"Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before hopping away beneath the bushes and undergrowth, appearing again farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... and the other the Fresco Room. The Marble Room is all made of marble,—walls, floor, window-sills, everything but the furniture. The marble is of different colors and patterns, and just as beautiful! The furniture is covered with drab damask. ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... work in the book. How admirable is the description; "a tall, thin man with a sandy-coloured head, inclined to baldness, and a face in which solemn importance was blended with a look of unfathomable profundity. He was dressed in a long, brown surtout, with a black cloth waistcoat and drab trousers. A double eye-glass dangled at his waistcoat, and on his head he wore a very low-crowned hat with a broad rim." Every touch is delightful—although all is literal the literalness is all humour. As when Pott, to recreate his guest, Mr. Pickwick, told ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... face, so like, yet so unlike his son's, showed heavy lines from the nostril to the corner of the mouth. Beneath his eyes were faint pouches. The thick thatch of yellow hair had lost its yellow light and now was drab in tone. His flannel shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, showed a strong neck, and the rider's belt that circled the top of his blue denim pants outlined a waist as ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... woman had half her body and two gesticulating arms out of the coach window. She was plainly neither a drab nor in liquor. Harry halted out of range of the splashes to examine and enjoy her. She had been comely, and still could hold a man's eye with her curves of neck and bosom. The piquant features must have been adorable before they sharpened ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... the desert wanly, as if it had been a leaden sea. But with the uprising of the sun the familiar glaring white of the alkali blazed out once more. They had left the pinnacled hills and were now traveling over undulating country overgrown with rough brush. It was a sad, drab color, and smelled pungently where the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... golden scales, clearing the brows, held the cap securely in place. On each scale a ruby of great size sparkled in solitaire setting. The circlet was further provided with four strings of pearls, two by each ear, dangling well down below in front of the shoulders. A loose drab robe or gown, drawn close at the waist, clothed him, neck, arms, body and nether limbs, answering excellently as ground for a cope the color of the cap, divided before and behind into embroidered squares defined by rows of pearls. Boots of purple leather, also embroidered, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... but they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit, that if the taste of the Quaker could have been consulted at the creation what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, not a bird been permitted ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... was there any drama, any thrill, any excitement. We stood, a rather lonely little group, in the forest clearing whilst the soldiers in the trench flung us a careless glance, then turned back to their business of the day with an indifference that showed how ordinary and drab a thing custom ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... called in 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 Shakespeare 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 want of ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street against a unanimity in goodness. Not to mention that a Quaker world, all faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,—what should we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel? No rascals, no literature. You have your choice. Were we weak enough to consent to a sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be thrown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... the oars in the rowlocks and the gentle lapping of the stream against the bow. This day had God been very good to me. This was life as I would have it; work to do for brain and brawn, and a woman to do it for who was worth the uttermost that was in me. Romance had flushed the drab night of my life with a rosy dawn, and my heart was lifted up within me. If it faded away, there would at least be the memory of it. But it might not fade. I was under no illusions as to the stiffness of my task. I was matched against the powers that be, against my Lord Brocton, whose ability ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... him as willing to descend from the dignity of the poet and the statesman to the low delights of mean company. His Chloe, probably, was sometimes ideal; but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab[10] of the lowest species. One of his wenches, perhaps Chloe, while he was absent from his house, stole his plate, and ran away; as was related by a woman who had been his servant. Of this propensity to sordid converse I have seen an account so seriously ridiculous, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... light, his atmospheric effect, and he will work into their pattern no matter what plain or repulsive wretch. To Velasquez the flaccid yellowish fair flesh, with its grey downy shadows, the limp pale drab hair, which is grey in the light and scarcely perceptibly blond in the shade, all this unhealthy, bloodless, feebly living, effete mass of humanity called Philip IV. of Spain, shivering in moral anaemia like some dog thorough bred into nothingness, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... 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 ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the 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 for those towards whom ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... 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 are. So fare ye, fare ye well, old roofs! The syren warns the shore, The flowing tide sings ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... admiration, readjusts his hat several times, and stands off to contemplate her man. MARTIN watches them both, then inspired, takes pencil and cardboard and begins to sketch.] Brown is unutterably drab. It does the most terrible things to me. Put it a little more forward. There—I think ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... 