"Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so pessimistic one might suppose that a ballroom is always a chamber of torture and the young girl taken as an example above, a very drab and distorted caricature of what "a real young girl" should be and is. But remember, the young girl who is a "belle of the ballroom" needs no advice on how to manage a happy situation; no thought spent on how to make a perfect time better. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other on the pavement before me, and then went and came their several ways. In him I saw that his distinction was passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but hers I beheld active, positive, as she marched my way with the tall cane that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion, with a head, ashen gray, held high, and a straight well-fitted figure dressed in such keeping that there was nothing for the eye ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... lively air and to its strains the feet of Yerba Buena's first invading army kept uncertain step as sailors and marines toiled through the sand. Half a thousand feet above them stood the quaint adobe customs house, its red-tiled roof and drab adobe walls contrasting pleasantly with the surrounding greenery of terraced hills. Below it lay the Plaza with its flagpole, its hitching racks for horses ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... together, few waking, and so there was space for spreading cloth and chintz. Stuffs were unrolled and flung aside till many folds and colors draped the motionless sleepers, and at length a choice was made. Unmeasured yards of this drab chintz were ripped off, money treble its worth was thumped upon the counter, and they returned, bearing it like a streamer to the coffin. While the noise of their hammers filled the room, the hearse came tottering to the door, pulled and pushed by twenty men. It ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... are no more than a—But I won't call you names; I'll tell you quite plainly that if there is anything wrong in that message to her—which I believe there is—no, I can't believe, though I fear it—you have the chance of appearing in drab clothes at the expense of the Government before the year is out, and I ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... was Temperance Murthwaite, who was clad in the plainest of brownish drab serges, without an unnecessary tag or scrap of fringe, and carried on her arm an unmistakable market-basket, from which protruded the legs of a couple of chickens and sundry fish-tails, notwithstanding the clean cloth which should have hidden such ignoble articles from public ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... sees in that most liberal profession. My friend, John Hallett, suited it exactly. His predecessor, Mr. Simon Saunders, had been a small, wrinkled, spare old gentleman, with a short cough and a thin voice, who always seemed as if he needed an apothecary himself. He wore generally a full suit of drab, a flaxen wig of the sort called a Bob Jerom, and a very tight muslin stock; a costume which he had adopted in his younger days in imitation of the most eminent physician of the next city, and continued ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn't bear to ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... that any single colour or combination of single colours—for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion behind—is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers' meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is a plain, ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... and moving from one show to another. Tuesday was Viceroy's Cup Day at the races, a very pretty sight. One side of the ground was crowded by pretty women in lovely gowns, and on the other side the natives sat in their hundreds and chattered, not the drab-coloured crowd we produce, but gay and striking as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... such a case, much depended on the personality of the man who moved the amendment, and Mr. Agar-Robartes was one of the most whimsically incongruous figures in the Government ranks. Twentieth-century Liberalism wears a somewhat drab and serious aspect, but this ultra-fashionable example of gilded youth would have been in his place among the votaries of Charles James Fox. The climax of his incongruity was a vehement and rather antiquated Protestantism; ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... with red mud, the condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration of beds above full of iron. Except where high water had scoured the walls, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... morning I awaken, worn out with cold and fatigue, to peer with sleepy eyes, no longer down the familiar avenue of ice and pine-trees, but across a white and dreary wilderness of snow. On the far horizon, dividing earth and sky, a thin drab streak is seen which soon merges, in the clear sunrise, into the faint semblance of a city. Golden domes and tapering fire-towers are soon distinguishable, and our driver grows proportionately loquacious as his home is neared. "Yakutsk!" ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... did not wander; they were kept snug beneath their lids with well-trained reverence; and this genius of the fire always appeared as soon as the glow began to fade, as if by inspiration. In my large chamber, draped with white muslin over rose color and drab damask, a superb fire glowed. I must make ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... question, we think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable, though not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist" (as Shakspeare has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments! We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet. The neglect of punctilious exactness in his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the icy slope, the sun seemed suddenly quenched and the daylight turned to sodden drab. Heavy drifts of snow could be seen falling headlong from the clouds hanging about the peak, making a wonderful if ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Italian woman." In his "Journal to Stella" for August 6th, 1711, Swift writes: "We have a music meeting in our town [Windsor] to-night. I went to the rehearsal of it, and there was Margarita and her sister, and another drab, and a parcel of fiddlers; I was weary, and would not go to the meeting, which I am sorry for, because I heard it was a great assembly." (See present ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Why, Sally Salisbury's niece! and the equal of Sally herself for worthless good looks and behaviour. She is not yet well known to the town or I could not have been so took in. But you will recall that Molly Skerret observed the likeness to that drab Sally on seeing her. Good Heaven, that I had heeded, and ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... the end of Gorky Street, was Red Square. St. Basil's Cathedral at the far end, and