"Decrepit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she triumphs in her Jove, And shows the glorious tokens of his love: But if I'm still the mistress of the skies, By her own lover the fond beauty dies.' This said, descending in a yellow cloud, Before the gates of Semele she stood. Old Beroe's decrepit shape she wears, Her wrinkled visage, and her hoary hairs; Whilst in her trembling gait she totters on, And learns to tattle in the nurse's tone. 40 The goddess, thus disguised in age, beguiled With ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... great nuisance and were ordered to appear in court. But none of them turned up. M. Chassensee therefore argued that a default should not be taken because all the rats had been summoned, and some were either so young or so old and decrepit that they needed more time. The court thereupon granted him an extension. However, they didn't arrive on the day set, and this time their lawyer claimed that they were under duress and restrained by bodily fear—of the townspeople's cats. ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... forget all about the herder and the promise of pinochle that night. He went eagerly to the decrepit little shed which housed Rambler, his long-legged, flea-bitten gray; saddled him purposefully and rode away toward the violet hills at the trail-trot which eats up the miles ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... Sir Priest, the fading footprints of adventurous Castile. Thou hast seen the declining glory of old Spain,—declining as yonder brilliant sun. The sceptre she hath wrested from the heathen is fast dropping from her decrepit and fleshless grasp. The children she hath fostered shall know her no longer. The soil she hath acquired shall be lost to her as irrevocably as she herself hath thrust the Moor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... decay by degrees. The people sink into sloth and luxury and prostitution. It is enervated at home—becomes contemptible abroad; and such indeed is its misery and wretchedness, that it resembles a man in the last decrepit stage of life, who looks with unconcern at his ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... sheep roamed the hillsides. Many of these were black. For tilling, primitive wooden ploughs, fitted with an iron share, were used. These were drawn by oxen or, sometimes, by an ox and a donkey, both animals usually in a very decrepit condition. The ordinary means of conveyance was a curious old covered cart—also ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... them, and in fourteen days after his birth the father died of a stroke of apoplexy. The child was entitled to the viceroyship of Transylvania, while all the rest of Hungary was to pass unincumbered to Ferdinand. But Isabella, the ambitious young mother, who had married the decrepit monarch that she might enjoy wealth and station, had no intention that her babe should be less of a king than his father was. She was the daughter of Sigismond, King of Poland, and relying upon the support of her regal father she claimed the crown of Hungary for her boy, in defiance of the solemn ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... promotion, if not his job, depended upon his employer getting a tiger. And, as the steamer was due in four days, there was no time to spare. From the director of the Singapore zoo he purchased for considerably above the market price, a decrepit and somewhat moth-eaten tiger of advanced years, which he had transported across the straits to Johore, whence it was conveyed by bullock cart to a spot in the edge of the jungle, a dozen miles outside the town, where it was turned loose in an enclosure ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... ye a cab,' he said after some hesitation induced less by consideration of the expense than by the sheer novelty of the proceeding. Ere she could respond he was gone. Not without trouble and a thorough drenching he discovered a decrepit four-wheeler. ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... though they had been glued to the teeth. Some grinned sadly in the sunlight, shaking with cold. Others were sad and still. Charley, subdued by the sudden disclosure of the insignificance of his youth, darted fearful glances. The two smooth-faced Norwegians resembled decrepit children, staring stupidly. To leeward, on the edge of the horizon, black seas leaped up towards the glowing sun. It sank slowly, round and blazing, and the crests of waves splashed on the edge of the luminous circle. One of the Norwegians appeared to catch sight of ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... captives, one almost leans to Athens. It seems to me the most enduring monument of Syracusan glory survives in the eloquent protest of Nicolaus against her cruelty; especially when we recollect that it came from one who, of all others, had most to forgive. Old, decrepit, unable to walk, the venerable sorrow-laden man whose only children, two sons, had died fighting to save Syracuse—was carried on a litter into the midst of the shouting thousands, who were drunk with the wine of victory. 'Behold an unhappy father, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... disgrace to gods and men," I demanded, "for your name must never be mentioned among refined people. Did I deserve to be lifted up to heaven and then dragged down to hell by you? Was it right for you to slander my flourishing and vigorous years and land me in the shadows and lassitude of decrepit old age? Give me some sign, however faint, I beg of you, that you have returned to life!" I vented my anger ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... sliding-bolt, which shot from the wall when there was occasion to put the apparatus of death in requisition. Fearful as this elevated gallows appeared, and unique in its character, it was not more so than the finisher of the law who then generally officiated upon it. No decrepit wretch, no crime-hardened ruffian, no secret and mysterious personage, who was produced occasionally disguised and masked, plied his dreadful trade here. Who, think you, gentle reader—who now, perhaps, recoils from these unpleasant but truthful minutiae—officiated upon this ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... at the end of the Camden Road, known as the Caledonian Market. It was just eleven by the clock tower, and wares were still pouring in; arriving in all manner of shabby carts and vans—mostly drawn by aged and decrepit horses. Every variety of goods had its own particular pitch. In one quarter were piles of books, brown, musty volumes of all shapes and sizes, also tattered magazines, and of theological works a great host. Farther on the explorers came to a vast collection of old iron. It was as if numbers of travelling ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... surprise you? Are not you the cause of it all?... Is it not you?... Is it not thou?...[15] Is it not thou, Judas, who hast robbed me, by taking advantage of my youth? Dost not thou skin the peasants? Is it not thou who hast deprived this decrepit old man of his daily bread? Is it not thou?... O Lord! Everywhere there is injustice, and oppression, and villainy.... So down with everything,—and with me also! I don't wish to live—I don't wish to live any longer in Russia!"—And the spade made swifter progress than ever ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... love to you? That I was old and hideous and had everything against me? That it was all a comedy for your amusement? That there was to be nothing but deception from beginning to end? That I was like a decrepit owl screeching at the moon, and many other things to a ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... will, and there I had the pleasure of recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that beneficent humanity is of all countries and religions. The Casa di Ricovero is an immense edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the decrepit and helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number of five hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by Soldini; and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... climbing the hill a few steps before him, an old, decrepit woman, who hobbled along with great difficulty. As the Emperor approached her he inquired why, infirm as she was, and apparently so fatigued, she should attempt to travel ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... other!" said Wagner. "You can now understand the meaning of the inscription beneath my portrait. 'His last day thus' signifies that it was the last day on which I wore that aged, decrepit, and ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... unbelievers of bad faith because they sometimes waver in their principles, changing opinions during sickness, and retracting them at the hour of death. When the body is diseased, the faculty of reasoning is generally disturbed also. The infirm and decrepit man, in approaching his end, sometimes perceives himself that reason is leaving him, he feels that prejudice returns. There are diseases which have a tendency to lessen courage, to make pusillanimous, and to enfeeble the brain; there are others which, in destroying the body, do not affect ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... pageant opened in July 1914. Once again the rulers were feasting and the workers at toil, but the scene was enlivened by the presence of the leaders of the Second International, a group of decrepit professorial old men, who waddled in in solemn procession carrying tomes full of international learning. They sat in a row between the rulers and the people, deep in study, spectacles on nose. The call to war was the signal for a dramatic appeal ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... Mackintosh, largely reducing the number of offences for which capital punishment could be inflicted. He was also the first to reform the police system of London, and to substitute for a multitude of decrepit watchmen, incapable of dealing with gangs of active criminals, a disciplined body of stalwart constables, which has since been copied in every county and large town of Great Britain. Above all, while he cannot be said to have shown a statesmanlike insight or foresight of the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... care!" exclaimed Bess. "You can't have a bite of what I buy, Laura Polk!" and she marched away to the lunch counter and spent most of her remaining pocket money on greasy pies, decrepit sandwiches, soggy "pound-cake" and crullers that might have been used ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... give pension and cottage to the widow who has lost her son; it is nothing to give food and medicine to the workman who has broken his arm, or the decrepit woman wasting in sickness. But it is something to use your time and strength in war with the waywardness and thoughtlessness of mankind to keep the erring workman in your service till you have made him an unerring one; and to direct ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... long since lost all reverence for the Church. This feeling did not spread readily across the Alps; but it came at last, and at a moment when Germany no longer needed aid. A nation guarded by the strong arm of Maximilian could ill brook new levies to feed the extravagance of its decrepit ally, and the infamous practices of Tetzel served as a timely pretext to shake off the burdensome alliance of the papal see. The abuses of popery were little more than a war-cry, while the real struggle of the Reformation ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... there, more entertaining and blinding beautiful than ever. Henry desired me to give her his "desperate love," to which she replied by sending the poor youth her "deadly scorn." Lord Melbourne desired to be introduced to me, and I think if he likes, he shall be the decrepit old nobleman you are so afraid of me marrying. I was charmed with his face, voice, and manner; we dine with him next Wednesday week, and I will write you word if ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... ever since stood as a sort of proverb of honesty, Nathaniel Macon. By the representations of these friends, he was led to believe that their new State capital, Raleigh, where there was only a very decrepit specimen of journalism, would afford him at once a surer competence and a happier life than Philadelphia. Coming to this conclusion, he disposed of his newspaper and printing-office, and removed to Raleigh, where he at once established the "Register." Of his late paper, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... tall hat stealing cautiously around, not across the square of pavement, keeping close to the dark wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings, he felt about for the latch, opened ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... old age of this government, if it is thus early decrepit!" Such was the remark of Fauchet, the French minister at Philadelphia, in that famous despatch to his government, which was intercepted by one of our cruisers in the year 1794. This curious memorial may ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... their prominence at a distance over the flat land, some of these mud buildings look quite imposing. I remember once approaching a city with ramparts, towers, and formidable walls which, on close inspection, turned out to be a small mud enclosure of the most decrepit kind. ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... perfect nest of small servants' rooms, with broken pieces of furniture, dirty cane-bottomed chairs, chests of drawers, cracked mirrors, and decrepit bedsteads. The rooms had low sloping ceilings already hung here and there with cobwebs, small windows, and badly plastered walls—a depressing and dismal region which they were glad ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the situation, managed to explain, between gasps of laughter, that "Hello, my Baby, Hello, my Honey" was in its dotage in the United States. Then the laughter became general, for all were more recent arrivals from America than I, and it was hard for them to understand how so elderly and decrepit a ditty could be unfamiliar ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... dialectic sword-play, this leader of two rebellions was executed at Regina. Several Indians, notably Wandering Spirit, who was the evil genius of the Big Bear revolt, were also visited with capital punishment. Big Bear himself, who had become decrepit, and the lordly Poundmaker, who sturdily maintained that he had only defended himself when attacked at Cutknife, were confined to the Stony Mountain penitentiary for a time, but released when a medical board decided that the change ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... upon their wrists into the faces of the brutal soldiery, who knouted or cut down men and women indiscriminately. Long will that massacre be remembered, and the dreadful sufferings which the survivors endured at the command of Ivan Rachieff. When at last Tomsk was reached, only a handful of decrepit exiles passed into the city out of all those who started on ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Day-Watchman, followed by a Goose, which bears the Bob of his Ditty, and confirms what he says with a Quack, Quack. I gave little heed to the mention of this known Circumstance, till, being the other day in those Quarters, I passed by a decrepit old Fellow with a Pole in his Hand, who just then was bawling out, Half an Hour after one a-Clock, and immediately a dirty Goose behind him made her Response, Quack, Quack. I could not forbear attending this grave Procession for the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... is bereft. Old age springs on him suddenly, as Javert had done in other days. He has, apparently without provocation, passed from strength to decrepitude. Since he sees Cossette no more, he has grown gray, stooped, decrepit. There is no morning now, since he does not see Cossette. You have seen him walking to the corner to catch sight of her house. How feeble he is! Another day, walking her way, but not so far; and the next, and the next, walking; but the last ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... on as the work of a very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy, seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authors appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying that Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one so ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Benezet took upon himself the task of serving as mediator between this deported group and the community. A man of high character and much influence, he easily obtained a relief fund with which he provided asylum for the decrepit, sustenance for the needy, and employment for those able to labor. He attended the sick, comforted the dying, and delivered over their remains the last tribute due ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... take tea alone, but poured out some for his visitors, but by no means for all, usually pointing himself to those he wished to honour. And his choice always surprised people by its unexpectedness. Passing by the wealthy and the high-placed, he sometimes pitched upon a peasant or some decrepit old woman. Another time he would pass over the beggars to honour some fat wealthy merchant. Tea was served differently, too, to different people, sugar was put into some of the glasses and handed separately with others, while some got it without any sugar at all. This time the favoured ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... mere fact that the victim had once tinkered for her a decrepit parasol entitled him in her feudal mind to the high protection of the Tallafferr tradition.) "Tell them to desist ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... word as 'teapoy'; it is NOT 'teapot' and it means a three-legged table. 'Dullness' was consistently spelled 'dulness' and is left thus. 'Decrepit' was consistently spelled 'decrepid' and is left thus. 'Dote, dotes,' etc. was consistently spelled 'doat, doats,' etc. and is left thus. 'License' is spelled once thus and once 'licence.' The word 'speciality' appears only once, and that is the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... facts of the story. But we have also its ideal possibilities, as reflected by the imagination of the narrator. He had seen the gipsy metamorphosed as she received the Duke's command, from a ragged, decrepit crone into a stately woman, whose clothing bore the appearance of wealth; and as he mounted guard on the balcony which commanded the Duchess's room, he saw the wonder grow. A sound as of music first attracted his attention; and as he looked in at the window he saw the Duchess ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... did not know how old he was himself, although he did know that no person in his tribe had been alive when he was a young boy in the village. He remembered the days when some of the old men, still alive, had been born; and, unlike him, they were now decrepit, shaken with palsy, blear-eyed, toothless of mouth, deaf of ear, or paralysed. All his own faculties remained unimpaired. He even boasted a dozen worn fangs of teeth, gum-level, on which he could still chew. Although he no longer had the physical endurance of youth, his thinking was as original ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... two friends. They were to take their examinations for graduation. Upon the days when M. Violette—they now called him at the office "Father Violette," he had grown so aged and decrepit—was not too much "consoled" in the cafe in the Rue du Four, and when he was less silent and gloomy than usual, he would say to his ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... carriages, and the tall, haggard city. Pale, sloppy, yellow houses; an oppressive absence of colour; a peculiar bleakness in the streets. The menagere hurries down the asphalte to market; a dreadful garcon de cafe, with a napkin tied round his throat, moves about some chairs, so decrepit and so solitary that it seems impossible to imagine a human being sitting there. Where are the Boulevards? where are the Champs Elysees? I asked myself; and feeling bound to apologise for the appearance of the city, I explained to my valet ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... motion, and obedience to human guidance, double the interest of the vessel: nor less her organized perfectness, giving her the look, and partly the character of a living creature, that may indeed be maimed in limb or decrepit in frame, but must either live or die, and cannot be added to nor diminished from—heaped up and dragged down—as a building can. And this particular ship, crowned in the Trafalgar hour of trial ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... after some love-making—on which side was disputed—there was a promise of marriage given by him, which, however, he was in no hurry to fulfil. The consistory deemed it best to interfere, in the interests of propriety, and insist on the marriage; and the decrepit old invalid in vain pleaded his age and bodily infirmities. So he was married in spite of himself to his nun, and showed his disposition to make the best of it by making her a wedding-present of his new Latin treatise, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... young. In travelling by rail, he would woo crying babies out of their mothers' arms, and still them; it was always his back that Irishwomen thumped, to ask if they must get out at the next station; and he might be seen handing out decrepit paupers, as if they were of royal blood and bore concealed sceptres in their old umbrellas. Exquisitely nice in his personal habits, he had the practical democracy of a good-natured young prince; he had ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... forgotten. "By the way, what rare numbers are here! Would not one swear that this youngster had espoused some antiquated muse, who had sued out a divorce on account of impotence from some superannuated sinner; and, having been p—xed by her former spouse, has got the gout, in her decrepit age, which makes her hobble so damnably?" This was the man who would reform a nation ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... there was a scattered group of log cabins, surrounded by little whitewashed palings, and at their approach a decrepit old Negro, followed by a slinking black-and-tan foxhound, came beneath the straggling hopvine over one of the doors and through the open gate out into the road. His bent old figure was huddled within his carefully patched clothes ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... collar of the coat, and through the temporary gaps which he made in its length to cool his body, I saw it like a gnarled and mossy tree. His hands were grimy and his nails black-edged, but there was intellect in his eye, and a broken force in his huddled, loosed attitude. He was not decrepit, or with a trace of humility, but had the ease of the philosopher and also his detachment. It was plain he did the best he could with his garb, and was entirely undisturbed, and perhaps even unmindful, of its ludicrousness. He was as serene as Diogenes must have been when he ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... little picture-book of childish tales which have utterly and entirely lost their power to affect the mind even of middle life, directly and alone, regain their magic influence, and call up vividly all the old emotions, even to the heart of decrepit age, when it seeks these enjoyments in companionship and sympathy with children or grandchildren beloved. By giving to us this capacity for renewing our own sensitiveness to the impressions of pleasure through sympathy with childhood, God has provided a true and effectual ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... tossed about in my baronial bed, counting sheep backwards and forwards over hedges and fences until the vociferous cocks in the stable yard began to send up their clarion howdy-dos to the sun. Strangely enough, with the first peep of day through the decrepit window shutters I fell into a sound sleep. Britton got nothing but grunts from me until half-past nine. At that hour he came into my room and delivered news that aroused me more effectually than all the alarm clocks or alarm cocks in the world could ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, fetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins and chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick where rusted iron ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... instructions to Morton, therefore, and directed him to take two men as a body-guard, and to set off at once. Ronald selected Truefitt and Doull, the first for his steadiness and the other for his cool courage, and having procured a guide and a horse, and two wretched mules which had been too decrepit for the enemy to carry ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... I hate, be consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?" Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend, Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, 280 That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier He Decrepit may doze, doze, as good ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... such turret near the summit of Campden Hill; but that familiar imposture was rased a year or two ago, no one protesting. Fuit the frantic factitious sentimentalism for ruins. On the other hand, the sentiment for them is as strong as ever it was. Decrepit Carisbrooke and its rivals annually tighten their hold ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... scarred with the wounds caused by the pitiless waves, its timbers gaping open here and there, and the rent copper-sheathing showing, as it rolls sluggishly on the waste of waters—where it has been left to linger out the last days of a decrepit existence, with masts and sails and bulwarks and everything washed away, presenting such a contrast to what it was in its pride, when it swam the waters "like a thing of life"—is painful in ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... feel inclined. He was as isolated from his fellow-creatures as was his tenement, and was only to be seen in the chamber of disease and death. What his establishment consisted of no one knew. When he first settled in the neighbourhood, an old decrepit woman occasionally answered the knocks given at the door by those who required the doctor's services; but she had been buried some time, and, ever since, all calls at the door had been answered by Mynheer Poots in person, if he were at home, and if not, there was no reply to the most ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of the Republic. The Monroe Doctrine is based on patriotism and self-preservation, and the crisis which called it forth was of the gravest consequence to the American people. The Spanish empire in America had never been a menace to the United States. It was too decrepit to be dangerous. Conditions would have been very different with France, for instance, or Prussia, established as a great South American power. There was the strongest reason for believing that the governments ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... riven it was with seams and cracks of all sorts and sizes. The house front, built of brick and stone, with no pretensions to symmetry, seemed to be bending beneath the weight of a worm-eaten roof covered with the curved pantiles in common use in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... Janaway's house, being surprised to see a window lighted so late. Lord Blandamer must have changed his intention of going by train, for the gates of Cullerne station had been locked for hours, and the boiler of the decrepit branch-line engine was cooling in ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... visited in Bombay which is, so far as we know, unique, commending itself however, to every philanthropist, namely, An Asylum for Aged and Decrepit Animals. Here were found birds and beasts suffering under various afflictions, carefully tended and nursed as human beings are in a well-regulated hospital. The origin of the establishment was due to a philanthropic native who ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... me, hundreds of years. Yet, although in appearance a very Methuselah in age, this individual had a pair of piercing black eyes that glowed and sparkled with all the fire and passion of early manhood, and, bowed as he was, and decrepit as he appeared to be, he tottered across the intervening space with extraordinary agility, and seated himself in the second chair. Thus I found myself in the presence of the two most powerful men in the district, namely, King Banda and Mafuta, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... purity and freshness. The youth of Nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child. I doubt if any man can be called "old" so long as he is an early riser and an early walker. And oh, youth!—take my word of it—youth in dressing-gown and slippers, dawdling over breakfast at noon, is a very decrepit, ghastly image of that youth which sees the sun blush over the mountains, and the dews sparkle upon ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... through the solitary stump-dotted street, past windowless, deserted buildings which were the saloons and dance-halls of better days, to foregather around the huge stove in the rear of Hod Burrage's general store, which was decrepit Hilarity's sole remaining enterprise, and there to brag and maunder over ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... people does not spread in vain throughout an Assembly, even throughout the most decrepit. On the decisive day this sap ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... told that she was growing weak, a decrepit, bleeding old woman. Her fate was upon her; let ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... that accompanied her worth, when he says that "besides discharging excellently well her own and all tender offices becoming the female character; ... besides being a faithful friend, an amiable companion, and a tender nurse, [she] could likewise supply the wants of a decrepit husband and occasionally perform his part." That Fielding suffered socially by the fact of his second marriage is probable. But the fact is proof, if proof were needed, of his courage in reparation, and of the unworldly spirit in which he ultimately followed the dictates of that incorruptible ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... back, and having carried him over, bade him get down, and for that end stooped, that he might get off with ease; but instead of doing so (which I laugh at every time I think of it), the old man, who to me appeared quite decrepit, threw his legs nimbly about my neck. He sat astride upon my shoulders, and held my throat so tight that I thought he would have strangled me, and ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... broken-backed appearance of the other, which still retains its legibility although the t's have begun to lose their crossing, we can say that the one was a young man and the other was advanced in years without being positively decrepit." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... There are women who are by accident more degraded physically. Mutatis mutandis, there are none more degraded, morally and intellectually, than those whose minds are constantly bent upon marriage at any cost, and with anybody, however decrepit, however silly, and however evil, who ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... shalt have of the best that can be procured for thee." So Geraint went forward. And the hoary-headed man preceded him into the hall. And in the hall he dismounted, and he left there his horse. Then he went on to the upper chamber with the hoary-headed man. And in the chamber he beheld an old decrepit woman, sitting on a cushion, with old, tattered garments of satin upon her; and it seemed to him that he had never seen a woman fairer than she must have been, when in the fulness of youth. And beside her was a maiden, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... in idleness, hugging their misery, discussing the "bating" of the Unionist party, or, as I saw them yesterday evening, listening to the crooning of an ancient female gutter-snipe, a dun-coloured heap of decrepit wretchedness, chanting the great future of the Irish Parliament in a picturesque and extraordinary doggerel anent the "larned reprisintatives of the Oirish na-a-tion. Promiscu-o-ous they shtand in em-u-la-a-tion." The small shopkeepers, once ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... whose death caused such universal lamentation in the city of London, was for many years a wanderer from God, and was at length converted by means of a tract, given him by the "way-side," by an old and decrepit woman. ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... with which we are acquainted. Temples they had none: no images of gods, no altars of sacrifice; scarce any memorials of the dead. Their worship at best was offered in hymns to some vague, half-forgotten deity or First Maker of things, a god decrepit from age or all but careless of his children. Spirits were known and feared, but scarcely defined or described. Sympathetic magic, and perhaps a little hypnotism, were all their science. Kings and nations they knew not; they ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... hardly time, while looking at the shelves, to remember what Mr Crawley had said of his anger at the beautiful bindings, before an old man, very thin and very pale, shuffled into the room. He stooped a good deal, and his black clothes were very loose about his shrunken limbs. He was not decrepit, nor did he seem to be one who had advanced to extreme old age; but yet he shuffled rather than walked, hardly raising his feet from the ground. Mr Toogood, as he came forward to meet him, thought that he had never seen a sweeter ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... decrepit eagle the crone pondered. Suddenly she spoke, and her speech was a hoarse chant. "You are good to me. The bones of my children lie up there. I will go once more ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... by Cody on his second trip from Larned indicated where the villages would be found in the winter, and I decided to move on them about the 1st of November. Only the women and children and the decrepit old men were with the villages, however enough, presumably, to look after the plunder most of the warriors remaining north of the Arkansas to continue their marauding. Many severe fights occurred between our troops and these marauders, ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... the Fables, and it is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work. I lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought to himself, one day, reading of a man who, confined by disease and poverty, had lived for twelve years alone in a back bedroom attended by an old and probably decrepit housekeeper. A darning-needle forced into his heart had ended his earthly woes. "To the devil with such a life! Why twelve years? Why not at the end of the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... from our food the deleterious earthy matter is our constant aim. To that alone do we owe immunity from old age far in advance of that period of life when your people become decrepit and senile. The human body is like a lamp-wick, which filters the oil while it furnishes light. In time the wick becomes clogged and useless and is thrown away. If the oil could be made perfectly pure, the wick ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Knox, still minister of Edinburgh, and now in his fifty-ninth year, was seen riding home with a second wife, 'not like a prophet or old decrepit priest as he was,' said his Catholic adversaries, 'but with his bands of taffetie fastened with golden rings.' The lady for whom he put on this state was Margaret Stewart, the daughter of his friend Lord Ochiltree, and ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... If I wasn't such an aged, decrepit wreck I'd come up and be one of your scholars. Anyhow, I'm real glad to have met you. No, I can't stay ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... succession of worldly Popes, Paul III., Julius III., Pius IV., and Gregory XIII., heaped favors and showered wealth upon the order. The Jesuits incarnated the political spirit of the Papacy at this epoch; they lent it a potency for good and evil which the decrepit but still vigorous institution arrogated to itself. They adapted its anachronisms with singular adroitness to the needs of modern society. They transfused their throbbing blood into its flaccid veins, until it became doubtful whether the Papacy had been absorbed ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... well-proportioned; their features are generally regular; their complexions are generally fair and without color.... At twenty years of age the women have no longer the freshness of youth. At thirty-five or forty they are wrinkled and decrepit. The men are almost ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... was tightly closed, and no reply was made to our demands for entrance. The second was the same; one might imagine that it had been deserted for weeks. At the third, the door was opened, and within, an aged woman, ugly, bent, decrepit. Here we measured. The next house, and the next, and the next, were shut. And then another open house contained another veritable hag. Passing several other houses, tightly closed, we found a third old woman, and I saw that we were destined to secure nothing but decrepit hags, as representatives ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... hunger. It was impossible to swallow any of that stuff. And indeed there was a strange mustiness in everything. The wooden dining-room stuck out over the mud of the shore like a lacustrine dwelling; the planks of the floor seemed rotten; a decrepit old waiter tottered pathetically to and fro before an antediluvian and worm-eaten sideboard; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... over his shoulders; the occupant sits with his legs over the rim of the basket, and his back almost resting against the head of his bearer, who, bending forward under the weight of his load, and grasping a long stick, looks like some decrepit old man—a delusion which vanishes the instant you commence the ascent of a mountain by his side, when his endurance and vigour astonish you, if they do ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... battalion headquarters, located underneath the old stones of a barn which was topped by the barest skeleton of a roof. What had been the first floor of the structure had been weighted down heavily with railroad iron and concrete to form the roof of the commander's dugout. The sides of the decrepit structure bulged outward and were prevented from bursting by timber props radiating on all sides like the legs of a centipede. A mule team stood in front of ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... are wainscotted to the ceilings and have a decrepit, old-world air, and the odds and ends of furniture—all characteristic of the dwelling of a poor literary man of refined taste—are in keeping with the surroundings. In the dining-room there are half-a-dozen chairs of various patterns, a sideboard or two, ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... Mr. Lanniere is not a monster or a decrepit centenarian. He is still in his prime, and is a very agreeable and accomplished man of the world. He is well-connected, moves in the best society, and could give ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... treasures between them, and above them a large white cross with a simple inscription. The lot was fenced around with a hawthorn hedge, and here and there a rose bush grew luxuriantly. There was room for himself and for the old grandmother who was now terribly decrepit, so that she was unable to take any care of the house, and Patrick Marsh had consented to let his little shanty and come, with good Molly his wife, to look after the lad's comfort, for they had no child, and Archie ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... but it is at the bleak cost of making life a wistful transaction with foreigners. In such enforced aloofness Sarah Drew had come to him—strong, beautiful, young, good and vital, all that he was not—and had serenely befriended "the great Mr. Pope," whom she viewed as a queer decrepit little gentleman of whom within a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... affairs, weakness is never innoxious. Hitherto the name of poor (in the sense in which it is used to excite compassion) has not been used for those who can, but for those who cannot, labour—for the sick and infirm, for orphan infancy, for languishing and decrepit age: but when we affect to pity, as poor, those who must labour, or the world cannot exist, we are trifling with the condition of mankind. It is the common doom of man that he must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... servile dependency they were in when they wore the badges of the Lords." It would, he contended, take away "one of the most powerful incentives to virtue, . . . since there would be no coming to honor but through the winding-sheet of an old decrepit lord and the grave of an extinct noble family." Walpole knew well his public and his time. He dwelt most strongly on this last consideration—that the Bill if passed into law would shut the gates of the Peerage against deserving Commoners. He asked indignantly how the House ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... very significantly with the organic changes that occur in his body. The emotions, sensations and ideas of a child differ from those of a man, and those of a man in maturity differ from those of a man decrepit with old age. And these and similar changes are quite beyond ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... him beside his gravity; but he answered, They only kept it as a curiosity. I was very much scandalised at a large silver image of the Trinity, where the Father is represented under the figure of a decrepit old man, with a beard down to his knees, and triple crown on his head, holding in his arms the Son, fixed on the cross, and the Holy Ghost, in the shape of a dove, hovering over him. Madam —— is come this ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... made for her out of an old packing case in those early days before London had taken the life out of him. Then, suddenly, the light upstairs was extinguished, and a few minutes later a short, stout man in a seedy frock coat and decrepit silk hat came down the steps, and ordered the ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... flare and the drum wooed me one night, and I went in. As a circus, well, you may imagine—a tent in a fair. My fauteuil was a plank, and the orchestra surpassed the worst tortures of the Inquisition. And then, after the decrepit horses, and a mangy lion, a girl came into the ring, with the most marvellous eyes I have ever seen in a human face. They are green eyes, with golden lights ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... deprecate the cosmopolitan character of our population. It is a fact, however, that the best blood of the old world came to us until within ten years—not the decrepit, not the maimed, not the aged; for over fifty per cent. of those who came were between fifteen and thirty, and have grown up to be honorable citizens in the composition of our constitutional society. They came not as paupers. Many of them came, each bringing seventy dollars, some $180 dollars, ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... to come at him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large- eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other playmates than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within- doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all her relatives, from her great-grandmother ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... where, more than half a century later, the writer of those lines was to come, bowed down under the weight of an enormous celebrity, to look for the last time upon Paris and the world; where, too, Madame du Deffand herself, decrepit, blind, and bitter with the disillusionments of a strange lifetime, was to listen once more to the mellifluous enchantments of that extraordinary intelligence, which—so it seemed to her as she sat entranced—could never, never ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... be easy, my fine Bull. They will be easy to dispose of. The dealers in children have for their especial patrons the decrepit and surfeited Roman Senators, who love fresh fruits. By the way, they have announced the near arrival of the patrician Trymalcion, a very rich and very noble man, an old and very capricious expert. He is traveling through the Roman colonies of southern Gaul, and is expected here, ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... carry off the weeping Freia agree to release her whenever the gods will give to them the precious and all-powerful metal. As love departs, the heavens become dark and sadness overcomes the gods. They grow suddenly old and decrepit. Fricka totters and Wotan yields to despair. Darkness and decay settle down upon them. The divine wills are broken, and they are about to surrender to what seems approaching dissolution, when Wotan suddenly ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... asked Alec of a decrepit old creature, bent almost double with rheumatism, who was trying hard to see something or other in the air or on the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... "Oh, mine is a decrepit world, where nature takes a hundred years to move a foot of solid land. Men and animals go about in flocks. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... destinies, and are content. Sometimes they change pupils; my lord educates the little dame, and my lady the hope of Raynham. Joy and blessings unto all! as the German poet sings. Lady Judith accepted the hand of her decrepit lord that she might be of potent service to her fellow-creatures. Austin, you know, had great hopes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fond of buttered tea-cakes—so the Duchess said; a man who, in the words of Madame Steynlin, "really appreciated good music" and who, as the PARROCO never ceased to declare, could be relied on to give a handsome contribution towards the funds for supporting the poor and repairing a decrepit parish organ. (The parish poor were never in such dire distress, the parish organ never so hopelessly deranged, as during that annual week when the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Rydal Mount afterwards, he said, 'I could make a better, and would like to paint the same subject over again.' The sky in this picture is nobly done, but it reminds one too much of Wilson. The only fault, however, of any consequence is the female figure, which is too old and decrepit for one likely to frequent an eminence on such ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... undoubtedly the tenant of the house. The others, with the possible exception of the bearded German, merely used it as a rendezvous. Therefore, why not wait in ambush for Conrad behind the door, and when he entered bring down a chair, or one of the decrepit pictures, smartly on to his head. One would, of course, be careful not to hit too hard. And then—and then, simply walk out! If he met anyone on the way down, well——Tommy brightened at the thought of an encounter with his fists. Such an affair ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... Terry stood at the window looking down over the blistering plaza. Davao was torpid under the noonday heat. Three carabaos grazed undisturbed on the forbidden square: another of the awkward powerful brutes dawdled up the dusty road, hauling a decrepit two-wheeled cart on which a naked-backed, red-pantalooned native dozed: Padre Velasco, the aged Spanish priest, waved a weary hand at Terry from his window in the old adobe convento. As he watched he saw the soldierly figure of Sergeant Mercado ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... consigned to the house appointed for all living, may love of country and pride of country glow with equal fervor among those to whom our names and our blood shall have descended! And then, when honored and decrepit age shall lean against the base of this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered round it, and when the one shall speak to the other of its objects, the purposes of its construction, and the great and glorious events with which it is connected, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... man, with pale blue eyes and a blonde beard. Hubert had protected him before now against the brutality of the boys, who, when they were not playing nap, divided their pleasantries between him and the decrepit prize-fighter. He came in about nine, took a cup of coffee from the counter, and settled himself for a snooze. The boys knew this, and it was their amusement to keep him awake by pelting him with egg-shells and other missiles. Hubert noticed that he had always with him a red handkerchief full of ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... the bargain seemed to me to be a poor one, for I had not yet viewed this decrepit newcomer or been refreshed with tales of his prowess. But Ma Pettengill knows men, and positively will not bubble except under circumstances that justify it, so I considered the matter ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... the country, under the new laws which force every wretch who enters a workhouse for a night's shelter to stay there two nights; under the cold-blooded cruelty which, in the guise of science, takes the miserable quarter of a pint of ale from the lips of the palsied and decrepit inmates; which puts the imbecile—even the guiltless imbecile—on what is practically bread and water. Words fail me to express the cruelty and ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... speaking; yet I know that, except in memory, these never will be seen and heard again. O Heaven, why didst thou take away that dawning life from the world, and leave such a one as I—old Shokei, feeble, decrepit, and of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... little awry. Besides, I doubt if even the ground you assume is tenable. If a woman has lived long enough to be truly young herself, she won't find a man at forty either decrepit or grotesque. He can even make himself youthful to a girl of thought ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... secret from outsiders. A day was appointed for visiting her, and on arriving we found her living in a comfortable log house, built by Inl[)i] himself, with her children and an ancient female relative, a decrepit old woman with snow-white hair and vacant countenance. This was the oldest woman of the tribe, and though now so feeble and childish, she had been a veritable savage in her young days, having carried a scalp in the scalp dance in the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... actually purchased and transferred in the manner described above, had little earning capacity, and therefore little value; they were decrepit horse-car lines in unprofitable territory. The really valuable roads were those that traversed the great north and south thoroughfares—Lenox, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Avenues. Many old New York families and estates had held these properties for years and had collected large annual ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... new university they talk about, they had better make it for the pupilage of perpetual card-players, and let them take their degrees by the cleverness in odd tricks, or their ability in shuffling. "No offence, Gregory." "No wonder they have their decrepit ones, their ranters." ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... There was a narrow single bed in which mother, Jenny, and I slept, a decrepit table on which stood a diseased mirror, a broken lounge without a bottom, and a pine armoir filled with—corn! In the centre stood the chief ornament, a huge pile of dirt, near which Miriam's mattress was placed, while the sail of a boat flanked it ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... were bounding cityward in a decrepit, ancient taxi driven by a bearded, grizzled Frenchman who without make-up could assume a role in a drama of pirates and freebooters, McGee ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... surface. No, he was a philanderer simply, an exploiter of women. But for her it had been a blinding hallucination nevertheless, fraught, during the first days, at least, with the delicious exhiliration, the voluptuous abandonment of true love. She became the slave of the decrepit tenor, voluntarily, just as she had become her maestro's slave through fear. And so complete had her infatuation been, so overpowering its intoxication, that, in obedience to Salvatti, she fled with him at the end ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... were now contemplating in a sorry mood the disastrous outcome of their encounter with the Knight of the Rueful Countenance. As they were staggering along on their decrepit mounts, the squire summed up the thoughts of his master Samson in this question: "I'd like to know now which is the madder, he who is so because he can not help it, or he who is so ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... bank note is said to average two or three years, and does not terminate until the condition is very shaky indeed—crimpled, pierced with pinholes, corner creases torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... diverted but by tippling as often as they can fall into company in the day, and conclude with downright drunkenness at night. These gentlemen never know the satisfaction of youth, but skip the years of manhood, and are decrepit soon after they are of age. I was godfather to one of these old fellows. He is now three-and-thirty, which is the grand climacteric of a young drunkard. I went to visit the wretch this morning, with ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... framed in tumbled curls, her heart swelled, and she felt that she had much to thank the gods for, seeing that her lover was so full of splendid youth and in no respect resembled the prematurely decrepit and sickly wearer of the purple. Nevertheless, she thought a good deal of Caracalla, and it even occurred to her once that if it were he who was being carried instead of Diodoros, she would tend him no less carefully than her betrothed. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... aged negro of my acquaintance comes to me one day, with the astounding information that he, and a number of equally decrepit and unserviceable slaves, have been killed and buried by his master. In other words, the owners of these useless helots have hoodwinked the slave emancipators by representing their decrepit human property as defunct, while they substitute ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... down upon a finished creation he saw that it was good, yea, very good. Can this be said of our bodies now? Let the blind, the deaf, the lame, the countless sufferers on beds of affliction, the child-bearing mother, the decrepit consumptive, the rheumatic invalid, let these say whether our bodies are very good now. And how about our spirits? I use the term spirit here in the sense of its being the basis of human perception and thought. Are ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... coiffures displayed by Mrs. Edward Schuyler Deflaver of Saserkopee, who gave smart teas at the Woman's Exchange. Lulu cheerily told Father how well he was withstanding the hand of Time, which made him feel decrepit and become profane. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... at this time, the invalid old woman, and another, well-nigh as old but less decrepit, who had been engaged to attend upon her in her sickness. How she got the money to pay her no one knew, for her middle life and the first stage of old age had been marked by poverty and distress; but somehow money seems ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... raven jumped to the ground, and hastened down to the shore. All the geese had come out of the lake, and stood talking with an old dog, who was so weak and decrepit that it seemed as if he might drop dead ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... butler swung open the door and ushered in a small and decrepit man, who walked with a bent back and with the forward push of the face and blink of the eyes which goes with extreme short sight. His face was swarthy, and his hair and beard of the deepest black. In one hand he held a turban ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this juvenile appearance is a species of second childhood; for, on the shores of the Great Bear Lake, four centuries are necessary for the growth of a trunk not as thick as a man's wrist. The further north the more lamentably decrepit becomes the appearance of these woodlands, until, presently, their sordidness is veiled by thick growths of gray lichens—the "caribou moss," as it is called—which clothe the trunks and hang down from the shrivelled boughs. And still ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... successor of the Prophet." A prudent explanation restored his tranquillity, and he passed to a more familiar topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadi. "Fifty years." "It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here," continued Timur, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... path porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the case of unmarried girls the breasts are rounded and erect, but after marriage gradually become more and more pendant until they hang almost to the waist line. With advancing age the muscles shrink, the skin shrivels up until an individual of 40 to 50 years usually has the decrepit appearance of an octogenarian; in fact, 50 is old age with the ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... sitting by the fier side, Decrepit with extreamity of Age, Stilling his little Grand-childe when it cride, Almost distracted with the Batteries rage: Sometimes doth speake it faire, sometimes doth chide, As thus he seekes its mourning to asswage, By chance ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... parturition of increased aspirations of the laborers, and as every kind of abortion leaves the womb which bears it, has done so violently. His law for the insurance of workmen, though dating only from '82, is already tottering in almost decrepit decay. He even admitted himself that it needed perfecting by means of a law that should establish compulsory corporations, like the ancient guilds, which proposal was objected to by the workmen themselves, more inclined to Saxon individualism ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... escort of a great grotesque shadow as he threw himself from his horse and passed the reins over a decrepit hitching-post near at hand. Then he essayed the latch of the small gate. He glanced up at Dundas, the moonlight in his dark eyes, with a smile as it ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... here that in time fought their way into the appreciated valuations of the stock market. He became Canada's greatest adventurer in creating a sort of "wealth" from the merging of small, sometimes decrepit, concerns under a new name and new issues of stock; just as Mackenzie was our greatest adventurer in creating wealth from borrowed money. Beaverbrook worked mainly with small groups to whom he left the ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... just what I was when you left me, that is, nobody. Old age steals upon me insensibly. I grow weak and decrepit, but do not suffer, and so ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... like an Arab's blanket, and cotton breeches ending at the knees. For food they carry a bag of parched corn, another bag of roasted barley-meal (mashka), and a few red peppers. The beasts are thin, decrepit jades, which threaten to give out the first day; yet they must carry you halfway up the Andes. The distance to the capital is nearly two hundred miles. The time required is usually eight or nine days; but officials often travel it ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... dear Mrs Murray, it's all we have to look to," answered Terence. "We must grow old, it's certain; and we wish to become admirals before we are laid up with the gout, or become too decrepit to go to sea. I hear the Admiralty are taking the matter into consideration, and intend to increase the retired list, so that we juvenile captains may have a better chance ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... realm, because there was no man to defend the burghs, priests, and poor men and labourers hauntind to their leisum (lawful) business either private or public. These men because of these enormities might not travel for thieves and brigands and such like: all other weak and decrepit persons who was unable to defend themselves, or yet to get food and sustentation to themselves, were most cruelly vexed in such troublous times. For when any passed to seek redress at the Chancellor of such ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... if the whole man were a moral and physical humbug; his wonderful beauty of face, for aught I knew, might be removable like a mask; and, tall and comely as his figure looked, he was perhaps but a wizened little elf, gray and decrepit, with nothing genuine about him save the wicked expression of his grin. The fantasy of his spectral character so wrought upon me, together with the contagion of his strange mirth on my sympathies, that I soon began to ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... incipiency have given $200,000. The board is composed of white and colored persons. On a recent visit I found the home complete, convenient, and cleanly in all its appurtenances, with an air of comfort and contentment pervading the place. From many with bent and decrepit bodies, from wrinkled and withered faces, the sparkling eye of gratitude could be seen, and prayer of thankfulness read; for this product of a benign clemency that had blessed both the giver and receiver. There can be no one with filial affection happy in the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... was not an extra bed in the building, barring a five-foot crib in the hospital room. She, as you know, approaches six. We tucked her in, and she spent the night folded up like a jackknife. She has limped about today, looking like a decrepit letter S, openly deploring this latest escapade on the part of her flighty mistress, and longing for the time when we shall come to our senses, and return to the parental fireside ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... regard life in a backwater as anything else than stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages. He was being put aside, as a wine is put aside, but to deteriorate instead of gaining in the process, to lose the best time of his youth and health and good looks in a world where youth and health and good looks count ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... and went out. He turned into the Via Sistina, on through the Via Quattro Fontane, passed the Palazzo Barberini and stopped before a book-stall to wait for three o'clock. The bookseller, a little wrinkled, dried-up old man, like a decrepit tortoise, offered him books, taking down his choicest volumes one by one, and spreading them out under his eyes, speaking all the time in an insufferable nasal monotone. Three o'clock would strike directly; Andrea looked at ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... no more the folly; shall this be called a heavenly conjunction? Were I in height of youth, as now I am, forced by my parents, obliged by interest and honour, to marry the old, deformed, diseased, decrepit Count Anthonio, whose person, qualities and principles I loathe, and rather than suffer him to consummate his nuptials, suppose I should (as sure I should) kill myself, it were blasphemy to lay this fatal marriage ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... heavens shedding brilliant light, symbolises early manhood with its strength and glory. Sext typifies mature age. None, recited when the sun is declining, suggests man in his middle age. Vespers reminds all of decrepit age gliding gently down to the grave. Compline, night prayer said before sleep, should remind us of the great ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley |