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 ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... nightly good cheer, his cocked hat, military coatee, and terrific paunch, which resisted all attempts to confine it within reasonable military compass; John Bellingham—the murderer of Spencer Perceval,—with his retreating forehead, long pointed nose, drab cloth coat and exuberant shirt frill; "What? What? What?"—Great George himself, as he appeared in 1810, in full military panoply—huge ill-fitting boots, huge blue military coat, collar, lappets, and star, a white-powdered bob ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... 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 urchins, the price ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... her. The man in the Ulster laughed. "Get along, you little drab!" said he, in the same loud ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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 to the time of his death. Perhaps the cough might have been originally an imitation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... How poor and dull and sleepy and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved street, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings, with the inevitable battlements-the same, only worse, was ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... singular fact that must be noted in connection with the vast majority of such depictions. Punk or bona roba, lorette or drab—put her before an artist in letters, and, lo and behold ye! such is the strange allure emanating from the hussy, that the resultant portrait is either that of a martyred Magdalene, or, at the very least, has all the enigmatic piquancy of a Monna Lisa... Not ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... such a fashionable place as Westham, the nearest county town to our parish, at mother's especial request father consented to hide the beauties of his favourite old shooting-jacket under a more clerical-looking overcoat of a greyish drab colour, or "Oxford mixture." He was induced to don, too, a black felt hat, more in keeping with the coat than the straw one he had worn in the garden; and thus "grandly costumed," as he laughingly said to mother and Nell, who watched our ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As it was in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins, base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their spooncase of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... archeus, or prime colour, of the tertiary citrine; characterises in like manner the endless number of semi-neutral colours called brown, and enters largely into the complex hues termed buff, bay, tawny, tan, dan, dun, drab, chestnut, roan, sorrel, hazel, auburn, isabela, fawn, feuillemort, &c. Yellow is naturally associated with red in transient and prismatic colours, and is the principal power with it in representing the effects of warmth, heat, and fire. Combined with the ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... there were nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in THIS accursed life; and THERE—somewhere lost to me—things were happening—momentous, terrible things.... I lived at nights—my days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... he rode away, not giving Tom time to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches, drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave himself airs because he wore smart ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the novel, it won her instant fame and a small fortune. It was gloomy, pessimistic, excoriating, merciless, drab, sordid, and hideously realistic. Its people hailed from that plebeian end of the vegetable garden devoted to turnips and cabbages. They possessed all the mean vices and weaknesses that detestable humanity has so ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... passes at the empty doorway, and jumped back. The audience was lifted fairly to its feet with excitement. What monster could it be that was giving so much trouble? The next moment, while Tomaso's whip hissed in vicious circles over his head, a plump little drab-colored pug-dog marched slowly out upon the stage, its head held arrogantly aloft. Volleys of laughter crackled around the arena, and the delighted spectators settled, tittering, back ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... advanced a hundred yards, her courage began to fail, and the further she went, the more her spirits sank. Her surroundings were indescribably depressing: the smirched, steadily retreating snow was leaving bare all the drab brownness it had concealed—all the dismal little gardens, and dirty corners. Houses, streets and people wore their most bedraggled air. Particularly the people: they were as ugly as the areas of roof and stone, off which the soft white coating had slid; their ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of a performance of Lord Lytton's Money at the theatre will supply the farce to this tragedy. "I have rarely seen anything finer than Lord Glossmore, a chorus-singer in bluchers, drab trowsers, and a brown sack; and Dudley Smooth, in somebody else's wig, hindside before. Stout also, in anything he could lay hold of. The waiter at the club had an immense moustache, white trowsers, and a striped ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... relieved, in charity with all the world, now that my prodigal portmanteau is safely reclaimed. Porter takes me into a large luggage-room. Don't see my things just at first. "Your baggage—ere!" says the Porter, proudly, and points out a little drab valise with shiny black leather covers and brass studs—the kind of thing a man goes a journey with in a French Melodrama! He is quite hurt when I repudiate it indignantly; he tries to convince me that it is mine—the fool! There is no other baggage ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... picture, you drab!" Here another model of rustic charms, who might have furnished an ideal for the fat scullion in "Tristram Shandy," bobbing a courtesy put in ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the mail besides a catalogue and the speeches of his congressman, of having something actually to look forward to, appealed to him strongly the more he considered it. Bowers craved a little of the warmth of romance in his drab existence and this was the only way he ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... of garments 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 ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... failings was an inability to estimate the true value of things. He possessed something of the spirit of adventure and a desire to escape from the drab monotony of his early life, but these found expression in betting on the exploits of others on the football field and the turf, a haunting of the music-halls, and the cultivation of acquaintances on the lowest rung of the dramatic profession. All this offered him some glimpses of what he ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... faded into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day of our ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... was all right. They had enlarged it a bit, but it was still painted a dirty drab (perhaps there used to be a shade more yellow ochre in the drab), and the Virginian creeper still climbed over the station master's box, veiling him as in a bower. If he could have swallowed up time (fifteen years ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... insidiousness Creeps into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard fingers Of the ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... the avenue of elms to church, with their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with gold buckles, strode along, while Cato, dressed in some of the Squire's old clothes, walked close behind him like his shadow. You would have thought my master forty instead ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... religious elements. The general costume of the inhabitants is frocks or sacks, loosely made, and rather shabby; often, shirt-sleeves; or the coat hung over one shoulder. They wear felt hats and straw. People of respectability seem to prefer cylinder hats, either black or drab, and broadcloth frock-coats in the French fashion; but, like the rest, they look a little shabby. Almost all the women wear shawls. Ladies in swelling petticoats, and with fans, some of which are highly gilded, appear. The people generally are not tall, but ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at dusk. I was too tired to speak. Every muscle set up a separate complaint and I had had nothing to eat since morning, as we had expected to make camp by noon. The world seemed indeed a very drab place. We found the hunters careering around searching for us. They thought they had missed us—as they had done ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... day. If anybody can see that my tuft is dyed, may I be—" When the door was flung open, and a large lady with a curl on her forehead, yellow shawl, a green-velvet bonnet with feathers, half-boots, and a drab gown with tulips and other large exotics painted on it—when, in a word, Mrs. Crump and her daughter bounced into ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drifted level with the eaves. Ichabod stood in the narrow window frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,—a condensed milky way. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... busy at its long day's work. Roger did not interest himself in these things, in the wasps that left the gate as he approached—they were making papier-mache from the wood of the top bar,—in the bright poppies brushing against his drab unpolished boots, in the hue of the wheat or the white convolvulus; they ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... man. He had brought the Fulmar round the south of Celebes, making for Ceram; but as the Dutch had forbidden him to travel in the interior, saying that the natives were too dangerous just then; and as Sidin, the mate, had sighted the Dutch tricolor flying above drab hulls that came nosing southward from Amboina way, we had dodged behind the Bandas till nightfall. The crew laughed at the babi blanda—Dutch pigs; but every man of them would have fled ashore had they known that among the hampers and bundled spears ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... years, with a stern handsome face under harsh bands of yellowish gray hair, and a mouth that sank in at one corner where her upper teeth had been drawn. Her figure was erect and flat as a lath, and this flatness was accentuated by the extreme scantiness of her drab calico dress. In her youth she had been beautiful in a hard, obvious fashion, and her eyes would have been still fine except for ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom,—in all these summer or winter nests he was always at home and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... however, but in the Casino the Congress meets, and, where Swiss sweethearts use to dance, are debated the tragic issues of an outcast nation. An oblong hall, of drab yellow, with cane chairs neatly parted in the middle, and green-baized tables for reporters, and a green-baized rostrum, and a green-baized platform, over which rise the heads and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... knew of no ideals. The only thing I believed in was the cold, drab theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This could not satisfy a heart that was hungry for enthusiasm and affection, so dreams of family life became my religion. Self-sacrificing devotion to one's family was the only kind of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... to behold those same veteran Yanks still fighting the Red Guard armies and doing their bit to keep the state of Archangel, the North Russian Republic, safe, and their own skins whole. The warming sun and bursting green were to see the olive-drab uniform, tattered and torn as it was, covering a wearied and hungry and homesick but nevertheless fearless and valiant American soldier. With deadly effect they were to meet the onrushing swarms of Bolos on all ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... 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 the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to return with two exceedingly rusty keys tied together with a drab piece of tape. He jingled them on his long, slender forefinger with an ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... 