unbelievable candy-cane construction of fanciful spirals, and every-colored turrets; the red marble mausoleum, Mecca of world Communism, housing the prophet Lenin and his two disciples; the long drab length of the GUM department store ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman who ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... vespers close. The priest on high Raises the thing that Christ's own flesh enforms; And down the Gothic nave the crowd flows by And through the portal's carven entry swarms. Maddened he peers upon each passing face Till the long drab procession terminates. No princess passes out with proud majestic pace. She has not come, the woman ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... of his affection for Sue showed itself on the morrow and following days yet more clearly. He could no longer endure the light of the Melchester lamps; the sunshine was as drab paint, and the blue sky as zinc. Then he received news that his old aunt was dangerously ill at Marygreen, which intelligence almost coincided with a letter from his former employer at Christminster, who offered him permanent work of a good class if he would come back. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... coiled dismally over the fanlike roof of dirty glass that sheltered a blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time. The ugly drab curtains in the drawing-room smelled of the moth-powder in which they had been wrapped through the summer heat. The imitation lace drapery underneath them had been torn and not mended. Bits of thick brown paper pasted over the windows during the hot months still stuck to the glass. The furniture ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... majesty on those occasions on which I dragged—if I must here once more speak for myself only—after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... moments he looked out upon the cheerless drab roofs of the barracks, with their wisps of pale smoke swirling upward into the leaden sky; counted the dozen gnarled and scrubby trees, as had become a habit with him; rested his eyes upon the black and shriveled remnants of summer ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... both the lamp and the shade for one day's work! Aren't you glad you wore your pink gingham now, even if mother did make you put on flannel underneath? You do look so pretty in pink and red, Rebecca, and so homely in drab and brown!" ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wet with the rains of winter; the low farm-houses sitting amid flat stretches of prairie, their low roofs making them look as if they were hugging the ground. The train roared past little hamlets, with cottages of white and yellow and drab, their roofs blackened by frost and rain. Jennie noted one in particular which seemed to recall the old neighborhood where they used to live at Columbus; she put her handkerchief to her eyes and began ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... additional help, but the harvesters were for the most part residents of the neighborhood, who found accommodation in their own homes. The house was a small frame, oblong building, of the conventional Canadian farm-house order of architecture, painted of a drab color and standing a hundred yards or so from the main road. The barn and stable stood a convenient distance to the rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and chain. ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... footsteps, and sounds of doors opening and shutting. They put new locks on the doors lest the villagers had procured keys, but this proved of no avail. The servants talked of seeing appearances of a gentleman in drab and of a lady in silk, which Mrs. Ricketts disregarded. Her husband went to Jamaica in the autumn of 1769, and in 1771 she was so disturbed that her brother, Captain Jervis, a witness of the phenomena, insisted on her leaving ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... these; the rabble fill the streets, And mob with mob in great disorder meets. See next the coaches, how they are accouter'd, Both in the inside, eke and on the outward: One p——y spark, one sound as any roach, One poet and two fiddlers in a coach: The playhouse drab, that beats the beggar's bush, * * * * * By everybody kissed, good truth,—but such is Now her good fate, to ride with mistress Duchess. Was e'er immortal poet thus buffooned! In a long line ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... farmers in the country nurse The poor that else were undone; Some landlords spend their money worse, On lust and pride at London. There the roys'ters they do play, Drab and dice their lands away, Which may be ours another day; And therefore ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... as 99 per cent of women would? Evidently you are the one-per-cent woman. I bitterly regretted my whines after having written them, for their very untruth. Alas, how many people think the world is drab-colored and life a failure, and so have done or said something they regret all their lives, when a vegetable pill or a brisk walk would have changed their vision completely! Why is it that people sometimes ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... room above a baker's shop in the village, and had strewn it about with books and photographs and nick-nacks until the drab surroundings seemed to reflect a little of her dainty personality. Thither, later in the day, she took Betty off to tea and introduced her to a tall fair girl with abundant hair and a gentle, rippling laugh that had in it the ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... to-day, and exchanged a frigid bow with Monroe. The Senator from Virginia took a chair in the rear of the others, stretched his long legs in front of him, and folded his arms defiantly. He looked not unlike a greyhound, his preference for drab clothing enhancing the general effect of a pointed ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... sat behind the scenes with mild interest on his face and a sneer in that ugly, gnarled heart of his. "We stood on the stage," he writes to Stella, "and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompting every moment, and the poet directing them, and the drab that acts Cato's daughter (Mrs. Oldfield) out in the midst of a passionate part, and then calling ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... aware, however, that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified as a "drab." Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him, her heart would be wrung. That was all he asked for, the wringing of ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... saints. Some un-Italian sense of duty stiffened his hard little legs, gave rigid strength to his back. Willing to trudge on with his load, willing to rest, carrying his head a little bent, blinking mournfully at the world from under the drab hair on his forehead, San Pietro stood as a type of the disciplined and chastened soul. His very way of cropping the grass had something ascetic in it, reminding his mistress of Eustace at a ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... and the green failed and the immense train of freight-cars and passenger-coaches, loaded to capacity, clattered on into arid country. Gray and red, the drab and fiery colors of the desert lent the ridges ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... for sports was held in the afternoon before the sale, and was voted by all to be a great success. It is a far cry from the days when games were introduced here by the Mission. Then the people's lives were so drab, and they had little idea of the sporting qualities which every Englishman values so highly. In those early days if in a game of football one side kicked a goal, they had to wait till the other had done the same before ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him to return. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... sometimes called a foot-mantle, also a weather-skirt. A traveller tells of seeing a row of horses tied to a fence outside a Quaker meeting. Some carried side saddles, some men's saddles and pillions. On the fence hung the muddy safeguards the Quaker dames had worn outside their drab petticoats. Men wore sherry-vallies or spatter-dashes to protect their ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... give them something to do, that dancing schools were invented; that pews in churches were stiff and uncomfortable; that ministers stormed and threatened until the hour hand had gone its round. In a word, wherever life was drab, or stiff, or formal, wherever prohibitions intervened to check the young impulse, wherever the policing principle showed itself, at the bottom somewhere the feminine sex must be ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... he seemed a smart but common sort of lad." For the unsophisticated Madame Dufour did not discover in the plain black frock and drab gaiters of the bearer of that letter the simple livery of an ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... trouble is I don't want to wait that long. Now, for instance, who lives over there on my left; the square white house with the drab blinds?" ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... has tould me all her inward thoughts, and disclosed her passion for Mr Wilson; and that's not his name neither; and thof he acted among the player-men, he is meat for their masters; and she has gi'en me her yallow trollopea; which Mrs Drab, the mantymaker, says will look very well when it is scowred and smoaked with silfur — You knows as how, yallow fitts my fizzogmony. God he knows what havock I shall make among the mail sex, when I make my first appearance in this killing collar, with ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... slim, inspiriting figure. Her face shone through the drab fog like an undimmed star of purest light. He bounded up the steps toward her, drawn as by magnet against which there was no ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... his Drab again, and to her he repeats what his Wife had said to him: which so far had rais'd her Choler, that she gives it vent in such ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... to suit the Procrustean measure of Ernest Le Breton's communistic fancies. You shall fly free in the open air, and flash your bright silken wings, decked out bravely in scales of many hues, not toned down to too sober and quaker-like a suit of drab and dove-colour. You were meant by nature for the sunshine and the summer; you shall not be worried and chilled and killed with doses of heterodox political economy and controversial ethics. Better even a country rectory (though with a bad Late Perpendicular church), and flowers, and ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... could approach in matters of dress Lord Fairfax. The inventory of this gentleman's estate shows an astonishing variety of gaudy clothes. He possessed a suit of brown colored silk, a suit of velvet, a suit of blue cloth, a suit of drab cloth, a green damask laced waistcoat, a scarlet laced waistcoat, a pink damask laced waistcoat, a gold tissue waistcoat, a brown laced coat, a green silk waistcoat, a pair of black velvet breeches, and a ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... It was all so drab, so cheerless. Outside the snow was still piled to the depth of many feet, the ice still held the river in its chill embrace. But the temperature was rising. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... it to give. He was a creature of a past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... he was stimulated by the clean newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed flat—the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling, the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... air of perplexity—sate an old gentleman who was evidently a stranger to every lawyer present. Who was he? Who brought him? Was there any one in the room who knew him? Such were the whispers that floated about, concerning the portly old man, arrayed in blue coat and drab breeches and gaiters, who took his snuff in silence, and watched the proceedings with evident surprise and dissatisfaction. After listening to three speeches this antique, jolly stranger rose, and with much embarrassment addressed ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... condition made her incapable of entering many of the most profitable employments in the world of work. Miss Weber exemplified her teachings by her practice. She usually wore a dress coat and pantaloons of black cloth; on full-dress occasions, a dark blue dress coat, with plain flat gilt buttons, and drab-colored pantaloons. Her waistcoat was of buff cassimere, richly trimmed with plain, flat-surfaced, gold buttons, exquisitely polished; this was an elegant costume, and one she wore to great advantage. Her clothes were all ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... means," he whispered. "Why you wept in the station, why you invented the story of the actress, why you came here to brighten my drab exile—what this whole comedy of Baldpate Inn amounts to, anyhow? I assure you I am as innocent of understanding it as is the czar of Russia ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... ended. And not youth only, nor Italians only. The British troops loudly and healthily and almost riotously sang also, all the temporary soldiers and nearly all the regulars. Yet here and there were gloom, and drab, wet blankets, trying to make smoulder those raging fires of joy. In a few officers' Messes, especially among the more exalted units, men of forty years and more croaked like ravens over their impending loss of pay and rank, Brigadier ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... for the Volucella to disguise herself as a wasp? Any fly, whether clad in drab or motley, is admitted to the burrow directly she makes herself useful to the community. The mimicry of the bumblebee fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere childish notion. Patient observation, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... because coats were too hot, and you can't climb with your arms held by coat-sleeves. We had our coats in the packs, for emergencies. We wore blue flannel shirts with the Scouts' emblem on the sleeves, and Scouts' drab service hats, and khaki trousers tucked into mountain-boots hob-nailed with our private pattern so that we could tell each other's tracks, and about our necks were red bandanna handkerchiefs knotted loose, and ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... suppose reigned in the days when the men of the Terror were inaugurating a reign of universal love, brotherhood, and peace through the narrow opening between the upper and the lower knife of the guillotine. His coat is blue: so is his waistcoat; and his nether garments are of a severe drab brown. It is impossible to imagine that any man who assumes such garments could be otherwise than a severe and sanguinary doctrinaire, anxious for his neighbours' blood. The genial smile with which the House of Commons has become familiar has invalidated the Tory ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... disentangled themselves from the crowd was a light barouche, cushioned with a rich shade of drab which had a pink flush running through it, and drawn by a pair of jet-black horses. The carriage was so perfect in its proportions and so exquisitely neat in its appointments, that it would have been an object of general admiration during the whole ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... girls, all decorated with wreaths and garlands, and wearing almost the same dress that we had seen at Tahiti—a coloured, long-sleeved, loose gown reaching to the feet. The natives here appear to affect duller colours than those we have lately been accustomed to—lilac, drab, brown, and other dark prints being the favourite tints. Whenever I stopped to look at a view, one of the girls would come behind me and throw a lei of flowers over my head, fasten it round my neck, and then run away laughing, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... although he walked with a slouching gait. He wore corduroy trousers fastened round the waist by a narrow strap, and a blue shirt, with an unbuttoned jacket of fustian. On his head was a limp-brimmed, dirty, drab felt hat, and in his left hand he carried a red handkerchief, which apparently contained all his possessions, and in his right a stout stick which had been obviously cut from a hedge. His hair was extremely short and black, but he could not have shaved for some days; ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... reality. But, somehow, I could never quite make myself believe that it was real when a brilliant group of horsemen in pointed, yellow hats and streaming, peacock feathers dashed down the street. It seemed too impossible that I, a wandering naturalist of the drab, prosaic twentieth century, and my American wife were really a living, breathing part of this strange drama ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... over-arching sky, relieved only by the soft purple of the sage—a picture of utter loneliness, of intense desolation, which was a horror. The eye found nothing to rest upon—no landmark, no distant tree, no gleam of water, no flash of colour—only that dull monotony of drab, motionless, and ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... that she had planned the medieval effect deliberately, and it was a great success. As she flitted about like a brilliant bird, our eyes followed her. My eyes, indeed, drank of her, like new wine. I have always loved color, and my life has been drab. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... of the big Anthology and-this a secret-writing poetry yourself! It was heavenly to write poetry. Something soft and warm seemed to ooze through your being as you sat out there and watched the sorrow of a drab, drab sky; or else, on a bright day, a big shining cloud aloft like some silver-gold fairy palace and, down below, the smell of warm, new-cut grass, and whispers of little live things everywhere! It was then that you felt you'd have died if you couldn't ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... loving some one more than oneself! And oh, the blessedness of toiling together for something greater and more important than either! That is what makes it possible for the other thing to endure—not merely for a few mad, glad years, followed by drab duty and dull regret, but for a happy lifetime of useful vigor. That, and not leisure or dignity, is the great compensation for ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... which is performed under circumstances such as these, is heroism still. But I want to lay down the principle that such heroism is of a type inferior to that performed under the drab, uninspiring, familiar circumstances of daily life. The soldier who goes marching into battle with the flag before his eyes and wild music in his ears, is a brave man—but the sailor who leaps into the foaming sea, the miner who descends into the flaming pit, the locomotive engineer ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... loved this forest country in which he had been born and bred, while he was too keen a sportsman to be unobservant of any aspect of wind and weather, any movement of bird or beast. With the collar of his long drab driving-coat turned up about his ears, and the stem of a well-coloured meerschaum pipe between his teeth, he sat huddled together in the high, swinging gig, with Timothy, the weazel-faced, old groom by his side, while the drama of the opening day unfolded itself before his somewhat critical ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble kellner at my elbow, with the plain, homely German people to the right and left of me, with the stars beginning to silver in the silent water, with the band lifting me, a drab and absurd American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, and with the innocent eyes of the fair fraeulein under yonder tree intermittently englishing their coquettish glances from the eisschokolade ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... else more wonderful even than the promise of a blow-pipe, with arrows galore, and this was that young sister of his, whose name was Oalava, a maid of about sixteen, shy and silent and mild-eyed, rather lean and dirty; not ugly, nor yet prepossessing. And this copper-coloured little drab of the wilderness he proposed to bestow in marriage on me! Anxious to pump him, I managed to control my muscles and asked him what authority he—a young nobody, who had not yet risen to the dignity of buying ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... be the home of her daughter, Ida Baker. The clean-swept walks of the small yard were brightened by borders of gay colored zinnias and marigolds in front of the drab looking two-story, frame house. "Come in," answered Ida, in response to a knock at the front door. "Yessum, Mammy's here. Go right in dat dere room and ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... the drab peaks of the mountains which loomed between the partly dismantled trees. Beyond lay the kingdom. Would they ever reach it? There was only one pass; this they dared not make. Yet if they attempted to cross the mountains in a deserted place, they might ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... companion in silence. Then his lacklustre eyes brightened, his drab features turned scarlet and, suddenly striking the table with his fist, he growled, in ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they came nearly up to the man's armpits, and covered his back and chest, while the braces he wore were short in the extreme. To finish the description of an individual who played a very important part ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... a tall Man's height, or more; No bonnet screen'd her from the heat; A long drab-colour'd Cloak she wore, A Mantle reaching to her feet: What other dress she had I could not know; Only she wore a Cap that was as white ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... yourself bankrupt at once, for this liability is a ton weight at least. When I came in I found your fire out, and I had it lit again, and made that sulky drab of a servant stay and blow at it with the bellows till it had burnt up ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the London warehouse of Allerdyke and Partners, Limited, he had set himself up in two rooms in a Bloomsbury lodging-house. He knew little of London life at that time, or he would have known that he was thus condemning himself to a drab and dreary existence. As it was, he quickly learnt by experience, and within six months, having picked up a comfortable knowledge of things, he transferred himself to one of those well-equipped boarding establishments in the best part ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... except red, wound with a rich band about the crown and another around the brim. Those of straw were of every imaginable weave, some of rattan, like baskets or veranda furniture. The Mexican male seems to be able to endure sameness of costume below it, but unless his hat is individual, life is a drab blank to him. With his hat off the peon loses seven eights of his impressiveness. The women, with only a black sort of thin shawl over their heads, were eminently inconspicuous in the forest ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... service which Avery regarded as downright revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers—as many prayers as the Vicar could get in, rendered in an emotionless monotone with small regard for sense and none whatever for feeling. The whole thing was drab and unattractive to the utmost limit, and Avery rose at length from her knees with a feeling of having been deliberately cheated of a thing she valued. She left the church in an unwonted spirit of exasperation, which lasted ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... of those willing hands always so eager to thrust someone else to the forefront of the battle, Miss Primstinn, clutching her courage and a drab dressing-gown in both hands, half ran, half slipped ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... he awoke, and dismal groans and unearthly rumblings struck his terrified ear. "Sally! Sally!" said he, leaping from bed and giving his sleeping spouse a vigorous shake, "why sleepest thou? arise and don thy drab camlet and high-crowned cap, and prepare to meet thy Lord; for ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing like a very drab." ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... voice—seems hoarse with sepulchral vapours, and puts forth its tones like the sighing of the wind among tombs. With regard to his dress, it is in admirable keeping with his countenance. He wears a black coat, fashioned in the mould of other times, with large cloth buttons and flowing skirts; drab inexpressibles, fastened at the knee with brass buckles; gaiters, which, reaching no higher than the calf of the leg, set up independent claims to eccentricity and exact consideration on their own account; creaking, square-toed shoes; and a hat, broad in front, pinched ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... face and made his eyes water. Curly loped at his easy swift stride over the well-trodden trail. The bleached grass waved, the tumbleweeds rolled along the brown ground. There was no sun. All the west was draped in drab clouds. Soon Pan was riding down into the swale where Blake lived. The cottonwoods were almost bare. Only a few yellow leaves clung to the branches, and every moment a leaf fluttered down. Here in this swale Pan caught the ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... pictures, optical instruments, luxurious furniture, artistic jewelry—in short, the many things that minister to the infinite variety of human tastes. And you suppress the possibility of obtaining anything besides the bread and meat which the commune can offer to all, and the drab linen in which all your lady citizens will ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... four wheels, like a break in which horses are exercised. They looked offensively modern, and I wondered why our Army had not got field artillery with fixed ammunition and 8,000 yards range. Some officers and men of the Staats Artillerie, dressed in a drab uniform with blue facings, approached us. The commander, Adjutant Roos—as he introduced himself—made a polite salute. He regretted the unfortunate circumstances of our meeting; he complimented the officers on their defence—of course, it was hopeless ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Barbed-wire fences, low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops, personnel-housing area carefully shielded against radiation by a huge stellene bubble, sealed ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... merry measure, till the music stops and the Italian passes on to raise Fairyland in the next slum. Music has given them a glimpse of something outside their dull and prosaic surroundings, it has touched their hearts with a glamour which is a glint of spiritual sunshine in a drab world. ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... and properly brewed, produces a natural beverage that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature's own laboratory, and one of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... McKenzie read the evening paper. Jean sat on the rug in front of the fire and knitted for the soldiers. She had made sweaters until it seemed sometimes as if she saw life through a haze of olive-drab. ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... cannot be got to see that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the North-East Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colourless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the grey or the drab. Yet he will explain, in serious official documents, that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master-race and the inferior-race." The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument; and the difficulty here ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... had, in my estimation, a low character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavor of pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against the drab-colored State. It is noted for repudiation of its own debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President to the country, and Cameron ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... notice or remark; for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should: and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by the skirts of Mr. Bumble's coat as they blew open, and disclosed to great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee-breeches. As they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it expedient to look down, and see that the boy was in good order for inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and becoming ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... agreeably outlandish vessels of blue and white, the luscious lodgings of preserved tamarinds and ginger. Every benevolent inhabitant of this retreat had his name inscribed upon his stomach. The pickles, in a uniform of rich brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or sombre drab continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed capitals, as Walnut, Gherkin, Onion, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members of that noble family. The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... little of his fellow roomers. A strange, drab lot he thought them from the occasional glimpses he had had in passings upon the dark stairway and in the gloomy halls. They appeared to be quiet, inoffensive sort of folk, occupied entirely with their own affairs. He had made no friends in the place, not even an acquaintance, ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sad embarrassment—no bed; nothing to offer the invalid in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible, drab-coloured cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal proportions, and called by the name of “bread”; then the patient, of course, had no “confidence in his medical man,” and on the whole, the best chance of saving my comrade seemed to lie ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... say to this, though I was thinking a great deal. From time to time I stole a look at my companion. His coat was black, and so was his waistcoat; neckcloth he had none, his strong full throat being bare above the snow-white shirt. He wore drab-coloured knee-breeches, grey worsted stockings (I thought I knew the maker), and strong-nailed shoes. He carried his hat in his hand, as if he liked to feel the coming breeze lifting his hair. After ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... their sleek, rain-varnished horses glittering in the flash of the electric lamps. Others spring from out street cabs. Many come by twos and threes, their skirts held high. Still others form a line, its head lost in a small side door. These are in drab and brown, with worsted shawls tightly drawn across thin shoulders. Here, too, wedged in between shabby men, the collars of their coats muffling their chins, their backs to the grim policeman, stand keen-eyed newsboys and ragged street ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... antipathy as he cast about for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible down the vista of a series ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... yet?' said Bess, still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, and there passed between ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... by the Congregationalists, and was formerly known as Connaught Chapel. Just beyond the chapel we come to the St. Marylebone Almshouses. They are built round three sides of a square, and enclose a quadrangle of green grass. The blue slate roofs and drab stuccoed walls form a gentle contrast. The central house, occupied by the superintendent, is fronted by a clock over the ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... we should wish to see, there will be more joy of life than in the drab tragedy of modern every-day existence. After early youth, as things are, most men are bowed down by forethought, no longer capable of light-hearted gaiety, but only of a kind of solemn jollification by the clock at the appropriate hours. The advice to "become as little children'' would be ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... daughter doesn't take an interest in girls her own age." That ugly couple on the porch of the apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house—the mother a mute, dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart, a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They are all examples ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... here and there crystallized by contact with the plutonics. The formation mostly stands up either in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured by manganese. The greater part of the old city was built of this alabaster-like[EN34] ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... "Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you," she cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. "If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back," she declared. "I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall if but ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... old white coat had some foundation in fact, but not much. He did wear a light drab overcoat when I first saw him, with the full pockets spreading out on each side. As it suited him he wore it many years afterward, and when it was quite worn out he had another one made just like it which ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... was, in fact, a sort of aesthetic drab, relieved with salmon, as Lemuel had time to notice before he was hustled into it with the ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... this smoky little den on a drab November day, sick at heart. The winter. He tried to face it, and at what he saw ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... glistened on scores of polished bayonets, as sturdy figures, clad in olive drab, which matched in hue the brown of the earth, sprang from their ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... became quite absorbed in his own reflections. He frequently repeated to himself, or composed perhaps, for a good while, and often smiled or raised his hand, seeming completely occupied and amused. His neighbor, a vastly scientific and rather grave professor, in a smooth drab Benjamin and broad-brimmed beaver, cast many a curious sidelong glance at him, evidently suspecting that all was not right with the upper story, but preserved perfect politeness. The poet was, however, discovered ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... obeyed her late mistress' commands, and took off her bonnet before seating herself on the ottoman at Lady Audley's feet. Her smooth bands of light hair were unruffled by the March winds; her trimly-made drab dress and linen collar were as neatly arranged as they could have been had she only ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... roundabouts, sword-swallowers in purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough. Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even "ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... we would name the eleven chickens, as Mater could not name them herself; and, since then, we know them each and all, and just how they behave. Annie and Mary are two sober-looking little creatures, in quakerish feathers of drab and grey. Nat is a white crower, with beautiful soft feathers, and a long graceful black tail. Louise has a shaded dress of grey and white, and is almost as modest and gentle as Luca. Hannah is a little bantam, with tufted head ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... or girth himself into separate sections, and front the world an Agglomeration of four limbs,—will depend on the nature of such Architectural Idea: whether Grecian, Gothic, Later-Gothic, or altogether Modern, and Parisian or Anglo-Dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in Colour! From the soberest drab to the high-flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies unfold themselves in choice of Colour: if the Cut betoken Intellect and Talent, so does the Colour betoken Temper and Heart. In all which, among nations ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... fire-place was seated a man of a grave aspect, who wore a pretty large wig, which had once been white, but was now of a brownish yellow; his coat was a modest coloured drab; and two jack-boots concealed in part the well-mended knees of an old pair of buckskin breeches. Next him sat another man, with a tankard in his hand and a quid of tobacco in his cheek, whose ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... his pocket a drab-covered note-book. The outside was rough and worn, the leaves discoloured. On the first page were written the initials "J.H.N." and the date "1883." Holmes laid it on the table and examined it in his minute way, while Hopkins and I gazed ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... knapsack a' in order; His doxy lay within his arm; Wi' usquebae an' blankets warm She blinkit on her sodger; An' aye he gies the tozie drab The tither skelpin' kiss, While she held up her greedy gab, Just like an aumous dish; Ilk smack still, did crack still, Just like a cadger's whip; Then staggering an' swaggering He roar'd this ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely be able to sustain ourselves. The affection we entertain ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... was a short, stout man, in drab-coloured breeches, and gaiters to match; a black coat and waistcoat; he wore a large watch-chain, with a prodigious bunch of seals, alternated by small keys and old-fashioned mourning-rings. His complexion ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... were drab and ugly, with untidy grass-plots in front. They presented an exterior of three windows and a narrow round-topped hall-door which was a confession of poverty in itself. Five out of six houses had a ramping plaster horse in the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... other place on the Continent was the love of bright colours and extravagance in dress carried to such an extreme. Large numbers of the Quakers yielded to it, and even the very strict ones carried gold-headed canes, gold snuff-boxes, and wore great silver buttons on their drab coats and handsome buckles ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... be an easy guide to the acquirement of French, Italian, Low Dutch, and English." He took the two first, and when he had gleaned from the old volume all it had to teach him, he longed for a master. Him he found in the person of an old French emigre priest, {21b} a study in snuff-colour and drab with a frill of dubious whiteness, who attended to the accents of a number of boarding-school young ladies. The progress of his pupil so much pleased the old priest that "after six months' tuition, the master would sometimes, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... difference. Here and there were the same places to her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound of ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... them, they want wine; your true fool will never fight without it. Or a drab, a drab; Oh for a commodious drab betwixt them! would Helen had been here! then it had come to something. Dogs, lions, bulls, for females tear and gore; And the beast, man, is valiant for his whore. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... many hogsheads of tobacco the head. So notorious was this, that it became one of the jokes of contemporary playwrights, not only that men bankrupt in purse and character were "food for the Plantations," (and this before the settlement of New England,) but also that any drab would suffice to wive such pitiful adventurers. "Never choose a wife as if you were going to Virginia," says Middleton in one of his comedies. The mule is apt to forget all but the equine side of his pedigree. How early the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... send a flare of yellow light through the cabin; two made a comfortable illumination. But he worked cheerlessly. The excitement of the robbery and the chase was over, and then the conflict with the men was passing. He began to see things truly by the drab light of retrospection. The bullets of Allister and Clune might have gone home— they were intended to kill, not to wound. And if there had been two deaths he, Andrew Lanning, would have been equally guilty with the men who handled the guns, for ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... famous fast-trotting mare. It was his habit to drive himself; and it was one among the trifling external peculiarities in which he and his son differed a little, to affect something of the sporting character in his dress. The drab trousers of Pedgift the elder fitted close to his legs; his boots, in dry weather and wet alike, were equally thick in the sole; his coat pockets overlapped his hips, and his favorite summer cravat was of light spotted muslin, tied in the neatest and smallest of bows. He used tobacco ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Rose in doubt. "Soldiers don't wear blue clothes. They are dressed in khaki or olive-drab. Like Captain Ben was when he first came ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... smote Diana almost painfully—she herself, young and radiant, holding in her slender throat a key that would unlock the doors of the whole world, and beside her the little boarding-house help, equally young, and with all youth's big demands pent up within her, yet ahead of her only a drab vista of other boarding-houses—some better, some worse, mayhap—but always eating the bread of servitude, her only possible way of escape by means of matrimony with ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... have put up the age limit for the army, but I am sorry to say I have marched a good many years even beyond that. It is a great opportunity, an opportunity that only comes once in many centuries to the children of men. For most generations sacrifice comes in drab and weariness of spirit. It comes to you today, and it comes today to us all, in the form of the glow and thrill of a great movement for liberty, that impels millions throughout Europe to the same noble end. [Applause.] It is a great ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... has a fair breeze; dropped anchor in the best harbor in these parts! But what's this? colors half-mast?" exclaimed the captain, as he caught sight of a little pouch, woven together of bright colored basket stuff, slung over her shoulder; a little drab paw, darting from out its deepest recesses in pursuit of a tantalizing curl, soon explains how matters stand, and a voice of the greatest feline sweetness is heard in reply to divers catlike salutations, proceeding from ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... had not risen to the occasion. A thick vapour, half smoke half cloud, drifted along the street, and a thin persistent rain was falling steadily. It pit-patted upon the windows, splashed upon the sills, and gurgled in the water-pipes. Far down beneath him on the drab-coloured slimy road stood the lines of wet cabs, looking like beetles with glistening backs. Round black umbrellas hurried along the shining pavements. A horse had fallen at the door of the Constitutional Club, and an ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... styled the Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, with strings and rosettes to each knee; and it was de rigueur ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... and tailed, And drab as a dead man's hand. We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees Or trailed through the mud and sand, Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet, Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... three days our ride had been over stone and sand, with here and there a melancholy palm shooting up from the drab-hued desert, the sun beating down and being reflected up in a way that was almost unbearable; even Tom riding with his mouth open, panting like a dog, his face coated with perspiration and dust; while when at night we had stopped at some wretched ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... bully Bottom"—from Hugo? Though I will say it's curious that simply on just that account there should be Men so bold as to say that not one of my poems was written by me. It would stir the political bile or the physical spleen of a drab or a Tory To hear critics disputing my claim to Empedocles, Maud, and the Laboratory. Yes, it's singular—nay, I can't think of a parallel (ain't it a high lark? As that Countess would say)—there are few men believe it was I wrote the Ode to a Skylark. And it often has given myself and Lord Albert ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the Piazza Santo Spirito, grey and hollow-sounding in the chilly silences, his own footsteps echoed solemnly as he passed by the door of the great ragged church. Through the heavy darkness within lights flickered faintly and went; service was not begun. A drab crew of cripples lounged on the steps yawning and shivering, and two country girls were strolling to mass with brown arms round each other's waists. When Sandro's footfall clattered on the stones they ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... said, and we were admitted sulkily to a room, of which the conspicuous features were a malodorous lamp, and a brandy- bottle. I had taken the old drab for a landlady rather the worse for liquor, but, more amiably, she remarked now: "It's a pity Jeanne didn't know ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... in the gathering dusk. Seen under winter conditions the drab little town looked dreary and uninviting enough as the party negotiated its main street. A frame-built hotel, a livery-stable, a small church, a school-house, a line of false-fronted stores, and some three-score dwellings failed to arouse in George an enthusiastic desire to become a ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... marked its twisting course. That would be the Ourcq, and the forest beyond would be the Forest de Nesles. And—yes, there just beyond the river was a town—which McGee concluded must be Fere-en-Tardenois—and a little way from its outskirts a group of drab square blocks that caught and held ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, "one incapable of the effort necessary to ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... York, and thence proceeded to New Rochelle. Following the directions they had received, they hired a carriage at the steamboat-landing, to convey them to a farm-house a few miles distant. As they approached the designated place, they saw a slender man, in drab-colored clothes, lowering a bucket into the well. Mr. King alighted, and inquired, "Is this Mr. ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... from the Gamma Psi dance at Delmonico's except for several chorus girls from a midnight revue who sat at a side table and wished they'd taken off a little more make-up after the show. Here and there a drab, mouse-like figure, desperately out of place, watched the butterflies with a weary, puzzled curiosity. But the drab figure was the exception. This was the morning after May Day, and celebration was still ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his desk and gazed listlessly out of the window. The day arose before him in prospect, drab, desolate, and dreary. High up overhead, through the dingy panes, he could see the little fleecy clouds floating about in peaceful unconcern. May was a slack month. And at its end came June—June, with its four weeks' inventory period wherein each stick and stone of the ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... sounding through the towne, mine hosts being the auncient watring place where he did use to cast anchor. You must understand he was none of those base rascally tinkers that with a bandog and a drab at their tayles and a picke staffe at their necks will take a purse sooner then stop a kettle. No this was a devout tinker, he did honor God Pan; a musicall tinker, that upon his kettle-drum could play any ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the English people have come to think of American business ethics as being too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware that only in most exceptional cases can great or permanent individual ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... blotched, and mottled with a somewhat pale brown, more or less olivaceous in some eggs, the markings even in this type being generally densest towards the large end, where they form an irregular mottled cap: in the other type the ground is a very pale greenish-drab colour; there is a dense confluent raw-sienna-coloured zone round the large end, and only a few spots and specks of the same colour scattered about the rest of the egg. All kinds of intermediate varieties occur. The texture of the shell is ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume |
