bedroom; rather musty, but Barnard's is musty. This is your bedroom; the furniture's hired for the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should want anything, I'll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall be alone together, but we shan't fight, I dare say. But dear ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... down into the narrow space between the low couch and the wall, sharply pulling the clinging folds of my chiffon dress after me. Then I lay still, my blood pounding in my temples and ears, and in my nostrils a faint, musty smell from the Oriental stuff ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... plead the causes of the old and new education in person. Cleon and Brasidas are the pestles with which War proposes to bray Greece in a mortar; the triremes of Athens in council assembled declare that they will rot in the docks sooner than yield their virginity to musty, fusty Hyperbolus. The fair cities of Greece stand about waiting for the recovery of Peace from her Well, with dreadful black eyes, poor things; Armisticia and Harvest-Home tread the stage in the flesh, and Nincompoop and Defraudation ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the glories of the old buccaneering days and make ourselves feared and reverenced all over the globe; we will be sea-kings, you and I. What need is there for hesitation in the matter? Nay"—and he held up his hand as he saw that I was about to speak—"do not inflict upon me those musty platitudes about conscience and duty that I have heard so often in the old days, and that have been made the excuse for so many acts of gross tyranny and injustice that my gorge rises in loathing whenever I hear them mentioned. What ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... same meaning in the following words. They are, however, too simple to need defining; in fact, there are no simpler words on which to base definitions: airy, balky, bony, briny, chunky, downy, dusty, healthy, hearty, miry, musty, rusty, ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... Congressional Library in Washington and the Public Library in Boston—and this is the only portion of the dream which has been realized. I planned an elaborate scheme of research work which was to result in a magnificent (if musty) philological treatise. I thought of trying to discover by long and patient researches what species of lullaby were crooned by Egyptian mothers to their babes, and what were the elementary dramatic poems ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Monsieur le Comte, and see for yourself: it's plaster! Rusty, musty, mildewed plaster, made to look like old stone—but plaster for all that, plaster casts!—That's all that remains of your perfect masterpiece!—That's what they've done in just a few days!-That's what the Sieur Charpenais who copied the Rubenses, prepared a year ago." ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... suspicions proved too correct. He took that box to his private room, and with some trouble unlocked it. A damp and musty smell came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Tom's workshop and living quarters. The entire ground floor was taken up by the laboratory, and Old Crompton stared aghast at the wealth of equipment it contained. Furnaces there were, and retorts that reminded him of those pictured in the wood cuts in some of his musty books. Then there were complicated machines with many levers and dials mounted on their faces, and with huge glass bulbs of peculiar shape with coils of wire connecting to knoblike protuberances of their ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... one day, 'what under the sun is the use of them old, musty, fusty proverbs. A boy might as well wear his father's boots, and ride in his long stirrups, as talk in maxims, it would only set other boys a laughin' ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... she secretly carried out the goods that had already been collected at the Junta, during the next few days. Without a word to a soul they were shipped south. The boxes and barrels remained in the musty shop, apparently undisturbed. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... self! If you loved him—if you knew the first faint beginning of love—" I snatched up the letter I had addressed to Dan'l and ran over to the dresser for my purse. "You stay in here with the truth and keep your musty little soul safe! I'm going in there and tell him a ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the ghost talk, even if her voice did sound like the roar of a conch-shell with a bad case of grip. "I may say to you that, aside from a certain uncanny satisfaction which I feel at being permitted for the first time in my life to gaze upon the linaments of a real live misty musty spook, I regard your coming here as an invasion of the sacred rights of privacy which is, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... effort of conservative minds to preserve what had already served its turn and was vanishing from the scene of action. She made no end of comparisons. She compared her brother at one time to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who would sooner die than listen to reason. By degrees there was a perceptible change in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a cold, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... accustomed to some exercise and excitement, naturally drooped in the monotony of a camp knee in mire, where the only change from the camp-fire—with stew-pan simmering on it and long yarns spinning around it—was heavy sleep in a damp hut, or close tent, wrapped in a musty blanket and lulled by the snoring of half ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... mine of holiness, neither of them understood what road they were following, surrounded as they were by the lifeless, cold atmosphere, the mystic shadows, the yellowish lights falling from above, the odours of damp stone, of smoking wicks, of musty draperies; bewildered by visions of chapels, of grottos, of crosses at the foot of dark stairs; losing themselves in their flight down towards the lower caverns, keeping on a level with their own pointed vaults; of marbles the colour of blood, ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... aunt declared it smelled musty from being shut up. She has such a nose," and the little old ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... grew the musty smell of blood while that uncanny thud! thud! sound continued at regular intervals. Nelson waited, breath halted and finger on trigger, but still the darkness yielded no glimpse of those awful ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... saint's well or a ruined abbey; and there be but a cross or stone foot-stool in the way, he'll be considering it so long, till he forget his journey. His estate consists much in shekels, and Roman coins; and he hath more pictures of Caesar, than James or Elizabeth. Beggars cozen him with musty things which they have raked from dunghills, and he preserves their rags for precious relicks. He loves no library, but where there are more spiders volumes than authors, and looks with great admiration ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... prosy tales of petty squabbling. With every ship they sent to Versailles their memoires, often of intolerable length; and the patient monarch read them all. Marginal notes, made with his own hand, are still upon many of them, and the student who plods his way through the musty bundles of official correspondence in the Archives Nationales will find in these marginal comments enough to convince him that, whatever the failings of Louis XIV may have been, indolence was ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... fellow gets his sulk? not from life; for he's often too much of a recluse, or else too young to have seen anything of it. No, he gets it from some of those old plays he sees on the stage, or some of those old books he finds up in garrets. Ten to one, he has lugged home from auction a musty old Seneca, and sets about stuffing himself with that stale old hay; and, thereupon, thinks it looks wise and antique to be a croaker, thinks it's taking a stand-way ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... would- be private secretaries. Many high school and university students yearned for the voyage, and every trade in the working class developed a few applicants, the machinists, electricians, and engineers being especially strong on the trip. I was surprised at the number, who, in musty law offices, heard the call of adventure; and I was more than surprised by the number of elderly and retired sea captains who were still thralls to the sea. Several young fellows, with millions coming to them later on, were wild for the adventure, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... Table, comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked, to furnish the play-houses in London." Which shows very clearly what direction the public taste was then taking. The matter and method of the old dramas, and all "such musty fopperies of antiquity," would no longer do: there was an eager though ignorant demand for something wherein the people might find or fancy themselves touched by the real currents of nature. And, as prescription was thus set aside, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... a moment, looking straight before him at the rows of ancient and musty books that adorned his walls,—then ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the windows are never opened; probably the shutters are kept always shut; perhaps some kind of stores are kept in the room; no breath of fresh air can by possibility enter into that room, nor any ray of sun. The air is as stagnant, musty, and corrupt as it can by possibility be made. It is quite ripe to breed small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, or anything ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... musty and still as we climbed, except for the unheeded squeaking of a radio someone had forgotten to turn off. You could always tell when a radio was being listened to, for when disregarded it sulkily gave off painfully listless noises ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... still spoiling; the bacon is so badly injured that we are compelled to throw it away. By accident, this morning, the saleratus is lost overboard. We have now only musty flour sufficient for ten days, a few dried apples, but plenty of coffee. We must make all haste possible. If we meet with difficulties, as we have done in the canon above, we may be compelled to give ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... mountain height sublime, Round mountain caves with spirits ride, In thy mild haze o'er meadows glide, And, purged from knowledge-fumes, renew My spirit, in thy healing dew! Woe's me! still prison'd in the gloom Of this abhorr'd and musty room! Where heaven's dear light itself doth pass, But dimly through the painted glass! Hemmed in by book-heaps, piled around, Worm-eaten, hid 'neath dust and mould, Which to the high vault's topmost bound, A smoke-stained ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... the flour could be bolted in vacuo, it would not be changed." "Intelligent writers speak of the necessity of preparing corn for exportation by kiln-drying as indispensable. Without that process, corn is very liable to become heated and musty, so as to be unfit for food for either man or beast. The kiln-dried maize meal from the Brandywine Mills, &c., made from the yellow corn, has almost monopolized the West India trade. This process is indispensable, if we export maize to ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... care they are perfectly fresh-gathered when the weather is tolerably dry; for, if they are picked during very heavy rain, the ketchup from which they are made is liable to get musty, and will not keep long. Put a layer of them in a deep pan, sprinkle salt over them, and then another layer of mushrooms, and so on alternately. Let them remain for a few hours, when break them up with the hand; put them in a nice cool place for 3 days, occasionally stirring ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... windows and shades. But a dubious examination of that apartment was sufficient. If he should ever really live here the parlor could be made habitable, but for the present its demands were too many. He closed the windows again and abandoned the room to its musty solitude. From the spare room upstairs he brought bed and bedding and placed it in the sitting room. It required some ingenuity to convert the latter apartment into a bedroom, but the difficulty was at last solved by relegating the sewing machine to the parlor and ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... material advantage over my competitors, viz., the early habit I acquired of retaining in my mind's eye, without coldly copying on the spot, whatever I intended to imitate.... Instead of burdening the memory with musty rules, or tiring the eye with copying dry or damaged pictures, I have ever found studying from nature the shortest and safest way of obtaining knowledge in ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... most careful and faithful picture on record of the time, personal facts, unfortunately, being of the most meager nature. They have been sought for chiefly, however, in the old records themselves; musty with age and appallingly diffuse as well as numerous, but the only source from which the true flavor of a forgotten time can be extracted. Barren of personal detail as they too often are, the writer of the present imperfect sketch has found Anne Bradstreet, in spite of all such deficiencies, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... too, like those in Unknown Worlds and the old Weird Tales, I read them, too. But I hadn't any idea how much there was, until we started buying copies of everything there was on the news-stands, and then ransacking musty little stores for back issues and ones that had gone out of publication, until Paul's office was just full of teetery piles of gaudy magazines and everywhere you looked there were pictures of strange stars and eight-legged monsters ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... worth looking at. Natur! Lor', Passon, if ye likes wild natur ye ain't got no call to keep a gard'ner. But if ye pays me an' keeps me, ye must 'spect me to do my duty. Wherefore I sez: why not 'ave this 'ere musty-fusty place, a reg'ler breedin' 'ole for hinsects, wopses, 'ornits, snails an' green caterpillars—ah! an' I shouldn't wonder if potato-fly got amongst 'em, too!—why not, I say, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... a perfumer called Borachio was burning dried lavender in a musty room in Leonato's house, when the sound of conversation floated through the ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... it will be! I can see our little house now nestling among the hills, shaded by great spreading trees with flowers and vines and golden fruit all about it, rich plumaged birds and gorgeous butterflies. Oh! I can hardly wait. Who would live in a musty palace when one has within reach such a home, and that, too, ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... might call thick, but musty, these last few days. We were lookin' to pick up the ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... hibernated under extinguishers dropped over them two months since. The tables, drawn up in corners—loaded with ornaments at other times—had nothing but pen, ink, and paper (suggestive of the coming proceedings) placed on them now. The smell of the house was musty; the voice of the house was still. One melancholy maid haunted the bedrooms up stairs, like a ghost. One melancholy man, appointed to admit the visitors, sat solitary in the lower regions—the last of the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... not gloat over our superior knowledge. After a similar lapse of time, may not our vaunted wisdom concerning the properties of plants look as ridiculous to the delver among our musty volumes? Indeed, it may, if we may judge by the discoveries and investigations of only the past fifty years. During this time a surprisingly large number of plants have been proved to be not merely innocuous instead of poisonous, as ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... first bottom of the Platte there was scarcely a breath of air, and collars wilted limp as rags. Neither map nor chart graced the unplastered walls, the unpainted furniture of the room was sadly in need of repair, while a musty odor permeated the room. Outside the railing the seating capacity of the court-room was rather small, rough, bare planks serving for seats, but the spectators gladly stood along the sides and rear, eager to catch every word, as they silently mopped the ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... who lived the life of a recluse in that distant village, doing his duty exactly, but given over for the most part to his beloved books. He seldom went away. The monotony of his daily round was broken only by the occasional receipt of a parcel of musty volumes, which he had ordered to be bought for him at some sale. He was a man of varied learning, full of remote information, eccentric from his solitariness, but with a great sweetness of nature. His life was simple, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... banks, dominated by two declivities, lined with brambles and long rows of trees, hidden, drowned in that milky vapor, clad in that musty robe which sometimes floats over valleys, at break of day. And at the extreme end of that thick and transparent fog, you see coming or, rather already come, a human couple, a stripling and a maiden, embraced, inter-laced, she, with head leaning on him, he, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... things considered, you got a good deal for your money. The place was quiet and respectable; even in its downfall it clung desperately to its traditions. It took no transients, required a certain standard of conduct in its lodgers, and still maintained a night clerk in the office of its musty front hall. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a song, and it occurred to him that its echo there was as if one were to pin a ruffle of lace to the grim stones. Some one answered the laugh, and he heard the murmurous touching of soft skirts entering the corridor as he dived down the ancient dark of one of the musty passages. There the silence was resumed. In the palace it was as though the stillness were some living sleeper, waking with protests, thankful for the death of ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... The musty inn of mid-Europe will boast till the end of time of the two-hour visit within its walls of a certain Elector and his suite in the year sixteen hundred and something or seventeen hundred and something. There is not a hostelry in England dating back to Tudor times ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... way of washing a barrel is with boiling water, and when cool examining it with a light inside. If there be any sour or musty smell, however, lime must be used to remove it. Break the lime into lumps, and put it in the cask dry (it will take from 3 to 4 lbs. for each cask), then pour in as many gallons of boiling water as there are pounds of lime, and bung. Roll ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... to light that the cane belonged to a traveling tradesman who had spent the night carousing in the company of some wenches; but at the time, attention was at once turned to the Bancal house, a dilapidated, gloomy building with musty, dirty corners. It had formerly been owned by a butcher, and pigs were still kept in the yard. It was a house of assignation and was visited nightly by soldiers, smugglers, and questionable-looking ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... more; they had, at all events, introduced a wholesome and thorough system of cleansing and cleaning throughout the house, that had been very welcome to the soul of Mrs. Eccles; but into the library they had not penetrated. The old bookshelves remained untouched; the old books, in their musty brown calf bindings, were undesecrated by profaning hands. All sorts of quaint chairs and bureaus, gathered together out of every other room in the house, had congregated here. The space over the mantelpiece was adorned by a splendid portrait by Vandyke, flanked irreverently ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Lovejoy, I have been hurry'd quite out of my Senses, three more Ships are sail'd in upon me this Morning; the Atlas Merchant Man, Captain Sunburnt Commander from the East Indies, the Dighton Gally from the musty Islands, and the Hankerchief ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... we have our official report of debates in the House of Commons this also will follow. It is easy to imagine with what eagerness the House would welcome any alternative that should deliver it from the necessity, not of listening to these musty harangues—that, to do it justice, it never suffers—but of giving up an appreciable portion of its precious time to the gratification ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... that guarded the El Refugio Plutonean treasures, and who had swallowed it in a single gulp. It was in very bad case. The furrows of its red-tiled roof looked as if they were the results of age and decrepitude. Its best room had a musty smell; there was the dampness of deliquescence in its slow decay, but the Spanish Californians were sensible architects, and its massive walls and partitions defied the earthquake thrill, and all the year round kept an even ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... memory with exploded systems and useless names. Good God! In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand years old and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected, in this enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... n.; smell; stink, stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Jacob saw it stretch Its topmost round, when it appear'd to him With angels laden. But to mount it now None lifts his foot from earth: and hence my rule Is left a profitless stain upon the leaves; The walls, for abbey rear'd, turned into dens, The cowls to sacks choak'd up with musty meal. Foul usury doth not more lift itself Against God's pleasure, than that fruit which makes The hearts of monks so wanton: for whate'er Is in the church's keeping, all pertains. To such, as sue for heav'n's sweet sake, and not To those who in respect of kindred claim, Or on ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... world's honors to-day must not be overtrained mentally or physically; not, as John Randolph said of the soil of Virginia,—"poor by nature and ruined by cultivation," hollow-chested, convex in back, imperfect in sight, shuffling in gait, and flabby in muscle. The work of such a man will be musty like his closet, narrow as the groove he moves in, tinctured with the peculiarities that border on insanity, and out ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... his musty tomes in Latin and in Greek; Consulted cyclopaedias and manuscripts antique, Essays in Anthropology, studies in counterpoise— "For these," he said, "are useful lore ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... some extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and such support ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... something harder, colder than the boards; it was a hearthstone, and it marked the place where, before the room was turned into a shop, there had been a small fireplace. And on the other side of this, near the wall, was a collection of rubbish, over the musty items of which Max stumbled as he went. Old boxes, bits of carpet, broken bricks; ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... was by no means rapid. Much of the literature among which he delved, musty with age, written in mediaeval Latin and in obsolete characters, gave up its secrets with reluctance. Nevertheless he found definite replies to the questions which he propounded to himself. A collection of apocryphal Gospels "printed," according to the quaint title-page, "for Richard Royston ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... wait in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room pervaded by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple of chairs and a praying-stool, and for only ornament a great, gaunt crucifix hanging upon one of its ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... and historical works discovered in an old cupboard in his father's study. To this chamber, which had also served as the bedroom in which the child slept with his grandmother, the young man's thoughts returned with wistful bitterness, and at the image of the innocent little figure poring over the musty volumes by the flickering firelight in the silence of the night, the mass of rags heaved yet more convulsively. How he had enjoyed putting on fresh wood after his grandmother had gone to bed, and grappling with the astronomical treatise, ignoring ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... did—everybody did. Besides, this is fairly my task—you won't deny that. Chadlands will be mine, some day, so it's up to me to knock this musty yarn on the head once and for all. Could anything be more absurd than shutting up a fine room like that? I'm really ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... Fausta was sitting in a yellow chair on the deck of that musty old boat, crocheting from a pattern in Godey's Lady's Book. I remember it as I remember my breakfast of this morning. Not that I fell in love with her, nor did I fall in love with my breakfast; but I knew she was there. And that was the first time I ever saw her. ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... Orchard, Gardens, or in Fields, There is a grain which, tho' 'tis common, Its Worth till now was known to no Man. Not Ceres Sickle e're did crop A Grain with Ears of greater hope: And yet this Grain (as all must own) To Grooms and Hostlers well is known, And often has without disdain In musty Barn and Manger lain, As if it had been only good To be for Birds and Beasts the Food. But now by new-inspired Force, It keeps alive both Man and Horse. Then speak, my Muse, for now I guess E'en what it is thou wouldst express: It is not Barley, ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... rolled Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer night collected still, to make The morning precious. Beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of—were closely wed To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit; Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... said: "Take you, Icarus. They will fly away with you. You will become a cavalier of the clouds, a toreador of the aerial arena, an archangel soaring among the Eolian melodies of shrapnel. I envy, I applaud, but I cannot emulate. The upper circles are reserved for youth and over musty tomes I have squandered mine. I am thirty-two by the clock and I should hie me to the grave-digger that he may take my measure. And yet if I could—if I could!—I would like to be one of the liaison chaps and fall if I must in a shroud ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... in bed, So much I've read Of musty tomes that I've a headful Of tales and rhymes Of ancient times, Which, wife ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... the bringer of the best news we've ever had," she said, and her voice was like a flood of some warm sweet liquor in that musty, hate-charged room. "Oh, Hank, forget your silly, wrong jealousy and listen to me. Patrick here has something wonderful ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... that was left of a scattered Sunday-school library, that had been in use two generations before. Queer little books they were, time-yellowed and musty smelling, but to story-loving little Betty, hungry for something new, they seemed a veritable gold-mine. She had found that no key barred her way into this little red treasure-house of a bookcase, and a board propped against the wall under the window outside ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... started across it, but in the center of the floor I stopped. In all the other rooms of the castle dust had lain thick, but there was none here. Elsewhere the windows had been closed and the air heavy and musty, but here the soft night breeze was drifting in. On a table, in odd conjunction, stood the remains of a meal, a roll of bandages, and a half-burned candle; and finally, against the wall lay a bed of a sort, a ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... gimlet-eyed, wearing a musty brown coat, soiled black stock, unspeakable linen, and skin-tight trousers held to his rusty shoes by wide straps—showing not only the knuckles of his knees but the streaked thinness of his upper shanks—(Cruikshank ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... by the "lady of the Strachey"? If Timon chooses to invite Ullorxa to his feast, are we to bar the door because no one ever heard the name before? No: let us have our Shakespeare (is he not as much ours as yours?) free from all notes, on a page purified from the musty cobwebs of black-letter pedants. We want no jargon of bickering critics to drown the music that sings at Heaven's gate. Give us those immortal plays just as Shakespeare wrote them, that we may read them without ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... the Civil War? To be able to answer that question has cost more time and study than the reader could be brought to believe. It has necessitated a thorough examination of all published histories of California, of numerous biographies, of old newspapers, memoirs, letters and musty documents. It has involved interviews with prominent persons as well as a careful study of earlier writings upon Starr King in books and magazines. Best of all it has compelled the writer to the delightful task of renewing his acquaintance with the published ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... be taken that no stinking fish, or unwholesome flesh, or musty corn, or other corrupt fruits of what sort soever, be suffered to be sold about the city, or any part ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... and the little maid, Anne, showed him into the small parlor. There was a musty, unused smell in the dingy little room, for Mrs. Home was still at Torquay, and the curate during her absence mostly occupied his study. The maid, however, turned on the gas, and as she did so a small girl of four slipped in behind her. She was a very pretty child, with gray eyes and black ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... apologies for leaving me, explaining that he had been invited to assist at a dance at a neighbouring estancia, took himself off. Soon afterwards, though it was only about nine o'clock, I was shown to a room where a bed had been prepared for me. It was a large, musty-smelling apartment, almost empty, there being only my bed and a few tall, upright chairs bound with leather and black with age. The floor was tiled, and the ceiling was covered with a dusty canopy of cobwebs, on which flourished ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... eastward rumbled off along Paseo Colon. I walked a few steps down one of the dark avenues and sat down on a seat to finish my cigar. It was like walking into a dark room. I could hear the roar of the city, yet at the same time I could hear some local sounds plainly. A musty smell came up on the breeze from the river. Suddenly I heard the long deep note of a steamer's whistle: the Mihanovich Mail Boat leaving for Monte Video. I sat there quietly, thinking of nothing in particular, just glancing up now and then to note the numbers of ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... awe-inspiring, for the blinds were nearly always down, and it had a musty unused scent telling you that its grandeur was not for daily use. The library was gloomier still. Its windows were of stained glass; books of the dingiest hue surrounded you; they lined the walls; and the furniture and carpet matched them in tone. Ghostly busts on pedestals, ...
— 'Me and Nobbles' • Amy Le Feuvre
... don't waste your time," says I. "He's a good deal of a sport and all that, but I don't think he'd fall for anything so musty as this old ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... rebuking them. Or it might be that he wished to take the opportunity of informing Europe that he had no desire to conceal his humble beginning, though at that time he was recognised first man in it. Historians, when he was at the height of his power, ransacked musty archives assiduously to find out and prove that he had royal blood in him. They professed to have discovered that he was connected with the princely family of Treviso, and the comical way in which he contemptuously brushed aside this fulsome flattery ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... solitary and very dull, and I did not doubt that I might safely steal upstairs. I left Charley below and went up with a light foot, not distressed by any glare from the feeble oil lanterns on the way. I listened for a few moments, and in the musty rotting silence of the house believed that I could hear the murmur of their young voices. I put my lips to the hearse-like panel of the door as a kiss for my dear and came quietly down again, thinking that one of these days I would confess ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... pay the author of the Iliad out for his treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place—this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know everything down in Oxford and Cambridge; but I venture to say that if the ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... cabin had no door, and I could see the stars through the roof. The old sheet-iron stove was badly rusted and broken. Most of the night I spent chopping wood, and I did not sleep at all. But I had a good rest by the stove, where I read a little from a musty pamphlet on palmistry that I found between the logs of the cabin. I always carry candles with me. When the wind is blowing, the wood damp, and the fingers numb, they are of inestimable value in kindling a fire. I do not carry firearms, and during ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... should not also come clear, or what it was which made his hitherto talkative subject so silent. He never had such a case—he didn't believe his books had one on record; and the befogged old man hurried home to see if, in all his musty volumes, unopened for many a year, there was a ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... world." A passage which Hamilton's editor selects as the keynote of his system expresses well enough the spirit of the Revolution: "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... was damp and musty. The white mould could be seen gleaming on the walls, as if it wished to give a little colour to the sombre surroundings. Great cobwebs flung their streaming banners from the beams and rafters overhead, whilst smaller ones, with delicate lace-like tracery, tried ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... caught In love's stout meshes, flutters round the door, And fondly beckons her away from home,— The whilst, her lady mother fain would cage The foolish bird within its narrow cell!— And then, the grandame idly wastes her breath, In venting saws 'bout maiden modesty— And strict decorum,—from some musty volume: But the clipp'd wings will quickly sprout again; And whilst the doating father thinks his child A paragon of worth and bashfulness,— Her thoughts are hovering round the precious form Of her sweet furnace-breathing Don Diego!— And he, all proof 'gainst dews ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... ceilings are far too low! Across the wide, squat window the apple branches fell in black stripes which never stirred. It was too dark to see things clearly. At the foot of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs. Hopgood had sat down, moving her lips as if in speech. Mingled with the half-musty smell of age; there were other scents, of mignonette, apples, and some sweet-smelling soap. The floor had no carpet, and there was not one single dark object except the violin, hanging from a nail over the bed. A little, round clock ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster a la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... proceeds to the forecastle, at the break of which he is received by the three warrant-officers, the boatswain, gunner, and carpenter, in their best coats, cut after the fashion of the year one, broad-tailed, musty, and full of creases from bad packing and little use, and blazing from top to bottom with a double-tiered battery of buttons of huge dimensions. Behind these worthy personages, who seldom look much at home in their finery, stands the master-at-arms, in front of his troop of troublesome ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... arisen? Evidently, for a few minutes later she was standing in one of the dim corners of Oliver's musty room, reopening a book which she had taken down from the shelves on her former visit. She remembered it from its torn back and the fact that it was an Algebra. Turning to the fly leaf, she looked again at ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... that life might have been more cheerful for him if his wife Mary had lived, and he had had her and boys like that young Langton to meet him when his wearisome day was over, instead of being childless and a widower, and returning to the lonely, dingy house which he occupied as the incumbent of a musty church hard by. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... have only to bite one of the biscuits they make nowadays of Lord knows what, reeking the moment you taste them, of fish glue and plaster that has been rained upon, I have only to eat that cold, insipid paste and sniff at a musty closet, and at once the lugubrious picture rises before me of some Godforsaken place!—Your Chartres will ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... windows, closed doors, but nothing within; no rooms, no hollow places. The houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than the solid earth. Lea remained the only one the thought of whom was not like the reconsideration of an ancient, a musty pair ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... gray film of dust had accumulated on everything, and the rooms were oppressive with the musty odors that gather in a closed, untenanted house. But apart from that it stood as they had left it thirteen months before. No foot had crossed the threshold. The pile of wood and kindling lay beside the fireplace as Bill had placed ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... my apartment. It was musty, dusty, and lonesome. Some of Catherine's things were still on the table where I'd dropped them; they looked up at me mutely until I covered them with the walloping pile of mail that had arrived in my long absence. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... music in the world is the note of spring freshness. The dewy sweetness of the morning air is in it, and the fragrance of spring flowers. The brown sheets on which the notes are printed have lain amongst the dust for a couple of centuries; they are musty and mildewed. Set the sheets on a piano and play: the music starts to life in full youthful vigour, as music from the soul of a young god should. It cannot and never will grow old; the everlasting life is in it that makes the green buds shoot. To realise the immortal youth of Purcell's music, ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... people sat in the darkness with an extraordinary effect of personal sorrow. This was not where happy people came to offer thanks; it was a refuge for the afflicted, a temporary harbour for the weary. They did not seem to pray; they sat relaxed, wrapped in the antique peace, the warm, musty smell of the building, sitting with the stillness of their desire to preserve this safety which was theirs only for a little while. Their dull clothes mixed with the shadows, the old oak, the worn stone, and the voice of the organ was like the voice ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... asked what it meant? The tone of my interrogatory was rouzing, and recalled his attention. 'Pshaw! Trevor,' replied he, with a glance of half contemptuous pity, 'you are yet young: you are but at the beginning of your troubles. Your over weening fondness for the musty morality of dreaming dotards, or artful knaves who only made rules that they might profit by breaking them, will be your ruin. I tell you again and again, if you do not prey upon the world, the world will prey upon you. There is no alternative. What! be bubbled out of your fortune ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... too; for ever since I had strength enough to gnaw a bone I have longed for the power of speech, that I might utter a multitude of things I had laid up in my memory, and which lay there so long that they were growing musty or almost forgotten. Now, however, that I see myself so unexpectedly enriched with this divine gift of speech, I intend to enjoy it and avail myself of it as much as I can, taking pains to say everything I can recollect, though ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... darkened till it seemed to him like a great ruddy tress of Sofia's waving hair, Mauro sprang to his feet and fiercely whispered: "Mil demonios! but she shall at least know, and then I'll kiss the old padre, and his musty office good-bye and go try my hand at ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... ah, might I climb, Freely, some mountain height sublime, Round mountain caves with spirits ride, In thy mild haze o'er meadows glide, And, purged from knowledge-fumes, renew My spirit, in thy healing dew! Woe's me! still prison'd in the gloom Of this abhorr'd and musty room! Where heaven's dear light itself doth pass, But dimly through the painted glass! Hemmed in by book-heaps, piled around, Worm-eaten, hid 'neath dust and mould, Which to the high vault's topmost bound, A smoke-stained paper doth enfold; With boxes round thee piled, and glass, And many ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Mrs. Betsey. "Your aunt declared it smelled musty from being shut up. She has such a nose," and the little old ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... the lady of the house had returned. Upstairs the furniture was wrapped in gray covers, the chandeliers were veiled with cheese-cloth, the house and glass of the mirrors were dull and lifeless under the coating of dust. Marie opened the door for him and led the way through the dark, musty rooms, the windows closed, and the curtains down, without any light except what ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... transported back to his rural employments and amusements, that he sighed when his carriage stopped opposite to the old hackney-coach, which Archibald had kept in attendance at the place where they had left it. While the coachman again bridled his lean cattle, which had been indulged with a bite of musty hay, the Duke cautioned Jeanie not to be too communicative to her landlady concerning what had passed. "There is," he said, "no use of speaking of matters till they are actually settled; and you may refer the good lady to Archibald, if she presses you hard with questions. She is his old ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Groby Lington so far detached himself from his accustomed habits as to go and form one of a house-party, and he was not a little piqued that Mrs. Glenduff should have stowed him away in the musty old Georgian wing of the house, in the next room, moreover, to ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... started to leave him to change into street clothes; but he caught her arm and said, "Come on." They descended the next flight and came into the back room behind the pawnshop, which the Duchess used as a combination of sitting-room, office, and storeroom. About this musty museum hung or stood unredeemed seamen's jackets, men and women's evening wear, banjos, guitars, violins, umbrellas, and one huge green stuffed parrot sitting on top of ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... and omnibuses rattle over the pavements. There is a perceptible increase of oyster-shops, and other establishments for the accommodation of a transitory diurnal multitude. But a more important change awaits the venerable town. An immense accumulation of musty prejudices will be carried off by the free circulation of society. A peculiarity of character, of which the inhabitants themselves are hardly sensible, will be rubbed down and worn away by the attrition of foreign substances. Much of the result will be ...
— The Sister Years (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... entered Mr. Vetch's office with the best will in the world to please him, and to master the principles of legal practice and procedure; but I found it hard to reconcile myself to the atmosphere of a stuffy room filled with musty tomes, and to the unvarying round of desk work—copying from morning to night agreements, deeds and other documents bristling with a ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... from A.-S. harian, to become mouldy or musty. The word hoard may be traced to a ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... what I want," the professor said. "I'm interested in American Indians, and have always been considered an authority on the subject. But I'm getting old and younger men are stepping into the field. They think I'm just a musty old professor with nothing but a book knowledge of Indian ruins. So I have ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... means rapid. Much of the literature among which he delved, musty with age, written in mediaeval Latin and in obsolete characters, gave up its secrets with reluctance. Nevertheless he found definite replies to the questions which he propounded to himself. A collection of apocryphal ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... deal with actual affairs of life: but otherwise, they scarcely can enter into our stories. The main part of Ficulnus's life, for instance, is spent in selling sugar, spices and cheese; of Causidicus's in poring over musty volumes of black-letter law; of Sartorius's in sitting, cross-legged, on a board after measuring gentlemen for coats and breeches. What can a story-teller say about the professional existence of these men? Would a real rustical history of hobnails and eighteenpence a day be endurable? In the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... boy down to pie and the company of two musty old gentlemen like ourselves. He's earned a dance. You may go, Robert, and I wish—I wish my heels were light enough to go with yours," that kind ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... my reproaches for his dilatoriness, for there is a somewhat musty proverb that "Procrastination is ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... I have by reason of the war omitted for above two years, but now am endeavouring to have all my books ready and perfect against the Parliament comes, that upon examination I may be in condition to value myself upon my perfect doing of my own duty. At noon home to dinner, where my wife mighty musty,—[Dull, heavy, spiritless]—but I took no notice of it, but after dinner to the office, and there with Mr. Harper did another good piece of work about my late collection of the accounts of the Navy presented to the Parliament at their ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... alone, and whose only order was planned by the spirit that sent forth shadows and dreams. He had been too much of a rover, had seen too many strange sights in his young life, to be able to satisfy his cravings for knowledge in musty law tomes and dusty deeds. His curiosity had been aroused by many things he had seen in his early travels, he had had glimpses into so many wide fields of interest that led his mind astray. But none ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... new Cask and dig a Hole in the Ground, in which it may lye half depth with the Bung downwards; let it remain a Week, and it will greatly help this or any stinking musty Cask. But besides these, I have writ of two other excellent Ways to sweeten musty or stinking Casks, in my Second Book ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... have satisfied him that there would be no more use for his machine for a time, at least; for he pushed it to a place where there was a break in a fence and concealed it behind a musty-looking corn shock, left from the fall before. Then placing the glass under his arm he walked guardedly along the road in the direction of ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... cloth from 18 yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same fraudulent practice caused the decay of the Blews at Guildford." He probably muddled up musty scandals with the effect of pure business competition. He is not the last to make mistakes connected with a vanished trade. There still lingers a superstition at Guildford that Rack Close, not far from the Castle, is the place where unfortunate prisoners ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... correct. He took that box to his private room, and with some trouble unlocked it. A damp and musty smell came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the age of the sheep when he began to die; skins much ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... beseech your waiter with pathetic indignation, to 'see after that cutlet!' He steps out to see after it, and by-and-by, when you are going away without it, comes back with it. Even then, he will not take the sham silver cover off, without a pause for a flourish, and a look at the musty cutlet as if he were surprised to see it—which cannot possibly be the case, he must have seen it so often before. A sort of fur has been produced upon its surface by the cook's art, and in a sham silver vessel staggering on two feet instead of three, is a cutaneous kind of sauce of brown pimples ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... reference to one point, with not having thought it necessary to "pore over musty manuscripts, in the obscure chirography of two centuries ago." So far as my proper subject could be elucidated by it, I am constrained to claim, that this labor was encountered, to an extent not often attempted. The files of Courts, and ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors, and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing, unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy. I fancied that wings were sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... William, as he shut the door behind them: "certainly, Sir." And then, having placed the musty documents upon the shelf, whence they could be fetched down without difficulty on the slightest sign of a client, that ingenious youth, with singular confidence that nobody would be inconvenienced thereby, ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... because they have been labeled so," declared Kate. "When people tell you they are clinging to old ideals, it's well to find out if they aren't napping in some musty old room beneath the cobwebs. I'm a materialist, very likely, but that's only incidental to my realism. I like to be allowed to realize the truth about things, and you know yourself that you men—who really are the sentimental sex—have ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mammoths of Siberia were first discovered, though they had been dead for at least 80,000 years (according to Dr. Croll's minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice age), and might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty, they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators, that the wolves and bears greedily devoured the precious relics for which the naturalists of Europe would have been ready ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 'father' was nearly bankrupt and she did write 'Mrs.' to save him! Taking them in retrospect, it's a question if the thing they called sacrifice wasn't plain damn foolishness. Why, hell, Jack, d'you mean to say that the professor and his musty European customs—oh, I can't be profane enough!—the English language is trifling and inadequate! But I'm going to take a hand in this ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... I asked what it meant? The tone of my interrogatory was rouzing, and recalled his attention. 'Pshaw! Trevor,' replied he, with a glance of half contemptuous pity, 'you are yet young: you are but at the beginning of your troubles. Your over weening fondness for the musty morality of dreaming dotards, or artful knaves who only made rules that they might profit by breaking them, will be your ruin. I tell you again and again, if you do not prey upon the world, the world will prey upon you. There is no alternative. What! be bubbled out of your fortune ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... said Frawley, "I was just thinking—after all, it has been a bit of a while since I've been home—indeed, I should like it very much if I could take a good English mutton-chop and a musty ale at old Nell's, sir. I can still get ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... greatest value to posterity. Who could appear to have lived more entirely in vain than some of the early heretics? They were burned or massacred, their writings extirpated, their memory anathematized, and their very names and existence left for seven or eight centuries in the obscurity of musty manuscripts—their history to be gathered, perhaps, only from the sentences by which they were condemned. Yet the memory of these men—men who resisted certain pretensions or certain dogmas of the Church in the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... applause! Yet, that I may state the whole truth, let me acknowledge, that even these, my dullest, hardest tasks, were light, compared with the burden I formerly bore of ennui. At length my period of probation in my pleader's office was over; I escaped from the dusky desk, and the smell of musty parchments, and the close smoky room; I finished eating my terms at the Temple, and returned, even, as the captain of the packet swore, "in the face and teeth of the wind," ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... opened; probably the shutters are kept always shut; perhaps some kind of stores are kept in the room; no breath of fresh air can by possibility enter into that room, nor any ray of sun. The air is as stagnant, musty, and corrupt as it can by possibility be made. It is quite ripe to breed small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, or anything ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... men moved a little way along the oak stick to be out of the cool draught which blew from the cellar-like place, empty save for the storage of some old fragments of vessels or warehouse gear. There was a musty odor of the innumerable drops of molasses which must have leaked into the hard earth there for half a century; there was still a fragrance of damp Liverpool salt, a reminder of even the dyestuffs and pepper and rich spices that ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... you think of Gilt Leather for Furniture? There's your pretty Hangings for a Chamber; [2] and what is more, our own Country is the only Place in Europe where Work of that kind is tolerably done. Without minding your musty Lessons: I am this Minute going to Paul's Church-Yard to bespeak a Skreen and a Set of Hangings; and am resolved to encourage ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... great red blot on the landscape; all the while you know the only homelike portion of the establishment is in the wooden rear part. The front rooms are dark and gloomy, the paper hangings are mouldy, the closets musty and damp; there is a combined smell of creosote and whitewash pervading the chambers, and the ceilings hang low. I don't wonder you object to a brick house in the country. Yet, if you propose to build a model, honest and permanent, a house that shall be worth what ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... man passed into the high, chill rooms of his father's apartment. After feeling a moist atmosphere and breathing the heavy air and the musty odor which is given forth by old tapestries and furniture covered with dust, he found himself in the antique room of the old man, in front of a sick bed and near a dying fire. A lamp standing on a table of Gothic shape shed its streams of uneven light sometimes more, sometimes less strongly upon ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... It was now over a week since she had been out of her room, and during that time she had not only studied as usual, but read and read and read. She did not remember to have ever felt so nervous before. She could not go back into the Cathedral; it was musty in itself and crowded with the Great Unwashed. But it would not be right to disturb Julie. There could be no harm in the least bit of a walk alone, particularly as her father was in Menlo Park. She glanced about her dubiously. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... quince-tree in full blossom reared extravagant masses of pink snow against the blue overhead; beyond it a covered walk of vines shone golden-green. There was not a cloud in the sky. To turn back to the musty room from all this lush and lovely life was like stepping down into ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... habits of a gnat, or who counts it the pride of his life to have discovered a new fungus, but simpletons are pleased to make themselves merry with caricaturing any student of his country's institutions who is "always poring over musty old parchments." And yet these minute researches will have to be made sooner of later, and till we can bring ourselves to study the structure and the tissues and the comparative anatomy of Institutions, and to go through all the drudgery which sluggards loathe and fools deride, the light ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... very well for him, because he doesn't care for society and may as well be studying medicine as philandering about the woods with his pockets full of musty philosophers and old-fashioned poets," answered Charlie with a shrug which plainly expressed ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... Dalgarno. "To hear his wise lordship speak musty politics in false Latin, which the old fox always uses, that he may give the learned Majesty of England an opportunity of correcting his slips in grammar? ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... baker made to foreswear the trade in the city for ever.'' The assize of 1634 provides that "if there be any manner of person or persons, which shall by any false wayes or meanes, sell any meale under the kinge's subjects, either by mixing it deceitfully or sell any musty or corrupted meal, which may be to the hurte and infection of man's body, or use any false weight, or any deceitful wayes or meanes, and so deceive the subject, for the first offence he shall be grievously punished, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... smell musty up here too?" called out Guermeur to them, passing his bearded face up through the ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... was the answer. "I feel as if I was getting musty and rusty, and I've simply got to do something. Wish there was a hazing on, or something like that," and the fun-loving Rover gazed moodily out ...
— The Rover Boys in New York • Arthur M. Winfield
... through Six-Cross-Roads, sometimes singly, oftener in company. At one-o'clock the last posse passed through on its return to the county-seat, and after that there was a long, complete silence, while the miry corners were undisturbed by a single hoof-beat. No unkempt colt nickered from his musty stall; the sparse young corn that was used to rasp and chuckle greenly stood rigid in the fields. Up the Plattville pike despairingly cackled one old hen, with her wabbling sailor run, smit with a superstitious horror of nothing, in the stillness; she hid herself in the shadow underneath ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... sofas, three tables, two looking-glasses, and a wheezy clock of tarnished enamel with engraved bronze hands; in the study, a table piled up with papers, and a bluish-coloured screen covered with pictures cut out of various works of last century; a bookcase full of musty books, spiders, and black dust; a puffy armchair; an Italian window; a sealed-up door into the garden.... Everything, in short, just as it always is. Mardary Apollonitch has a multitude of servants, all dressed in the old-fashioned ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... hall was filled with sombre shadows; the motionless air was heavy with a musty, choking odor. In the dimness a few tattered hangings were visible on the walls; a rope, with bits of crumbling evergreen clinging to it, trailed from above one of the low windows. The panelled double door of the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... cottage!" she returned, with a shrill rendering of each adjective. "You would have us go and live in that damp, musty, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... He then took me to the Union Theological Seminary. In that institution about 120 young men are preparing for the Christian ministry. The library contains twenty thousand volumes on theology alone—musty and prosy tomes! What a punishment it would be to be compelled to wade through the whole! We saw neither professors nor students. My principal recollection of the place is that of feeling intensely hungry, and ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... Rachel Ellis. Their real acquaintanceship began one Sunday forenoon when Captain Zelotes and Olive had gone to church. Ordinarily he would have accompanied them, to sit in the straight-backed old pew on a cushion which felt lumpy and smelt ancient and musty, and pretend to listen while old Mr. Kendall preached a sermon which was ancient and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... is; ham as rancid as an old oil-cask, eggs that would have been chickens to-morrow, and wine—but the wine may atone for the rest—it is old Peralta, or the patrona is perjured. I have had the table spread under the tree, in hopes that fresh air may sweeten musty viands, and in order that we may see the ball-play ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... "This is a musty old place," said Paul, as he walked up one of the streets with a canal in the middle of it, in company with Mr. Fluxion and the surgeon; "I shouldn't feel safe here unless I lived ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... commenced on more favorable ground. It presented us an album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts. Yet we did not avail ourselves of all the advantages ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... now, he led the way into the queer-old front room, musty with the solemnity of many ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... creeps into the cellars, musty and dull. Tuxedos totter through the rubble of the street. Faces are moldy and worn out. The blue morning burns coolly in the city. How quickly music and dance and greed melted... It smells of the sun. And day begins With trolleys, horses, shouts and wind. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... men of highest condition and character, and vagabonds, Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, soldiers and artisans. There were theological discussions which led to blows before the colonists were far at sea. Fiske, the historian, says the "ship's atmosphere grew as musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles as that of a room at the Sorbonne." There was the incident of the wandering of Nicolas Aubry, "more skilled in the devious windings of the [Latin Quarter] ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... the squires. We started across it, but in the center of the floor I stopped. In all the other rooms of the castle dust had lain thick, but there was none here. Elsewhere the windows had been closed and the air heavy and musty, but here the soft night breeze was drifting in. On a table, in odd conjunction, stood the remains of a meal, a roll of bandages, and a half-burned candle; and finally, against the wall lay a bed of a sort, a mattress piled ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... pocket the crushed mass of colored sugar and fruit I had picked up from the musty cushions of the old sofa in the walled-up ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... at the frost's touch, So Richard's heart on coldness fed its fire, And burned with surfeit of indifference. All flavor and complexion of content Went out of life; what served once served no more. His hound and falcon ceased to pleasure him; He read—some musty folios there were On shelf—but even in brave Froissart's page, Where, God knows, there be wounds enough, no herb Nor potion found he to purge sadness with. The gray dust gathered on the leaf unturned, And then the spider drew his thread across. Certain bright coins ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... "y Vicare du," or "the black Vicar," as he was called by the country people, in allusion to his black hair and eyes, and also to his black apparel, sat in his musty study, as he had done every evening for the last twenty-five years, poring ever his old books, and occasionally jotting down extracts therefrom. He was a broad-shouldered man, tall and straight, about sixty-five years of age. His ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... besides images of gold, silver, plate, furniture, goods and ornaments, as [6423]Weever calculates, and esteems them at the dissolution of abbeys, worth a million of gold. How many towns in every kingdom hath superstition enriched? What a deal of money by musty relics, images, idolatry, have their mass-priests engrossed, and what sums have they scraped by their other tricks! Loretto in Italy, Walsingham in England, in those days. Ubi omnia auro nitent, "where everything shines with ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... on high shelves out of sight, and blows over folios, with large clasps, that once stood in monastery libraries, and gathers a subtle sweetness from parchments that were illuminated in ancient scriptoriums, that are now grass grown, and is fortified with good old musty calf. The wind was from the right quarter on the first day I visited Kilbogie Manse, and as we went up the garden walk the Rabbi's library already bade us welcome, and assured us of our reward for a ten ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... like it, do you?" sneered the bully. "You'll like it still less when you get below. It's beautifully damp and musty." ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... rather meanly lodged in a dingy hotel on a narrow street leading from what with us might have been Piccadilly Circus. Our rooms were rather a good height with a carved cornice and plaster enrichments, but the furnishings were musty and the general air depressing, notwithstanding the effect of a few good mantel ornaments which I have long made it a rule ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... manifestly a greater task than the recording of accomplished facts. To determine causes it is necessary to spend much time in the study of "original documents"—the newspapers, magazines, and pamphlet literature of each period. In these, rather than in the "musty documents" of state, do we find history in the making. Here we can see the clash of contending interests before they are crystallized into ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... their experience, if no little dirty views give them also that prepossession in one man's favour, which they are so apt to censure their daughters for having in another's—and if, as I may add in your case, they have no creeping, old, musty uncle Antonys to strengthen their prepossessions, as he does my mother's. Poor, creeping, positive soul, what has such an old bachelor as he to do, to prate about the duties of children to parents; unless he had ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... furnished with tusks like unto the shafts of ploughs and decked with girdles made of gold, and covered with fine blankets and therefore, resembling the lotus in hue. And they were all darkish as rocks and always musty, and procured from the sides of the Kamyaka lake, and covered with defensive armour. And they were also exceedingly patient and of the best breed. And having made these presents, those kings were permitted to enter. O king, these and many others, coming from various regions, and numberless ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... We are thy Mirmidons, thy Guard, thy Rorers, And when thy noble body is in durance, Thus do we clap our musty Murrions on, And trace the streets in terrour: Is it peace Thou Mars of men? Is the King sociable, And bids thee live? Art thou above thy foemen, And free as Phoebus? Speak, if not, this stand Of Royal blood shall be abroach, ...
— Philaster - Love Lies a Bleeding • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... way, full of unaccountable noises after dark—rustlings of garments along unfrequented passages, and stealthy footfalls in unoccupied chambers overhead. I never knew of an old house without these mysterious noises. Next to my bedroom was a musty, dismantled apartment, in one corner of which, leaning against the wainscot, was a crippled mangle, with its iron crank tilted in the air like the elbow of the late ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... which assumes every man to be a hare-brained scapegrace at twenty, and Solomon at forty-five. Youth sows wild oats, it may be; too many men in more advanced life seem to me to sow no crop of any kind. There are empty fools at all ages; but "an old fool," &c., (musty as the proverb is, it is rather from neglect than over-application.) I have known men by the dozen, who in their youth were either empty-headed coxcombs or noisy sots; does my reader think that any given number of additional years has made them able ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... purpose, some to nibble and discard white petals. All the moist soil beneath is strewn with snowy flakes, for at night flying foxes blunder among the branches, destroying more blooms than they eat. But why grumble? Birds which nip off petals and musty foxes which brush down whole posies in their clumsiness are but positive checks to overproduction. Do they not avert the unthankful task of carting away dozens of barrow loads of superfluous fruit? Last ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... offered to awaken his regard For's priuate Friends. His answer to me was He could not stay to picke them, in a pile Of noysome musty Chaffe. He said, 'twas folly For one poore graine or two, to leaue vnburnt And still to nose ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Thought", "Ungenerous Insinuation", "despicable Opinion", "slavery", "oppression", terms which suggest the level to which rhetoric had risen even for as rational a man as the moderate burgess from Prince George County, now grown "tough as whitleather" with "something of the look of musty old Parchments which he handleth and studieth much". The Inquiry was widely read in Virginia and England and its statement on "direct representation" became the standard American defense against "virtual representation" and any half-way measure which would ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin. I snuffed it off, and, very ill at ease under the influence of cold and lingering nausea, sat up and spread open the injured tome on my knee. It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a fly-leaf bore the inscription—'Catherine Earnshaw, her book,' and a date some quarter of a century back. I shut it, and took up another and another, till I had examined all. Catherine's library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... the source of life, and as they came out — Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest — they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of washing a barrel is with boiling water, and when cool examining it with a light inside. If there be any sour or musty smell, however, lime must be used to remove it. Break the lime into lumps, and put it in the cask dry (it will take from 3 to 4 lbs. for each cask), then pour in as many gallons of boiling water as there are pounds of lime, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... are right," exclaimed the lieutenant, sniffing in turn. "And I remember that last time I visited this place the old woman certainly seemed to carry with her an uncanny, musty, animal odour. Therefore it is probably ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... once was a bond of sympathy. No doubt this break in the monotony of her life gave fresh courage to the fair young woman. The gentle, sightless poet relaxed the severe hours of study. Instead of grim digging in musty tomes they talked: he sat by her bedside holding the thin hands (for the blind see by the sense of touch), and they talked for hours—or were silent, which served as well. Then she would read to the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... probe, pocketed his lamp, released the catch of the lock on the door, and turned away along the dark, musty-smelling hall. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... were the same dingy, wrinkled houses, with their odd little balconies and ornamental iron galleries overhanging the sidewalks and peering into one another's faces as if to see what their neighbors were up to; the same queer, musty, dusty shops, dozing amid violent foreign odors; the same open doorways and tunnel-like entrances leading to paved courtyards at the rear. The steep roofs were tiled and moss-grown, the pavements were of huge ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... up flights and flights of black stairs into someone's filthy little kitchen, I was made to look down, through a mysterious window, into the closed church of the Cencis. Looking down, always a curious impression, into a dark, musty place and onto vague somethings which are, they tell me, the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... man, fresh from the dusty, musty lectures of Cambridge, and out of the reach of his boisterous and carousing companions, grasped at the gentle, refined and sympathetic friendship of this brother and sister. The trinity would walk off across the fields ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... his treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place—this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know everything down ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... just as I expected it would," added the commander. "I thought it must be a very old, black, and musty-looking place." ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... patchouly thus made is that which is found in the perfumers' shops of Paris and London. Although few perfumes have had such a fashionable run, yet when smelled at in its pure state, it is far from agreeable, having a kind of mossy or musty odor, analogous to Lycopodium, or, as some say, ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... you're right. There was a fellow near me who set up a holler about his room the minute he saw it—said it was dark and musty and not fit to pen a hog in—and they gave him one twice as large, and the chief steward bowed and scraped to him, and the room stewards danced around him as if he was a duke. And yet I heard later that he was nothing but a Bismarck ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster a la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... were rolled up and concealed between the tea-tree bark of the hut. A small packet contained red ochre to colour their bodies, and larger packets contained soaked Cycas seeds, which seemed to be undergoing fermentation. They were of a mealy substance, and harmless; but had a musty taste and smell, resembling that of the common German cheese. There was also a very large stone tomahawk made of greenstone; and ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... in, I think," he laughed. And, leaving the patient donkey for the moment to her fate, he led the way indoors. A match illumined for a moment the hallway, showing a ladder-like stair to a trap door above, and then, sputtering faintly in the musty air, went out. Since matches were scarce, he deftly made a torch of a paper from his pocket with better success. A brief glance into the room at their left showed signs of recent occupancy. His quick survey marked an oil ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... o'clock Edinburgh express from King's Cross next morning took me up to Doncaster, and hiring a musty old fly at the station, I drove three miles out of the town on the Rotherham Road, finding Whiston Grange to be a fine old Elizabethan mansion in the center of a great park, with tall old twisted chimneys, ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... corn. Many of the stones were out of sight in it. The church, a relic of old catholic days, rose out of it like one that had taken to growing and so got the better of his ills. They walked into the musty, dingy, brown-atmosphered house. The cobbler led the way to a humble place behind a pillar; there Doory was seated waiting them. The service was not so dreary to Donal as usual; the sermon had some thought in it; ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... dark as night. He could not see his own hands, and the dampness and musty odor, often noticeable in old cellars, added much to his discomfort. He found that the cell was made of strong three inch slats, securely bolted to thick timbers. These strips, or slats, were about ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... you do, and how you pass your time. Taking lessons of Wisdom from your Minerva? or flying after the Atalanta's of Virginia, more swift than their celebrated racers? or, more probably, poring over musty records; offering your time, your pleasures, your health, at the shrine of Fame; sacrificing your own good for that of the public; pursuing a chimera which ever has and ever will mock the grasp; for, however the end may be crowned with ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... thou have rummaged the cupboard of thy fancy for musty scraps and flinty crusts to feed thy spleen withal,—inattentive to the dainties which a blue-eyed Hebe had culled in the garden of Hope, and had poured from out her basket ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... branches I was unusually precocious, my education was confined entirely to those two departments of learning. Few text-books were then used in the school, for the parents of the children were generally too poor to pay for many, and the musty old Grammar and Arithmetic were kept in reserve for the older scholars. On account of my youth the teacher did not advance me, and I went again and again through the old Spelling-book, and learnt by heart what was called the 'fore part of the book'—some ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked the mica lights in the side-curtains. A distant train whistled desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy drowse. She felt that she could ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... monotony of a camp knee in mire, where the only change from the camp-fire—with stew-pan simmering on it and long yarns spinning around it—was heavy sleep in a damp hut, or close tent, wrapped in a musty blanket and lulled by the snoring ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... thirty degrees, and, as your art does not make allowance for this, it is false. For, if the influence of the twelve signs does not emanate from the stars occupying the space of those signs, it must emanate from nothing—a doctrine well suited, no doubt, to musty old sages of your superstitious Chaldea, but quite out of court in our progressive age—the last decade of our cultured ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... all born during 1900, it might prove interesting as well as profitable for me to review my musical past. I hear the young folks cry aloud: "Here comes that garrulous old chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences! Even if Old Fogy did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we should be bored by the fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us anything valuable ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... them, saw the white gleam of a robe that fell down his length in smooth, still folds, saw his hands—greenish skin stretched tight over fleshless bones. Suddenly it seemed to him that the air was musty and fetid. ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... with us, Professor Kell," answered the reporter heartily, as they ascended the steps. The old man's head disappeared from the window and shortly the sound of footsteps inside told of his approach. Finally the oaken door swung open, and they were silently ushered into the musty smelling hallway. Though outwardly accepting the Professor's suddenly pacific attitude, Perry made up his mind to be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... Joe put his plan into execution by applying for and receiving a month's leave of absence, and taking the first train, he arrived early on the second day at Denver. Here he hastened to the court house and had the city clerk search in musty records and when he came close to the date that Joe had calculated tallied with Kansas Shorty's story, they found James McDonald's name, and the sentence the judge had imposed which read: "Imprisonment ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... however, was not merely confined to the Via Giulia; it extended to the whole district, once so fine and fashionable, but now fallen into sad decay, far removed from modern life, and exhaling a faint musty odour of monasticism. Towards San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele has ripped up every olden district, the lofty five-storeyed houses with their dazzling sculptured fronts contrasted violently with the black sunken dwellings of the neighbouring lanes. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... o'clock we arrived at our destination and partook of the lunch that had been prepared for us in the little brick cottage that stood at the foot of old Cheops. After lunch we found ourselves surrounded by a crowd of Bedouins and Arabs numbering some two hundred, who besought us to purchase musty coins and copper images that were said to have been found in the interior of the huge piles of stone that surrounded us, and more persistent beggars than they proved to be it has never been my misfortune to run against. After visiting ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid impressions, litter of multi-colored tatters, and faded herbs and flowers, whence arises that odor (we all know it), musty and damp, but penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering flames of candle and fire start ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... "I could even smell them, and they did not seem musty, either. Besides, look at everything. Nothing cut up or damaged, like an old, deserted place. Some one may ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... of the sitting-room was an old table, and on it several musty books. The boys looked the books over, but found little to interest them. As relics the volumes ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... dark here, and the atmosphere was musty and fetid; a murmur pervaded the place as of voices behind many closed doors, but apart from that the tenement might have been empty and deserted for all the signs of life it evidenced. And then the spot where Jimmie Dale had stood was vacant, and he was along ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... This musty, dry-as-dust, old document gives rise to several enquiries. One not the least curious, is the luxurious mode of life, which the puncheon of wine supposes among stonemasons at such a remote period of Quebec history as 1646. Finally, it was decided that this stone and cross were intended to ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... desire to elucidate some point which had hitherto been considered obscure, and which their explanations do not always clear up; to the temptation to display their proficiency in the ingenious art of manipulating facts and figures culled from a dozen musty volumes into one ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... laughing, "our worthy father is fond of reading memoirs and delving into the musty archives of the castle. Everything relating to Thibermesnil interests him greatly. But the quotations that he mentions only serve to complicate the mystery. He has read somewhere that two kings of France have known the key to ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... me by the sight of Kenilworth by moonlight. Whether Dad would have considered those vows worthy or not, we do not know, had it not been that he wanted to go to the Bodleian Library at Oxford to see some musty old manuscript or other. So on our way from Liverpool to Oxford we stopped at Kenilworth, and I did see it at moonlight. I shall give my impressions at a later date. The search for another old manuscript gave Jess her chance at the Tower and "JANE," and it was there ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... cleansing and cleaning throughout the house, that had been very welcome to the soul of Mrs. Eccles; but into the library they had not penetrated. The old bookshelves remained untouched; the old books, in their musty brown calf bindings, were undesecrated by profaning hands. All sorts of quaint chairs and bureaus, gathered together out of every other room in the house, had congregated here. The space over the mantelpiece was adorned by a splendid portrait by Vandyke, flanked irreverently ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... hurrying with relief from the musty atmosphere of failure into the busy street. Though half dazed by the sudden subsidence of his plans, unable to face as yet the possible consequences, he had his pictures, and the names of the real ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... dimly-lighted hall, pervaded by a musty smell of unventilated rooms, and a damp, dirty underground floor. The place was altogether sordid, and dingy, and miserable. At last I heard her step coming down the two flights of stairs, and I went to ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... soup; hot meat down in the bottom of a steamboat, with a smell of oil, sour water, and musty linen all around you—that is what "a dinner on board" means, and nothing else. The very thought made me feel rily about the temper—all that I wanted was ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... went down into the hold where half-a-dozen of his company were lying ill. The hold was damp and musty as an old cellar, so steeped in the smells and leakage of innumerable dirty cargoes that it could not be made or kept clean. There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid with sickness and sweat and vomit. Two of the band boys were working in the stench and dirt, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... across the kitchen, he threw open a further door ceremoniously. Laura followed, pausing just inside the threshold to look round the little musty sitting-room, with its framed photographs, its woollen mats, its rocking-chairs, and its square of mustard-coloured carpet. Mason watched her furtively all the time, to see ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it would be—only the stars were far bigger and brighter. The children stood on the white, pebbly beach and shook themselves dry; while Bridget showed them how to pull down their nightshirts to keep them from shrinking, and how to wring out their faery caps to keep the wishes from growing musty or mildewed. After that they met the faery ferryman, who—according to Sandy—"wore a wee kiltie o' reeds, an' a tammie made frae a loch-lily pad wi' a cat-o'-nine-tail tossel, lukin' sae ilk the brae ye wad niver ken ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... facts essential to the completion of the work is the apparent indifference of librarians and others in responding to letters of inquiry. Some, however, have entered most zealously and intelligently into the work of searching musty records and interviewing the traditional "oldest inhabitant" for light on these dark spots. Thanks are especially due in this regard to Hon. John M. Lea, Nashville, Tenn.; William Harden, librarian State Historical Society, Savannah, Ga.; K.A. Linderfelt, librarian Public Library, ...
— Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United States: Illustrated by Those in the State of Indiana • C. C. Royce
... and women love. Among the worst are those who won't bear quietly their share of work, who can't learn self-reliance, but run to and fro, squealing for help, and talking sentiment against their neighbors, who won't carry their burdens for them. It's all very well for a musty, discontented old bachelor to say there's no love in the world, but it's a falsehood. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the manifestations of life itself. Whether it was that that afternoon in the study had awakened with sharper poignancy than ever before the remembrance of his youth, that some aspect of the room, with its musty books, its fire and the driving rain without, had awakened in him a forgotten memory of a day that had once held actual place in his life but had long since been lost, awakened it through the mere ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... whatever concerns musty books goes deeper with thee than thy brother," replied Stephen, turning away ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... rendered by the Brethren to the cause of the evangelical faith in Bohemia the noblest and the most enduring was their translation of the Bible into the Bohemian tongue. In the archives of the Brethren's Church at Herrnhut are now to be seen six musty volumes known as the Kralitz Bible (1579-93). The idea was broached by Blahoslaw, the Church historian. The expense was born by Baron John von Zerotin. The actual printing was executed at Zerotin's Castle at Kralitz. The translation ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... dirty-looking shop, with begrimed bricks and blackened woodwork. The window contained some musty old books, an assortment of pipes and tobacco, and a large number of the vilest daubs unhung, painted in oil on Academy boards, and unframed. These were intended for landscapes, as you could tell from the titles. The most ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... is presented here is an old musty show, that hath lain this twelvemonth in the bottom of a coal-house amongst brooms and old shoes; an invention that we are ashamed of, and therefore we have promised the copies to the chandler to wrap ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... way up a flight of dark and twisting stairs, along a musty hall. She paused before a door at ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... I found a large box in the center of the room. One of my aunts had died and I was one of the heirs to her fortune, which was not large. The box contained, among other things, a number of musty old books. Not knowing what to do and being affected with ennui, I began to read one of them. They were for the most part romances of the time of Louis XV; my pious aunt had probably inherited them herself and never read them, for they were, ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... the Lord Swank lives, He holds high rank, and he has much pelf; And all the well-paid posts he gives Unto his fawning relatives, As foolish as himself. In offices and courts and boards Are Swanks, and Swanks, ten dozen Swanks, And cousin Swanks in hordes— Inept and musty, dry and dusty, Rusty Swanks ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... true that the wrong in this case is in a great degree fathered upon our own Massachusetts; and it maybe said that it is afoul bird that pollutes its own nest. We deny the applicability of the rather musty proverb. All the worse. Of not a more contemptible vice is what is called American literature guilty than this of unmitigated self- laudation. If we persevere in it, the stock will become altogether too small for the business. It seems that no period of our history has been exempt from materials ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to know things excellent, above the reach of such course Brains as yours, such muddy Fancies, that never will know farther than when to cut your Vines, and cozen Merchants, and choak your hidebound Tenants with musty Harvests. ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... Relish as they might musty bread and mouldy meat, Larie and his mate enjoyed, too, the sport of catching fresh food; and many a clam hunt they had in true gull style. They would fly above the water near the shore, and when they were twenty or thirty feet high, would plunge down head-first. ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... put over the cocks in case of rain, and barracks or mow to protect and preserve the hay would give the horse good hay, and be one of the very best of investments. It should be remembered that the digestive organs of none other of our farm animals are so easily deranged as those of the horse. Musty, moldy hay is the moving cause of much disease. The man who can not provide a good mow should sell his horses to some farmer ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... far as she was able to see, Colter had taken neither papers nor clothes, but only the gold. Perhaps, however, she had been mistaken, for she had not observed Colter's departure closely enough to know whether or not he carried a package. She missed only the gold. Her father's papers, old and musty, were scattered about, and these she gathered up to slip ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... unfaded, and each would bring to her mind instantly the picture of the writer as he had been in the golden days. But save to Blossy's eye alone there were no longer any rainbow tints in the little, old trunk; for every ribbon and every cord had faded into that musty, yellow brown which is dyed by ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... big-featured, a veritable giant in frame and even in his last days suggesting the enormous strength which had been his in his prime, had been an outdoor man, a man of large voice and large capable hands; James Kitson had been a student from his youth up and had spent his manhood in musty offices, stuffy courts, surrounded by ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... to the studio, the new lodger's door, at the back of the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... were the boys permitted to consider the peril of their position. Almost instantly they heard a faint grating sound directly in front of them. A cold draught of damp, musty air struck their faces, and they understood that a door had been opened into some other apartment. The odor of the incoming air told them plainly that the next apartment was also underground, and they surmised that it had not recently ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled—the miser in the old castle counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be waived. We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... peccary. acridity &c 401.1. V. have a bad smell &c n.; smell; stink, stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid &c 653; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... graceful, when other graces are fled. Oh! but you will cry, is not this a contradiction to the former part of your letter? Prudence is one of the graces of age;-why—yes, I do not know but it may and yet I don't know how, it is a musty quality; one hates to allow it to be a grace—come, at least it is only like that one of the graces that hides her face. In Short, I have ever been so imprudent, that though I have much corrected myself, I am not at all vain of such merit. I have purchased ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the door they caught a whiff of a grateful odor. Lillian and Eleanor had put a great part of their last rations into a big kettle of soup. The last can of tomatoes had been sacrificed, the last half dozen potatoes. Nothing remained but some musty corn meal, a few teaspoons of tea and a little sugar. Unless relief came soon the houseboat party would truly have to be ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... Greek, Spanish, Fardown Irish, and perhaps Choctaw, to such youths as desired to become thorough linguists. He was not very successful in this line, and concluded to enter the office of a prominent law firm on Superior Street as a student. He dove among the musty and ponderous volumes with all the enthusiasm of a wild young Irishman, and commenced cramming his head with law at a startling rate. He lodged in the back-room of the office, and previous to retiring he used to sing the favorite ballads of his own Emerald Isle. The boy who was employed in the ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... my dear," he replied gratefully. "I always feel like a new man when I'm freshly stuffed. No one likes to get musty, you know, and even good straw may be spoiled ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... thing unknown in America. I moved an emendation, except on the sea coast of Maine. We resolved to cherish the memory of our little hostess in our heart of hearts, and as we gathered round the cheery grate, drying our cold feet, we voted that poetry was a humbug, and damp, old, musty cathedrals a bore. Such are ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... walls were old books in stout binding, new books in cloth and fine leather—the poets, the philosophers, the seers of all ages. As his eyes swept the shelves, he knew that here was the living, breathing collection of a true book-lover—not a musty, fusty aggregation brought together through mere pride of intellect. The owner of this library had counted the heart-beats ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... reader, Fausta was sitting in a yellow chair on the deck of that musty old boat, crocheting from a pattern in Grodey's Lady's Book. I remember it as I remember my breakfast of this morning. Not that I fell in love with her, nor did I fall in love with my breakfast; but I knew she was there. ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... an antiquarian of eccentric character, ever poring over musty records and hunting up decayed titles. He was fond of attaching to his signature the names of all the innumerable offices he held over the conglomerated States of his realm. He was Rhodolph, Margrave of Baden, Vicar of Upper Bavaria, Lord of Hapsburg, Arch Huntsman of the Empire, ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... was done; and this with such appearances of religion as might work on the people, and make them impute it to the piety of their prince, and to his tenderness for the lives of his subjects. A third offers some old musty laws, that have been antiquated by a long disuse; and which, as they had been forgotten by all the subjects, so they had been also broken by them; and proposes the levying the penalties of these laws, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... nestling among the hills, shaded by great spreading trees with flowers and vines and golden fruit all about it, rich plumaged birds and gorgeous butterflies. Oh! I can hardly wait. Who would live in a musty palace when one has within reach such a home, and that, too, ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... self-respect which Tom had gained that he walked past this place several times before he could muster the courage to enter. When he did enter, the old familiar, musty smell and the sordid litter of the shelves renewed ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
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