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 he wore many years more. I doubt if he ever had more than two of these famous garments, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... these in turn into months. Simiti, drab and shabby, a crumbling and abandoned relique of ancient Spanish pride and arrogance, drowsed undisturbed in the ardent embrace of the tropical sun. Don Jorge returned, unsuccessful, from his long quest in the San Lucas mountains, and departed ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... into a drab-walled, official-looking apartment, curiously suggestive of the lesser and meaner forms of crime, and pointed ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... white. We call wine "white wine" which is as yellow as a Blue-coat boy's legs. We call grapes "white grapes" which are manifestly pale green. We give to the European, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a "white man"—a picture more blood-curdling than any spectre ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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 that the hat should be 3-1/2 inches ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... village street. Weston, lanky and erect, moved with a masterful stride, not unlike the lean and keen-witted setter that flashed to and fro over the road before him. At his side was the girl, a slender body in drab, tossing her hat gayly about at the end of its long string. They passed the store and the mill, and at the bend were lost to my view. They seemed to find themselves such good company! Even Tim, so fine and big, had in this homely, lanky man a ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... most of the party lay fast asleep in the shade, Tom, who was on the watch, observed a herd of small deer apparently coming down to drink. He roused up Desmond, and taking their rifles they crept behind two trees. The deer came on in single file. They were graceful little animals of a dark drab colour on their backs and sides, and white underneath, and pretty large antlers. Without hesitation they at once began to cross the stream, passing along close to where the midshipmen were concealed. Tom selected one animal and Gerald another, and both firing brought the ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... had recovered a little from his shock, he went and sniffed curiously at the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two drab animals of the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger lump, and walked round it several times, trying to find ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... trees, and pigs in the village; so above all did the shoes. No foot could make three plunges into that abyss of pulverised gravel, which had the impudence to call itself a hard road, without being clothed with a coat a quarter of an inch thick. Woe to white gowns! woe to black! Drab was your only wear. ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... more than one or two and twenty, tall and well-built, 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 ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... end, stopping tears and sobs as best she might, she waited listlessly her sentence of expulsion. Now nothing mattered; if her heart was lighter, her future was darker; and presently the nobody that she was would return into that drab nowhere whence some ill wind of chance ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... his aspect, but his tread was firm, and his arm still strong enough to steady his long, heavy, double-barrelled rifle. An ample coat of dark blue covered his body; his limbs were enveloped in long buttoned leggings of drab cloth, and a cap of sable surmounted his high, broad forehead. Under this his blueish grey eye glanced with a calm but clear intelligence, and a single look from it satisfied you that you were in the presence of a ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... that he was received by Washington, and, "after ... half an hour, the General came in again, with his hair neatly powdered, a clean shirt on, a new plain drab coat, white waistcoat and white silk stockings. At three, dinner was on the table, and we were shown by the General into another room, where everything was set off with a peculiar taste and at the same time neat and plain. The General sent the bottle about ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... 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
... to twenty inches in length, eight or ten inches in diameter, and weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds and upwards; skin thin, easily pierced or broken, of an ash-gray color, spotted, and marked with light drab and nankeen-brown,—the furrows dividing the ribs light drab; stem small; flesh deep orange-yellow, of medium thickness; seeds pure white, broader in proportion to their length than those of ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... tryings of new cafes. Mr. Dosson used to look sometimes as he had looked of old when George Flack "located" them somewhere—as if he expected to see their heated benefactor rush back to them with his drab overcoat flying in the wind; but this appearance usually and rather touchingly subsided. He at any rate missed Gaston because Gaston had this winter so often ordered his dinner for him; and his society was not, to make it up, sought by the count and the marquis, whose ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... light that preceded dawn we saw shadowy columns of infantry and artillery and cavalry passing by our camp. The costumes of the different regiments made a break in the drab monotony. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force was composed of varied components. Steel helmets could be worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and long tunics that were really shirts, and an adaption of the native custom ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... with silver and gold; the robes of her priests and ministrants were rich with embroideries. "People," said William Morris, "have long since ceased to take in impressions through their eyes," indeed so insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... 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. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... you had been so kind to him! He is an enthusiastic boy, and a great friend of mine. He deals always in superlatives. That is so refreshing here in Oxford where we are all so clever that we are deadly afraid of each other, and everybody talks drab. And his music is divine! I hear they talk of him in Paris as another Chopin. He passed his first degree examination the other day magnificently! Come and hear him some evening at my house. Jim Meyrick, too, has told me all about you. His ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but smooth or burnished surface, self- coloured (drab or brown), or intentionally coloured black (by charred matter in the clay, or by a smoky fire), or red (by a clear fire, sometimes aided by a wash or 'slip' of more ferruginous clay). Sometimes a black ware is 'overfired' ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... set of garments. I used to consider my brother Rupert the most especial dandy I had ever seen; but that, evidently, was my limited experience: even Rupert cannot display so perfect a fit in bottle-green coats, so faultless a silken stock, buckskins of such matchless drab!" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... her plain Quaker cap, with the nicely-starched kerchief crossed upon her bosom; Mr. Parlin in his drab dressing-gown, lined with crimson; Mrs. Parlin in a print wrapper, with a linen collar at the throat, her hair as smooth as satin; the three little girls all neatly dressed, and all happy but Dotty. Susy's mocking-bird hung in a cage by one of the windows, and "brother Zip" ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... cousins, notably of pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do look so lovely!" Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the drab Cooney milieu. Recent progress in the great game had more than blotted out all memory of little ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... which 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 ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... at breakfast time, and found the house of Mr. Kloh, a neat, bare, drab frame box, with tight small front and back yards. Dlorus was awake, and when she wasn't yawning, she was enjoying ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... ocean, the city slopes to abrupt cliffs along the outer harbor, and here are mansions whose windy gardens overhang the surf. Beyond Market street is the area described in the phrase, "south of the slot". Superficially drab and gray in aspect, it has been celebrated again and again in song and story. From this region have come the majority of San Francisco's champion athletes. Near here beats the red heart of the labor world. And not far off still stands that ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... commonplace topics in the course of a monologue that induced no reaction whatever, he voiced a perfectly natural remark about the wonder of sudden riches. He was, in a way, thinking aloud of the changes wrought in drab lives like the Briskows' by the discovery of oil. He was ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this? "They might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all." Is not Adam Bede justified in saying that "to hear some preachers you'd think a man must be doing nothing all his life but ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... forever, if he could have Helen Minorkey to listen to his enthusiastic expositions. From her science the transition to his was easy, and they studied under every combination of glasses the beautiful lace of a dragon-fly's wing, and the irregular spots on a drab grasshopper which ran by chance half-across one of his eyes. The thrifty landlord had twice looked in at the door in hope of finding the parlor empty, intending in which case to put out the lamp. But I can not tell how long this enthusiastic pursuit of scientific knowledge might have ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... public, July 4, 1835. The cars and locomotive would be a curiosity to-day. The former, resembling Concord coaches, were divided by a partition into two compartments, each entered by two doors, on the sides. The interiors of the compartments were upholstered with drab-colored cashmere, and each accommodated eight passengers. The conductor and engineer had each a silver whistle. After the former had ascertained the destination of each passenger and collected the necessary fare, he would ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... bright starlit night, and the long procession of big bullocks looked weird and strange in the gloom, for at times they seemed to be drawing nothing, so closely did the tilt of the great lightly-loaded wagon assimilate with the drab dusty tint of the parched earth and the dusky-coloured scrub which the great wheels ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... equipages that 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 concert, had not its ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... of a child. She sat in the Hither Isles, well walled between the This and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts, sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat and cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... married, Donna," he told her, when there came to him for the first time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a change from the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert, "we'll take horses and pack-animals and go up into that wonderful country on ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black eagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the large vigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vast multitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigue uniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Here and there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged his attention, and he knew at once it was three ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is nothing so airy, so piquant, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... down into the street, dull and listless and filled with the dread of the future that had once looked so engaging to her. The picture that avarice and greed had painted was gone. In its place was an honest bit of colour on the canvas,—a drab colour and noteless. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... leaving Oxford Street behind her oppressed her even more than Whitechapel had done in her one visit to it with Tom, the year before, to see a loan collection of pictures. Street after street of blank, drab-faced houses—dull, unsmiling houses! She thought of children growing up there, wan and joyless, like plants kept out of the sun. And then two happy-eyed boys came running by with their satchels under their arms, while a door opened and ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... and was justified by the fact that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for history—and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... quite narrow at the top. Her forehead was the thin edge of the wedge, and she widened slowly as she neared the ground; the first indication of a settlement showing in the lobes of her ears, then in her cheeks, and then in her drab-apparelled person. Her whole aspect gave the impression of a great self-importance, early realised and made part of life, but kept in abeyance by the society of Aunt Mary and by a religious conviction ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... shepherd's-plaid vest and pantaloons; two active youths, of the ages of seventeen and fifteen respectively, in precisely similar costume; a man-servant in pepper and salt, and a little thin timid boy in blue, a sort of confidential page without the buttons. All of them wore drab gaiters and shoes of the thickest conceivable description. From the inside of the coach there issued a delicate elderly lady, who leaned, in a helpless manner, on the arm of a young, plain, but extremely fresh and ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... health—"I have," he said, "seven distinct diseases, but am otherwise pretty well"—the indefatigable pamphleteer had not yet done with controversy. In 1842 he published three Letters on the Mismanagement of Railways,[141] and in 1843 two on a tendency displayed by the "drab-coloured men of Pennsylvania" to repudiate the interest on their State's bonds. On the 18th ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... a room without doors or windows and quite empty. Everything is gray, monocolored, drab—the watts gray, and the ceiling, and the floor. A feeble, even light enters from some invisible source. It too is gray, monotonous, spectral, producing neither lights ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... silence drab Paints music; hooting motors stab The pleasant peace; and, far and faint, The jangling lyric ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... N. gray &c. adj.; neutral tint, silver, pepper and salt, chiaroscuro, grisaille[Fr]. [Pigments] Payne's gray; black &c. 431. Adj. gray, grey; iron-gray, dun, drab, dingy, leaden, livid, somber, sad, pearly, russet, roan; calcareous, limy, favillous[obs3]; silver, silvery, silvered; ashen, ashy; cinereous[obs3], cineritious[obs3]; grizzly, grizzled; slate-colored, stone-colored, mouse-colored, ash- ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... unlovely tramp-steamers in the Hooghly River, to which I have already referred, is only one example of the universal disappearance of the picturesque. In twenty-five years' time, every one will be living in a drab-coloured, utilitarian world, from which most of the beauty and every scrap of local colour will have been successfully eliminated. I am lucky in having ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... to the Gaite to see the performance of "La Grace de Dieu." Quenu, in a frock-coat and drab gloves, with his hair carefully pomatumed and combed, was occupied most of the time in hunting for the names of the performers in the programme. Lisa looked superb in her low dress as she rested ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... received the long-expected intimation that the Herr Geheimrath would see me on such a morning. This notable audience took place in a little antechamber of his private apartments, covered all round with antique carts and bas-reliefs. He was habited in a long grey or drab redingote, with a white neckcloth and a red ribbon in his button-hole. He kept his hands behind his back just as in Rauch's statuette. His complexion was very clear, bright, and rosy. His eyes extraordinarily dark, piercing, and brilliant. I felt quite afraid before them, and remember comparing ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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 ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... will strengthen men and women to fight down their lower nature, that will convince them that their higher nature is a reality, and that will give them a living sense of companionship in their difficult lives—lives often as drab and depressing as they ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... 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 and air-conditioned, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... thinkers of the moment: Is Monogamy Feasible? or Can Men and Women be Friends? D'Annunzio is not to be approached either in a mood of radical earnestness or of evangelical fervor. He must be regarded as an artist of sensations, an Italian of the Renaissance set down in the middle of a drab century. He began his life by a quest for perfect physical pleasure through all the senses, and inaugurated its last phase with a gesture of military courage which was not only a retort to those who, like Croce, had called him a dilettante, but an earnest ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... strewn round a central bottle of ink, in which a steel pen stuck upright. The Judge wore his usual dilapidated business suit of brown cheviot that had once been snuff-coloured and was now a streaky drab. On his feet, stretched out under the magisterial table till they joined the jury, a pair of moccasins; on his grizzled head a cowboy hat, set well back. He could spit farther than any man in Minook, and by the same token was a better shot. They had unanimously ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... down before 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
... of a morrow. The future was drab and formless. His trouble drew her like a magnet. She trembled at the mere thought of being able to ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... not scream? Why are her eyes fastened—not on her lover—not on the madman, but upon another object? What is that object? Is it a man? Can any man move as that thing moves? Surely that cannot be a man, that streak of drab color—yonder thing that casts to the ground a garment, then shoots backward twenty feet from the abyss—swifter than a panther, as silent as death, with two balls of living fire glaring from—from a face? Surely not a human face! Yes, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... woman's figure in front had induced this thought. Her walk seemed oddly familiar, and when she turned the corner for which he was bound, his heart began to beat. He hastened on to the corner to make certain. Yes! It was Irene; he could not mistake her walk in that little drab street. She threaded two more turnings, and from the last corner he saw her enter her block of flats. To make sure of her now, he ran those few paces, hurried up the stairs, and caught her standing at her door. He heard the latchkey in the lock, and reached her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... monotonous. There was a shading of individuality in the girls and newly-wed women, but it faded soon into the dull drab that seemed the only possible wearing-colour of the place. Occasionally, though, the sameness had been relieved by a vivid touch, but only for a short hour. The Fate who snips the threads, had invariably ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... and New Year seasons, these children's Annuals formed the conventional gift-book for many years, and publishers spared no effort to make them attractive. Indeed, their red morocco, silk, or embossed scarlet cloth bindings form a cheerful contrast to the dreary array of black and drab cloth covering the fiction of both old and young. Better illustrations were also introduced than the ugly cuts "adorning" the other books for juvenile readers. Oliver Pelton, Joseph Andrews (who ranked well as an engraver), Elisha Gallaudet, Joseph ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... wear coats, 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 on our hands were ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... at near my present growth of six feet, and with my hair in buckle, a handsome lace jabot and wristbands to my shirt, and a red plush waistcoat, barred with gold, looked the gentleman I was born. I wore my drab coat with plate buttons, that was grown too small for me, and quite agreed with Captain Fitzsimons that I must pay a visit to his tailor, in order to procure myself a ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... barbaric trinkets of all kinds. Her hands were perfectly formed, and so doubtless were her feet, although these last were hidden by heavy laced-up boots. On the whole, she was an extremely picturesque figure, quite comforting to the artistic eye amidst the drab sameness of latterday civilization. ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... 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 ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... full of gaunt, narrow houses, with prim fronts and narrow railed windows, let in segments, flats, and bachelor apartments. Number 10 was as like its fellows as one drab soul resembles another. Superintendent Merrington's ring at the doorbell brought forth an elderly woman with an expressionless face surmounted by a frilled white cap. She informed them in an expressionless voice that Captain Nepcote's apartments were on the second ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 properly; ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... sure. Wouldn't it be possible to look at it while you were seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour out of all beauty?" She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old sugar tongs she had brought home ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... fulfilled its promise in just such measure as he had fulfilled himself. In as much as he had matured, in so much had his art. Man is not ripened by a shock, but by those elements that develop him to the point of feeling and knowing the shock when it comes to him. In a drab world, drab would have been Lewis's end; but, little as he realized it, his world had ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... it—as if the very fact that fate forced him to remain a looker-on had made him the more sensitive to the beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at. He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital—there is another characteristic glimpse in one of Stevenson's letters, a picture of Henley sitting up in his hospital bed, his hair and beard all tangled, "talking as cheerfully as if he had been in a King's palace, or the great King's ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... admit, a drab and dreary crowd to look at, these Germans at the theatre, at the opera, in the concert halls. They do not dress, or if they are women undress, for their music as do we; their music dresses for them. They come, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... family 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 have the shutters ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... in due time, I was served with a cup of tea. After that, I sat musing on Lady Ashby's past and present condition; and on what little information I had obtained respecting Mr. Weston, and the small chance there was of ever seeing or hearing anything more of him throughout my quiet, drab-colour life: which, henceforth, seemed to offer no alternative between positive rainy days, and days of dull grey clouds without downfall. At length, however, I began to weary of my thoughts, and to wish I knew where to find the library my hostess had spoken of; ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... the Birmingham Fire Office had two engines, very handsome specimens of the article too, being profusely decorated with wooden battle axes, iron scroll-work, &c. One of these engines was painted in many colours; but the other a plain drab, the latter it was laughingly said, being kept for the Society of Friends, the former for society at large. The first time a "portable" or hand engine was used here was on the occurrence of a fire in a tobacconist's shop in Cheapside Oct. 29, 1850. The steam fire engine was ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... continued to repeat; "Morleena, child, my hat! Morleena, my hat!" until Mrs. Kenwigs sunk back in her chair, overcome with grief, while the four little girls (privately instructed to that effect) clasped their uncle's drab shorts in their arms, and prayed ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, completely ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... rehearsal of Mr. Addison's play, called "Cato," which is to be acted on Friday. There were not above half a score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them; and the drab that acts Cato's daughter, in the midst of a passionate part, calling out "What's next?" I went back and dined with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... fascination of 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 ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... promisers, and after perform nothing to any. Think you to do with me as you did with Biliuzza, who went off with the ghittern-player?[368] Cock's faith, then, you shall not, for that she is turned a common drab only for that. If you have them not about you, go for them.' 'Alack,' cried the priest, 'put me not upon going all the way home. Thou seest that I have the luck just now to find thee alone, but maybe, when I return, there will be some one or other here to hinder us; and ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... it! We were close to the open door of a warehouse, with the scent of oranges coming out strongly, and great muscular men with knots on their shoulders, bare-armed, and with drab breeches and white stockings, were coming up a narrow court leading to a wharf, bearing boxes of fruit from a schooner, and going back wiping their ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... that before another thought could pass through monsieur's mind the fifth floor would be reached. The boy followed, climbing and ever climbing, until the meagre hand-rail appeared to lengthen into dream-like coils, and the threadbare, drab-hued carpet, with its vivid red border, to assume the proportions ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... seemed a death struggle between one of the giant soldiers and an inoffensive-looking worker. The drab, comparatively feeble body of the worker was wriggling right in the center of the great claws which, with a twitch, could have sliced it in two endwise. Yet the jaws did not twitch; and in a few moments the worker drew unconcernedly out ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... 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 quality of ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... which he ushered D. Webster was of such a depressing drab that even the green and red bed-quilt failed to disperse the gloom. The sole decoration, classic in its severity, was a large advertisement for a business college, whereon an elk's head grew out of a ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... and fly-blown and brown, but the harbour is very pretty, with its crowds of shipping, painted with red hulls, which make a nice bit of colour in the general drab of the hills and the town. There are no gardens and no trees, and all enterprise in the way of town-planning and the like is impossible owing to the Russian habit of cheating. They have tried for sixteen years to start electric trams, but everyone wants too much for his ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... Mitt. Special design, made of finest drab buckskin, heavily padded; a soft, easy fitting ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... to raise the human mind to a higher spiritual plane? Nothing. All that might come later, when, their desires satisfied, the weary body sick and aching, sends fearful thoughts ahead towards the drab sunset awaiting them. For the moment the full tide of youth is still running strong. Sickness and death have no terrors. The fine strength of powerful bodies will not allow the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... in the log he was sitting on, scra-ape! scra-ape! scr-r-rape! deep in the soft, dry pulp under the bark. There were no insects abroad except the white-faced pine hornets, crawling stiffly across the moss. He noticed no birds, either, at first, until, glancing up, he saw a great drab butcher-bird staring at him ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... new breadth, when a tall, thin, Don Quixote-looking old man came into the shop for some woollen gloves. I had never seen the person (who was rather striking) before, and I watched him rather attentively while Miss Matty listened to the shopman. The stranger wore a blue coat with brass buttons, drab breeches, and gaiters, and drummed with his fingers on the counter until he was attended to. When he answered the shop-boy's question, "What can I have the pleasure of showing you to-day, sir?" ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Fig. 5, represents, in compact yellow limestone, the speckled Eagle (K'iae[']-k'iae-li su-tchu-tchon-ne) of the Upper regions, the drab color of the body being varied by fragments of pure turkois inserted into the eyes, breast, and back. A notch in the top and front of the head probably indicates that the specimen was once supplied with a beak, either of turkois or of ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... in remote and God-forsaken regions, in which the only rival entertainment is offered by one-sided political campaigns, third-rate chautauquas and Methodist revivals. When it is imitated in the North, it is always in some drab factory or mining town. Genuine race riots, of course, sometimes occur in the larger cities, but these are always economic in origin, and have nothing to do with lynching, properly so-called. One could not imagine an actual ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... Three men had opened fire with rifles from below. Their garments were drab-colored, in contrast to the vivid tints of the clothing of the inhabitants of Rahn. They were Jacaro's gunmen. And a great freight carrier from Yugna veered suddenly, and a bluish flash burst out before it, and it began to flutter helplessly ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... in a long drab coat with red facings, was preparing to get off the box of a smart brougham, but before he could reach the pavement, a charming head, covered with a lace cap, was thrust out of the window, and a musical and almost girlish ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... dressed in black and drab, With horns and visage grim, Preceded the meandering crab; The mackerel ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... then struck into a bridle-track across the heath, and regained the high-road about a mile from Beechhurst. Scudding along in front of them was the familiar figure of Miss Wort in her work-a-day costume—a drab cloak and poke bonnet, her back up, and limp petticoats dragging in the dust. She turned swiftly in at the neat garden-gate that had a green space before it, where numerous boles of trees, lopt of their branches, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr |
