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Musty   Listen
adjective
Musty  adj.  (compar. mustier; superl. mustiest)  
1.
Having the rank, pungent, offensive odor and taste which substances of organic origin acquire during warm, moist weather; foul or sour and fetid; moldy; as, musty corn; musty books.
2.
Spoiled by age; rank; stale. "The proverb is somewhat musty."
3.
Dull; heavy; spiritless. "That he may not grow musty and unfit for conversation."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Musty" Quotes from Famous Books



... darkened till it seemed to him like a great ruddy tress of Sofia's waving hair, Mauro sprang to his feet and fiercely whispered: "Mil demonios! but she shall at least know, and then I'll kiss the old padre, and his musty office good-bye and go try my hand at ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... ah, might I climb, Freely, some mountain height sublime, Round mountain caves with spirits ride, In thy mild haze o'er meadows glide, And, purged from knowledge-fumes, renew My spirit, in thy healing dew! Woe's me! still prison'd in the gloom Of this abhorr'd and musty room! Where heaven's dear light itself doth pass, But dimly through the painted glass! Hemmed in by book-heaps, piled around, Worm-eaten, hid 'neath dust and mould, Which to the high vault's topmost bound, A smoke-stained paper doth enfold; With boxes round thee piled, and glass, And many ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... Mrs. Betsey. "Your aunt declared it smelled musty from being shut up. She has such a nose," and the little old ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison

... the lady of the house had returned. Upstairs the furniture was wrapped in gray covers, the chandeliers were veiled with cheese-cloth, the house and glass of the mirrors were dull and lifeless under the coating of dust. Marie opened the door for him and led the way through the dark, musty rooms, the windows closed, and the curtains down, without any light except what ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... transported back to his rural employments and amusements, that he sighed when his carriage stopped opposite to the old hackney-coach, which Archibald had kept in attendance at the place where they had left it. While the coachman again bridled his lean cattle, which had been indulged with a bite of musty hay, the Duke cautioned Jeanie not to be too communicative to her landlady concerning what had passed. "There is," he said, "no use of speaking of matters till they are actually settled; and you may refer the good lady to Archibald, if she presses you hard with questions. She is his old ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... Groby Lington so far detached himself from his accustomed habits as to go and form one of a house-party, and he was not a little piqued that Mrs. Glenduff should have stowed him away in the musty old Georgian wing of the house, in the next room, moreover, to ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki

... started to leave him to change into street clothes; but he caught her arm and said, "Come on." They descended the next flight and came into the back room behind the pawnshop, which the Duchess used as a combination of sitting-room, office, and storeroom. About this musty museum hung or stood unredeemed seamen's jackets, men and women's evening wear, banjos, guitars, violins, umbrellas, and one huge green stuffed parrot sitting on top of ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott

... and omnibuses rattle over the pavements. There is a perceptible increase of oyster-shops, and other establishments for the accommodation of a transitory diurnal multitude. But a more important change awaits the venerable town. An immense accumulation of musty prejudices will be carried off by the free circulation of society. A peculiarity of character, of which the inhabitants themselves are hardly sensible, will be rubbed down and worn away by the attrition of foreign substances. Much of the result will be ...
— The Sister Years (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... entered Mr. Vetch's office with the best will in the world to please him, and to master the principles of legal practice and procedure; but I found it hard to reconcile myself to the atmosphere of a stuffy room filled with musty tomes, and to the unvarying round of desk work—copying from morning to night agreements, deeds and other documents bristling with a ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang

... from A.-S. harian, to become mouldy or musty. The word hoard may be traced to a ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... what I want," the professor said. "I'm interested in American Indians, and have always been considered an authority on the subject. But I'm getting old and younger men are stepping into the field. They think I'm just a musty old professor with nothing but a book knowledge of Indian ruins. So I have ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm

... means rapid. Much of the literature among which he delved, musty with age, written in mediaeval Latin and in obsolete characters, gave up its secrets with reluctance. Nevertheless he found definite replies to the questions which he propounded to himself. A collection of apocryphal ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... deal with actual affairs of life: but otherwise, they scarcely can enter into our stories. The main part of Ficulnus's life, for instance, is spent in selling sugar, spices and cheese; of Causidicus's in poring over musty volumes of black-letter law; of Sartorius's in sitting, cross-legged, on a board after measuring gentlemen for coats and breeches. What can a story-teller say about the professional existence of these men? Would a real rustical history of hobnails and eighteenpence a day be endurable? In the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... boy down to pie and the company of two musty old gentlemen like ourselves. He's earned a dance. You may go, Robert, and I wish—I wish my heels were light enough to go with yours," that kind ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess

... my reproaches for his dilatoriness, for there is a somewhat musty proverb that "Procrastination is ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... I have by reason of the war omitted for above two years, but now am endeavouring to have all my books ready and perfect against the Parliament comes, that upon examination I may be in condition to value myself upon my perfect doing of my own duty. At noon home to dinner, where my wife mighty musty,—[Dull, heavy, spiritless]—but I took no notice of it, but after dinner to the office, and there with Mr. Harper did another good piece of work about my late collection of the accounts of the Navy presented to the Parliament at their ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... alone, and whose only order was planned by the spirit that sent forth shadows and dreams. He had been too much of a rover, had seen too many strange sights in his young life, to be able to satisfy his cravings for knowledge in musty law tomes and dusty deeds. His curiosity had been aroused by many things he had seen in his early travels, he had had glimpses into so many wide fields of interest that led his mind astray. But none ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt

... new Cask and dig a Hole in the Ground, in which it may lye half depth with the Bung downwards; let it remain a Week, and it will greatly help this or any stinking musty Cask. But besides these, I have writ of two other excellent Ways to sweeten musty or stinking Casks, in my Second Book ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous

... have satisfied him that there would be no more use for his machine for a time, at least; for he pushed it to a place where there was a break in a fence and concealed it behind a musty-looking corn shock, left from the fall before. Then placing the glass under his arm he walked guardedly along the road in the direction of ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre

... cloth from 18 yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same fraudulent practice caused the decay of the Blews at Guildford." He probably muddled up musty scandals with the effect of pure business competition. He is not the last to make mistakes connected with a vanished trade. There still lingers a superstition at Guildford that Rack Close, not far from the Castle, is the place where unfortunate prisoners ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... correct. He took that box to his private room, and with some trouble unlocked it. A damp and musty smell came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the age of the sheep when he began to die; skins much ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... beseech your waiter with pathetic indignation, to 'see after that cutlet!' He steps out to see after it, and by-and-by, when you are going away without it, comes back with it. Even then, he will not take the sham silver cover off, without a pause for a flourish, and a look at the musty cutlet as if he were surprised to see it—which cannot possibly be the case, he must have seen it so often before. A sort of fur has been produced upon its surface by the cook's art, and in a sham silver vessel staggering on two feet instead of three, is a cutaneous kind of sauce of brown pimples ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... reference to one point, with not having thought it necessary to "pore over musty manuscripts, in the obscure chirography of two centuries ago." So far as my proper subject could be elucidated by it, I am constrained to claim, that this labor was encountered, to an extent not often attempted. The files of Courts, and ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors, and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing, unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy. I fancied that wings were sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... William, as he shut the door behind them: "certainly, Sir." And then, having placed the musty documents upon the shelf, whence they could be fetched down without difficulty on the slightest sign of a client, that ingenious youth, with singular confidence that nobody would be inconvenienced thereby, ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard

... because they have been labeled so," declared Kate. "When people tell you they are clinging to old ideals, it's well to find out if they aren't napping in some musty old room beneath the cobwebs. I'm a materialist, very likely, but that's only incidental to my realism. I like to be allowed to realize the truth about things, and you know yourself that you men—who really are the sentimental sex—have ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mammoths of Siberia were first discovered, though they had been dead for at least 80,000 years (according to Dr. Croll's minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice age), and might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty, they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators, that the wolves and bears greedily devoured the precious relics for which the naturalists of Europe would have been ready ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... 'father' was nearly bankrupt and she did write 'Mrs.' to save him! Taking them in retrospect, it's a question if the thing they called sacrifice wasn't plain damn foolishness. Why, hell, Jack, d'you mean to say that the professor and his musty European customs—oh, I can't be profane enough!—the English language is trifling and inadequate! But I'm going to take a hand in this ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris

... I asked what it meant? The tone of my interrogatory was rouzing, and recalled his attention. 'Pshaw! Trevor,' replied he, with a glance of half contemptuous pity, 'you are yet young: you are but at the beginning of your troubles. Your over weening fondness for the musty morality of dreaming dotards, or artful knaves who only made rules that they might profit by breaking them, will be your ruin. I tell you again and again, if you do not prey upon the world, the world will prey upon you. There is no alternative. What! be bubbled out of your fortune ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... said Frawley, "I was just thinking—after all, it has been a bit of a while since I've been home—indeed, I should like it very much if I could take a good English mutton-chop and a musty ale at old Nell's, sir. I can still get ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... greatest value to posterity. Who could appear to have lived more entirely in vain than some of the early heretics? They were burned or massacred, their writings extirpated, their memory anathematized, and their very names and existence left for seven or eight centuries in the obscurity of musty manuscripts—their history to be gathered, perhaps, only from the sentences by which they were condemned. Yet the memory of these men—men who resisted certain pretensions or certain dogmas of the Church in the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... applause! Yet, that I may state the whole truth, let me acknowledge, that even these, my dullest, hardest tasks, were light, compared with the burden I formerly bore of ennui. At length my period of probation in my pleader's office was over; I escaped from the dusky desk, and the smell of musty parchments, and the close smoky room; I finished eating my terms at the Temple, and returned, even, as the captain of the packet swore, "in the face and teeth of the wind," ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... opened; probably the shutters are kept always shut; perhaps some kind of stores are kept in the room; no breath of fresh air can by possibility enter into that room, nor any ray of sun. The air is as stagnant, musty, and corrupt as it can by possibility be made. It is quite ripe to breed small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, or anything ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale

... men moved a little way along the oak stick to be out of the cool draught which blew from the cellar-like place, empty save for the storage of some old fragments of vessels or warehouse gear. There was a musty odor of the innumerable drops of molasses which must have leaked into the hard earth there for half a century; there was still a fragrance of damp Liverpool salt, a reminder of even the dyestuffs and pepper and rich spices that ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett

... you think of Gilt Leather for Furniture? There's your pretty Hangings for a Chamber; [2] and what is more, our own Country is the only Place in Europe where Work of that kind is tolerably done. Without minding your musty Lessons: I am this Minute going to Paul's Church-Yard to bespeak a Skreen and a Set of Hangings; and am resolved to encourage ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... great red blot on the landscape; all the while you know the only homelike portion of the establishment is in the wooden rear part. The front rooms are dark and gloomy, the paper hangings are mouldy, the closets musty and damp; there is a combined smell of creosote and whitewash pervading the chambers, and the ceilings hang low. I don't wonder you object to a brick house in the country. Yet, if you propose to build a model, honest and permanent, a house that shall be worth what ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... man passed into the high, chill rooms of his father's apartment. After feeling a moist atmosphere and breathing the heavy air and the musty odor which is given forth by old tapestries and furniture covered with dust, he found himself in the antique room of the old man, in front of a sick bed and near a dying fire. A lamp standing on a table of Gothic shape shed its streams of uneven light sometimes more, sometimes less strongly upon ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... It was now over a week since she had been out of her room, and during that time she had not only studied as usual, but read and read and read. She did not remember to have ever felt so nervous before. She could not go back into the Cathedral; it was musty in itself and crowded with the Great Unwashed. But it would not be right to disturb Julie. There could be no harm in the least bit of a walk alone, particularly as her father was in Menlo Park. She glanced about her dubiously. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... quince-tree in full blossom reared extravagant masses of pink snow against the blue overhead; beyond it a covered walk of vines shone golden-green. There was not a cloud in the sky. To turn back to the musty room from all this lush and lovely life was like stepping down into ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... habits of a gnat, or who counts it the pride of his life to have discovered a new fungus, but simpletons are pleased to make themselves merry with caricaturing any student of his country's institutions who is "always poring over musty old parchments." And yet these minute researches will have to be made sooner of later, and till we can bring ourselves to study the structure and the tissues and the comparative anatomy of Institutions, and to go through all the drudgery which sluggards loathe and fools deride, the light ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... very well for him, because he doesn't care for society and may as well be studying medicine as philandering about the woods with his pockets full of musty philosophers and old-fashioned poets," answered Charlie with a shrug which plainly expressed ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... Dalgarno. "To hear his wise lordship speak musty politics in false Latin, which the old fox always uses, that he may give the learned Majesty of England an opportunity of correcting his slips in grammar? ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... baker made to foreswear the trade in the city for ever.'' The assize of 1634 provides that "if there be any manner of person or persons, which shall by any false wayes or meanes, sell any meale under the kinge's subjects, either by mixing it deceitfully or sell any musty or corrupted meal, which may be to the hurte and infection of man's body, or use any false weight, or any deceitful wayes or meanes, and so deceive the subject, for the first offence he shall be grievously punished, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... smell musty up here too?" called out Guermeur to them, passing his bearded face up through the ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... was the answer. "I feel as if I was getting musty and rusty, and I've simply got to do something. Wish there was a hazing on, or something like that," and the fun-loving Rover gazed moodily out ...
— The Rover Boys in New York • Arthur M. Winfield

... through Six-Cross-Roads, sometimes singly, oftener in company. At one-o'clock the last posse passed through on its return to the county-seat, and after that there was a long, complete silence, while the miry corners were undisturbed by a single hoof-beat. No unkempt colt nickered from his musty stall; the sparse young corn that was used to rasp and chuckle greenly stood rigid in the fields. Up the Plattville pike despairingly cackled one old hen, with her wabbling sailor run, smit with a superstitious horror of nothing, in the stillness; she hid herself in the shadow underneath ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... sofas, three tables, two looking-glasses, and a wheezy clock of tarnished enamel with engraved bronze hands; in the study, a table piled up with papers, and a bluish-coloured screen covered with pictures cut out of various works of last century; a bookcase full of musty books, spiders, and black dust; a puffy armchair; an Italian window; a sealed-up door into the garden.... Everything, in short, just as it always is. Mardary Apollonitch has a multitude of servants, all dressed in the old-fashioned ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... hall was filled with sombre shadows; the motionless air was heavy with a musty, choking odor. In the dimness a few tattered hangings were visible on the walls; a rope, with bits of crumbling evergreen clinging to it, trailed from above one of the low windows. The panelled double door of the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... cottage!" she returned, with a shrill rendering of each adjective. "You would have us go and live in that damp, musty, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... He then took me to the Union Theological Seminary. In that institution about 120 young men are preparing for the Christian ministry. The library contains twenty thousand volumes on theology alone—musty and prosy tomes! What a punishment it would be to be compelled to wade through the whole! We saw neither professors nor students. My principal recollection of the place is that of feeling intensely hungry, and ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... Rachel Ellis. Their real acquaintanceship began one Sunday forenoon when Captain Zelotes and Olive had gone to church. Ordinarily he would have accompanied them, to sit in the straight-backed old pew on a cushion which felt lumpy and smelt ancient and musty, and pretend to listen while old Mr. Kendall preached a sermon which was ancient and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... is; ham as rancid as an old oil-cask, eggs that would have been chickens to-morrow, and wine—but the wine may atone for the rest—it is old Peralta, or the patrona is perjured. I have had the table spread under the tree, in hopes that fresh air may sweeten musty viands, and in order that we may see the ball-play ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... "This is a musty old place," said Paul, as he walked up one of the streets with a canal in the middle of it, in company with Mr. Fluxion and the surgeon; "I shouldn't feel safe here unless I lived ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... commenced on more favorable ground. It presented us an album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts. Yet we did not avail ourselves of all the advantages ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... now, he led the way into the queer-old front room, musty with the solemnity of many ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester

... creeps into the cellars, musty and dull. Tuxedos totter through the rubble of the street. Faces are moldy and worn out. The blue morning burns coolly in the city. How quickly music and dance and greed melted... It smells of the sun. And day begins With trolleys, horses, shouts and wind. ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... men of highest condition and character, and vagabonds, Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, soldiers and artisans. There were theological discussions which led to blows before the colonists were far at sea. Fiske, the historian, says the "ship's atmosphere grew as musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles as that of a room at the Sorbonne." There was the incident of the wandering of Nicolas Aubry, "more skilled in the devious windings of the [Latin Quarter] ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... musty smell of blood while that uncanny thud! thud! sound continued at regular intervals. Nelson waited, breath halted and finger on trigger, but still the darkness yielded no glimpse of ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... the squires. We started across it, but in the center of the floor I stopped. In all the other rooms of the castle dust had lain thick, but there was none here. Elsewhere the windows had been closed and the air heavy and musty, but here the soft night breeze was drifting in. On a table, in odd conjunction, stood the remains of a meal, a roll of bandages, and a half-burned candle; and finally, against the wall lay a bed of a sort, a mattress piled ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti

... pocket the crushed mass of colored sugar and fruit I had picked up from the musty cushions of the old sofa in the walled-up ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green

... at the frost's touch, So Richard's heart on coldness fed its fire, And burned with surfeit of indifference. All flavor and complexion of content Went out of life; what served once served no more. His hound and falcon ceased to pleasure him; He read—some musty folios there were On shelf—but even in brave Froissart's page, Where, God knows, there be wounds enough, no herb Nor potion found he to purge sadness with. The gray dust gathered on the leaf unturned, And then the spider drew his thread across. Certain bright coins ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... "y Vicare du," or "the black Vicar," as he was called by the country people, in allusion to his black hair and eyes, and also to his black apparel, sat in his musty study, as he had done every evening for the last twenty-five years, poring ever his old books, and occasionally jotting down extracts therefrom. He was a broad-shouldered man, tall and straight, about sixty-five years of age. His ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine

... besides images of gold, silver, plate, furniture, goods and ornaments, as [6423]Weever calculates, and esteems them at the dissolution of abbeys, worth a million of gold. How many towns in every kingdom hath superstition enriched? What a deal of money by musty relics, images, idolatry, have their mass-priests engrossed, and what sums have they scraped by their other tricks! Loretto in Italy, Walsingham in England, in those days. Ubi omnia auro nitent, "where everything shines with ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... on high shelves out of sight, and blows over folios, with large clasps, that once stood in monastery libraries, and gathers a subtle sweetness from parchments that were illuminated in ancient scriptoriums, that are now grass grown, and is fortified with good old musty calf. The wind was from the right quarter on the first day I visited Kilbogie Manse, and as we went up the garden walk the Rabbi's library already bade us welcome, and assured us of our reward for a ten ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... like it, do you?" sneered the bully. "You'll like it still less when you get below. It's beautifully damp and musty." ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield

... rather meanly lodged in a dingy hotel on a narrow street leading from what with us might have been Piccadilly Circus. Our rooms were rather a good height with a carved cornice and plaster enrichments, but the furnishings were musty and the general air depressing, notwithstanding the effect of a few good mantel ornaments which I have long made it a rule ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... manifestly a greater task than the recording of accomplished facts. To determine causes it is necessary to spend much time in the study of "original documents"—the newspapers, magazines, and pamphlet literature of each period. In these, rather than in the "musty documents" of state, do we find history in the making. Here we can see the clash of contending interests before they are crystallized into ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... their experience, if no little dirty views give them also that prepossession in one man's favour, which they are so apt to censure their daughters for having in another's—and if, as I may add in your case, they have no creeping, old, musty uncle Antonys to strengthen their prepossessions, as he does my mother's. Poor, creeping, positive soul, what has such an old bachelor as he to do, to prate about the duties of children to parents; unless he had ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... furnished with tusks like unto the shafts of ploughs and decked with girdles made of gold, and covered with fine blankets and therefore, resembling the lotus in hue. And they were all darkish as rocks and always musty, and procured from the sides of the Kamyaka lake, and covered with defensive armour. And they were also exceedingly patient and of the best breed. And having made these presents, those kings were permitted to enter. O king, these and many others, coming from various regions, and numberless ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... We are thy Mirmidons, thy Guard, thy Rorers, And when thy noble body is in durance, Thus do we clap our musty Murrions on, And trace the streets in terrour: Is it peace Thou Mars of men? Is the King sociable, And bids thee live? Art thou above thy foemen, And free as Phoebus? Speak, if not, this stand Of Royal blood shall be abroach, ...
— Philaster - Love Lies a Bleeding • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... way, full of unaccountable noises after dark—rustlings of garments along unfrequented passages, and stealthy footfalls in unoccupied chambers overhead. I never knew of an old house without these mysterious noises. Next to my bedroom was a musty, dismantled apartment, in one corner of which, leaning against the wainscot, was a crippled mangle, with its iron crank tilted in the air like the elbow of the late ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... which assumes every man to be a hare-brained scapegrace at twenty, and Solomon at forty-five. Youth sows wild oats, it may be; too many men in more advanced life seem to me to sow no crop of any kind. There are empty fools at all ages; but "an old fool," &c., (musty as the proverb is, it is rather from neglect than over-application.) I have known men by the dozen, who in their youth were either empty-headed coxcombs or noisy sots; does my reader think that any given number of additional years has made them able ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... purpose, some to nibble and discard white petals. All the moist soil beneath is strewn with snowy flakes, for at night flying foxes blunder among the branches, destroying more blooms than they eat. But why grumble? Birds which nip off petals and musty foxes which brush down whole posies in their clumsiness are but positive checks to overproduction. Do they not avert the unthankful task of carting away dozens of barrow loads of superfluous fruit? Last ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... offered to awaken his regard For's priuate Friends. His answer to me was He could not stay to picke them, in a pile Of noysome musty Chaffe. He said, 'twas folly For one poore graine or two, to leaue vnburnt And still to nose ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... Thought", "Ungenerous Insinuation", "despicable Opinion", "slavery", "oppression", terms which suggest the level to which rhetoric had risen even for as rational a man as the moderate burgess from Prince George County, now grown "tough as whitleather" with "something of the look of musty old Parchments which he handleth and studieth much". The Inquiry was widely read in Virginia and England and its statement on "direct representation" became the standard American defense against "virtual representation" and any half-way measure which would ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin. I snuffed it off, and, very ill at ease under the influence of cold and lingering nausea, sat up and spread open the injured tome on my knee. It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a fly-leaf bore the inscription—'Catherine Earnshaw, her book,' and a date some quarter of a century back. I shut it, and took up another and another, till I had examined all. Catherine's library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte

... the source of life, and as they came out — Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest — they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... of washing a barrel is with boiling water, and when cool examining it with a light inside. If there be any sour or musty smell, however, lime must be used to remove it. Break the lime into lumps, and put it in the cask dry (it will take from 3 to 4 lbs. for each cask), then pour in as many gallons of boiling water as there are pounds of lime, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... are right," exclaimed the lieutenant, sniffing in turn. "And I remember that last time I visited this place the old woman certainly seemed to carry with her an uncanny, musty, animal odour. Therefore it is probably ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... once was a bond of sympathy. No doubt this break in the monotony of her life gave fresh courage to the fair young woman. The gentle, sightless poet relaxed the severe hours of study. Instead of grim digging in musty tomes they talked: he sat by her bedside holding the thin hands (for the blind see by the sense of touch), and they talked for hours—or were silent, which served as well. Then she would read to the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard

... discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... probe, pocketed his lamp, released the catch of the lock on the door, and turned away along the dark, musty-smelling hall. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... were the same dingy, wrinkled houses, with their odd little balconies and ornamental iron galleries overhanging the sidewalks and peering into one another's faces as if to see what their neighbors were up to; the same queer, musty, dusty shops, dozing amid violent foreign odors; the same open doorways and tunnel-like entrances leading to paved courtyards at the rear. The steep roofs were tiled and moss-grown, the pavements were of huge ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... up flights and flights of black stairs into someone's filthy little kitchen, I was made to look down, through a mysterious window, into the closed church of the Cencis. Looking down, always a curious impression, into a dark, musty place and onto vague somethings which are, they tell me, the ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... man, fresh from the dusty, musty lectures of Cambridge, and out of the reach of his boisterous and carousing companions, grasped at the gentle, refined and sympathetic friendship of this brother and sister. The trinity would walk off across the fields ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... his treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place—this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know everything down ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... just as I expected it would," added the commander. "I thought it must be a very old, black, and musty-looking place." ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic

... patchouly thus made is that which is found in the perfumers' shops of Paris and London. Although few perfumes have had such a fashionable run, yet when smelled at in its pure state, it is far from agreeable, having a kind of mossy or musty odor, analogous to Lycopodium, or, as some say, ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse

... you're right. There was a fellow near me who set up a holler about his room the minute he saw it—said it was dark and musty and not fit to pen a hog in—and they gave him one twice as large, and the chief steward bowed and scraped to him, and the room stewards danced around him as if he was a duke. And yet I heard later that he was nothing but a Bismarck ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken

... when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster a la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... were rolled up and concealed between the tea-tree bark of the hut. A small packet contained red ochre to colour their bodies, and larger packets contained soaked Cycas seeds, which seemed to be undergoing fermentation. They were of a mealy substance, and harmless; but had a musty taste and smell, resembling that of the common German cheese. There was also a very large stone tomahawk made of greenstone; and ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... in, I think," he laughed. And, leaving the patient donkey for the moment to her fate, he led the way indoors. A match illumined for a moment the hallway, showing a ladder-like stair to a trap door above, and then, sputtering faintly in the musty air, went out. Since matches were scarce, he deftly made a torch of a paper from his pocket with better success. A brief glance into the room at their left showed signs of recent occupancy. His quick survey marked an oil ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... o'clock Edinburgh express from King's Cross next morning took me up to Doncaster, and hiring a musty old fly at the station, I drove three miles out of the town on the Rotherham Road, finding Whiston Grange to be a fine old Elizabethan mansion in the center of a great park, with tall old twisted chimneys, ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux

... corn. Many of the stones were out of sight in it. The church, a relic of old catholic days, rose out of it like one that had taken to growing and so got the better of his ills. They walked into the musty, dingy, brown-atmosphered house. The cobbler led the way to a humble place behind a pillar; there Doory was seated waiting them. The service was not so dreary to Donal as usual; the sermon had some thought in it; ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... dark as night. He could not see his own hands, and the dampness and musty odor, often noticeable in old cellars, added much to his discomfort. He found that the cell was made of strong three inch slats, securely bolted to thick timbers. These strips, or slats, were about ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey

... you do, and how you pass your time. Taking lessons of Wisdom from your Minerva? or flying after the Atalanta's of Virginia, more swift than their celebrated racers? or, more probably, poring over musty records; offering your time, your pleasures, your health, at the shrine of Fame; sacrificing your own good for that of the public; pursuing a chimera which ever has and ever will mock the grasp; for, however the end may be crowned with ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... thou have rummaged the cupboard of thy fancy for musty scraps and flinty crusts to feed thy spleen withal,—inattentive to the dainties which a blue-eyed Hebe had culled in the garden of Hope, and had poured from out her basket ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... branches I was unusually precocious, my education was confined entirely to those two departments of learning. Few text-books were then used in the school, for the parents of the children were generally too poor to pay for many, and the musty old Grammar and Arithmetic were kept in reserve for the older scholars. On account of my youth the teacher did not advance me, and I went again and again through the old Spelling-book, and learnt by heart what was called the 'fore part of the book'—some ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland

... misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked the mica lights in the side-curtains. A distant train whistled desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy drowse. She felt that she could ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... monotony of a camp knee in mire, where the only change from the camp-fire—with stew-pan simmering on it and long yarns spinning around it—was heavy sleep in a damp hut, or close tent, wrapped in a musty blanket and lulled by the snoring ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... thirty degrees, and, as your art does not make allowance for this, it is false. For, if the influence of the twelve signs does not emanate from the stars occupying the space of those signs, it must emanate from nothing—a doctrine well suited, no doubt, to musty old sages of your superstitious Chaldea, but quite out of court in our progressive age—the last decade of our cultured ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... extent be a chameleon and feed on air. But it need not be the musty breath of the multitude. He can find his needful support in the judgement of those whose judgement he knows valuable, and ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... gray film of dust had accumulated on everything, and the rooms were oppressive with the musty odors that gather in a closed, untenanted house. But apart from that it stood as they had left it thirteen months before. No foot had crossed the threshold. The pile of wood and kindling lay beside the fireplace as Bill had placed it the ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... all born during 1900, it might prove interesting as well as profitable for me to review my musical past. I hear the young folks cry aloud: "Here comes that garrulous old chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences! Even if Old Fogy did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we should be bored by the fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us anything valuable ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... them, saw the white gleam of a robe that fell down his length in smooth, still folds, saw his hands—greenish skin stretched tight over fleshless bones. Suddenly it seemed to him that the air was musty and fetid. ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat

... with us, Professor Kell," answered the reporter heartily, as they ascended the steps. The old man's head disappeared from the window and shortly the sound of footsteps inside told of his approach. Finally the oaken door swung open, and they were silently ushered into the musty smelling hallway. Though outwardly accepting the Professor's suddenly pacific attitude, Perry made up his mind to be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... Joe put his plan into execution by applying for and receiving a month's leave of absence, and taking the first train, he arrived early on the second day at Denver. Here he hastened to the court house and had the city clerk search in musty records and when he came close to the date that Joe had calculated tallied with Kansas Shorty's story, they found James McDonald's name, and the sentence the judge had imposed which read: "Imprisonment ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... however, was not merely confined to the Via Giulia; it extended to the whole district, once so fine and fashionable, but now fallen into sad decay, far removed from modern life, and exhaling a faint musty odour of monasticism. Towards San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele has ripped up every olden district, the lofty five-storeyed houses with their dazzling sculptured fronts contrasted violently with the black sunken dwellings of the neighbouring lanes. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... o'clock we arrived at our destination and partook of the lunch that had been prepared for us in the little brick cottage that stood at the foot of old Cheops. After lunch we found ourselves surrounded by a crowd of Bedouins and Arabs numbering some two hundred, who besought us to purchase musty coins and copper images that were said to have been found in the interior of the huge piles of stone that surrounded us, and more persistent beggars than they proved to be it has never been my misfortune to run against. After visiting ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid impressions, litter of multi-colored tatters, and faded herbs and flowers, whence arises that odor (we all know it), musty and damp, but penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering flames of candle and fire start ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... "I could even smell them, and they did not seem musty, either. Besides, look at everything. Nothing cut up or damaged, like an old, deserted place. Some one may ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose

... of the sitting-room was an old table, and on it several musty books. The boys looked the books over, but found little to interest them. As relics the volumes ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer

... dark here, and the atmosphere was musty and fetid; a murmur pervaded the place as of voices behind many closed doors, but apart from that the tenement might have been empty and deserted for all the signs of life it evidenced. And then the spot where Jimmie Dale had stood was vacant, and he was along ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... This musty, dry-as-dust, old document gives rise to several enquiries. One not the least curious, is the luxurious mode of life, which the puncheon of wine supposes among stonemasons at such a remote period of Quebec history as 1646. Finally, it was decided that this stone and cross were intended to ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... desire to elucidate some point which had hitherto been considered obscure, and which their explanations do not always clear up; to the temptation to display their proficiency in the ingenious art of manipulating facts and figures culled from a dozen musty volumes into one ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... laughing, "our worthy father is fond of reading memoirs and delving into the musty archives of the castle. Everything relating to Thibermesnil interests him greatly. But the quotations that he mentions only serve to complicate the mystery. He has read somewhere that two kings of France have known the key to ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc

... me by the sight of Kenilworth by moonlight. Whether Dad would have considered those vows worthy or not, we do not know, had it not been that he wanted to go to the Bodleian Library at Oxford to see some musty old manuscript or other. So on our way from Liverpool to Oxford we stopped at Kenilworth, and I did see it at moonlight. I shall give my impressions at a later date. The search for another old manuscript gave Jess her chance at the Tower and "JANE," and it was there ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase

... cleansing and cleaning throughout the house, that had been very welcome to the soul of Mrs. Eccles; but into the library they had not penetrated. The old bookshelves remained untouched; the old books, in their musty brown calf bindings, were undesecrated by profaning hands. All sorts of quaint chairs and bureaus, gathered together out of every other room in the house, had congregated here. The space over the mantelpiece was adorned by a splendid portrait by Vandyke, flanked irreverently ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to ice creams, jellies, or sillabubs, or regaled them with 10 musty almonds, moldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy, substantial fare. The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices of fat pork, fried ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... hurrying with relief from the musty atmosphere of failure into the busy street. Though half dazed by the sudden subsidence of his plans, unable to face as yet the possible consequences, he had his pictures, and the names of the real ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... dimly-lighted hall, pervaded by a musty smell of unventilated rooms, and a damp, dirty underground floor. The place was altogether sordid, and dingy, and miserable. At last I heard her step coming down the two flights of stairs, and I went to ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... soup; hot meat down in the bottom of a steamboat, with a smell of oil, sour water, and musty linen all around you—that is what "a dinner on board" means, and nothing else. The very thought made me feel rily about the temper—all that I wanted was ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... went down into the hold where half-a-dozen of his company were lying ill. The hold was damp and musty as an old cellar, so steeped in the smells and leakage of innumerable dirty cargoes that it could not be made or kept clean. There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid with sickness and sweat and vomit. Two of the band boys were working in the stench and dirt, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... across the kitchen, he threw open a further door ceremoniously. Laura followed, pausing just inside the threshold to look round the little musty sitting-room, with its framed photographs, its woollen mats, its rocking-chairs, and its square of mustard-coloured carpet. Mason watched her furtively all the time, to see ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... it would be—only the stars were far bigger and brighter. The children stood on the white, pebbly beach and shook themselves dry; while Bridget showed them how to pull down their nightshirts to keep them from shrinking, and how to wring out their faery caps to keep the wishes from growing musty or mildewed. After that they met the faery ferryman, who—according to Sandy—"wore a wee kiltie o' reeds, an' a tammie made frae a loch-lily pad wi' a cat-o'-nine-tail tossel, lukin' sae ilk the brae ye wad niver ken ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer

... facts essential to the completion of the work is the apparent indifference of librarians and others in responding to letters of inquiry. Some, however, have entered most zealously and intelligently into the work of searching musty records and interviewing the traditional "oldest inhabitant" for light on these dark spots. Thanks are especially due in this regard to Hon. John M. Lea, Nashville, Tenn.; William Harden, librarian State Historical Society, Savannah, Ga.; K.A. Linderfelt, librarian Public Library, ...
— Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United States: Illustrated by Those in the State of Indiana • C. C. Royce

... and women love. Among the worst are those who won't bear quietly their share of work, who can't learn self-reliance, but run to and fro, squealing for help, and talking sentiment against their neighbors, who won't carry their burdens for them. It's all very well for a musty, discontented old bachelor to say there's no love in the world, but it's a falsehood. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... the manifestations of life itself. Whether it was that that afternoon in the study had awakened with sharper poignancy than ever before the remembrance of his youth, that some aspect of the room, with its musty books, its fire and the driving rain without, had awakened in him a forgotten memory of a day that had once held actual place in his life but had long since been lost, awakened it through the mere ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... whatever concerns musty books goes deeper with thee than thy brother," replied Stephen, turning away ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... rendered by the Brethren to the cause of the evangelical faith in Bohemia the noblest and the most enduring was their translation of the Bible into the Bohemian tongue. In the archives of the Brethren's Church at Herrnhut are now to be seen six musty volumes known as the Kralitz Bible (1579-93). The idea was broached by Blahoslaw, the Church historian. The expense was born by Baron John von Zerotin. The actual printing was executed at Zerotin's Castle at Kralitz. The translation ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... dirty-looking shop, with begrimed bricks and blackened woodwork. The window contained some musty old books, an assortment of pipes and tobacco, and a large number of the vilest daubs unhung, painted in oil on Academy boards, and unframed. These were intended for landscapes, as you could tell from the titles. The most ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... is presented here is an old musty show, that hath lain this twelvemonth in the bottom of a coal-house amongst brooms and old shoes; an invention that we are ashamed of, and therefore we have promised the copies to the chandler to wrap ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... way up a flight of dark and twisting stairs, along a musty hall. She paused before a door at ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen

... I found a large box in the center of the room. One of my aunts had died and I was one of the heirs to her fortune, which was not large. The box contained, among other things, a number of musty old books. Not knowing what to do and being affected with ennui, I began to read one of them. They were for the most part romances of the time of Louis XV; my pious aunt had probably inherited them herself and never read them, for they were, ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... the Lord Swank lives, He holds high rank, and he has much pelf; And all the well-paid posts he gives Unto his fawning relatives, As foolish as himself. In offices and courts and boards Are Swanks, and Swanks, ten dozen Swanks, And cousin Swanks in hordes— Inept and musty, dry and dusty, Rusty Swanks ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis

... true that the wrong in this case is in a great degree fathered upon our own Massachusetts; and it maybe said that it is afoul bird that pollutes its own nest. We deny the applicability of the rather musty proverb. All the worse. Of not a more contemptible vice is what is called American literature guilty than this of unmitigated self- laudation. If we persevere in it, the stock will become altogether too small for the business. It seems that no period of our history has been exempt from materials ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... to know things excellent, above the reach of such course Brains as yours, such muddy Fancies, that never will know farther than when to cut your Vines, and cozen Merchants, and choak your hidebound Tenants with musty Harvests. ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... Relish as they might musty bread and mouldy meat, Larie and his mate enjoyed, too, the sport of catching fresh food; and many a clam hunt they had in true gull style. They would fly above the water near the shore, and when they were twenty or thirty feet high, would plunge down head-first. ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch

... musty old lubbers, Who tell us to fast and to think, And patient fall in with life's rubbers, With nothing but water ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... put over the cocks in case of rain, and barracks or mow to protect and preserve the hay would give the horse good hay, and be one of the very best of investments. It should be remembered that the digestive organs of none other of our farm animals are so easily deranged as those of the horse. Musty, moldy hay is the moving cause of much disease. The man who can not provide a good mow should sell his horses to some farmer ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... far as she was able to see, Colter had taken neither papers nor clothes, but only the gold. Perhaps, however, she had been mistaken, for she had not observed Colter's departure closely enough to know whether or not he carried a package. She missed only the gold. Her father's papers, old and musty, were scattered about, and these she gathered up to slip ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... The musty stench was so strong that Shann could no longer fight the demands of his outraged stomach. He rolled on his side, retching violently until the sour smell of his illness battled the foul odor of the ship. His memories of how he had come ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... unfaded, and each would bring to her mind instantly the picture of the writer as he had been in the golden days. But save to Blossy's eye alone there were no longer any rainbow tints in the little, old trunk; for every ribbon and every cord had faded into that musty, yellow brown which is dyed by ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund

... big-featured, a veritable giant in frame and even in his last days suggesting the enormous strength which had been his in his prime, had been an outdoor man, a man of large voice and large capable hands; James Kitson had been a student from his youth up and had spent his manhood in musty offices, stuffy courts, surrounded by ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... to the studio, the new lodger's door, at the back of the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... were the boys permitted to consider the peril of their position. Almost instantly they heard a faint grating sound directly in front of them. A cold draught of damp, musty air struck their faces, and they understood that a door had been opened into some other apartment. The odor of the incoming air told them plainly that the next apartment was also underground, and they surmised that it had not recently ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson

... Lights. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled—the miser in the old castle counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be waived. We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... peccary. acridity &c 401.1. V. have a bad smell &c n.; smell; stink, stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid &c 653; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... graceful, when other graces are fled. Oh! but you will cry, is not this a contradiction to the former part of your letter? Prudence is one of the graces of age;-why—yes, I do not know but it may and yet I don't know how, it is a musty quality; one hates to allow it to be a grace—come, at least it is only like that one of the graces that hides her face. In Short, I have ever been so imprudent, that though I have much corrected myself, I am not at all vain of such merit. I have purchased ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... the door they caught a whiff of a grateful odor. Lillian and Eleanor had put a great part of their last rations into a big kettle of soup. The last can of tomatoes had been sacrificed, the last half dozen potatoes. Nothing remained but some musty corn meal, a few teaspoons of tea and a little sugar. Unless relief came soon the houseboat party would truly have to be ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers

... Greek, Spanish, Fardown Irish, and perhaps Choctaw, to such youths as desired to become thorough linguists. He was not very successful in this line, and concluded to enter the office of a prominent law firm on Superior Street as a student. He dove among the musty and ponderous volumes with all the enthusiasm of a wild young Irishman, and commenced cramming his head with law at a startling rate. He lodged in the back-room of the office, and previous to retiring he used to sing the favorite ballads of his own Emerald Isle. The boy who was employed in the ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne

... my dear," he replied gratefully. "I always feel like a new man when I'm freshly stuffed. No one likes to get musty, you know, and even good straw may be spoiled ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... thing unknown in America. I moved an emendation, except on the sea coast of Maine. We resolved to cherish the memory of our little hostess in our heart of hearts, and as we gathered round the cheery grate, drying our cold feet, we voted that poetry was a humbug, and damp, old, musty cathedrals a bore. Such are ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... walls were old books in stout binding, new books in cloth and fine leather—the poets, the philosophers, the seers of all ages. As his eyes swept the shelves, he knew that here was the living, breathing collection of a true book-lover—not a musty, fusty aggregation brought together through mere pride of intellect. The owner of this library had counted the heart-beats ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey

... reader, Fausta was sitting in a yellow chair on the deck of that musty old boat, crocheting from a pattern in Grodey's Lady's Book. I remember it as I remember my breakfast of this morning. Not that I fell in love with her, nor did I fall in love with my breakfast; but I knew she was there. ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale

... an antiquarian of eccentric character, ever poring over musty records and hunting up decayed titles. He was fond of attaching to his signature the names of all the innumerable offices he held over the conglomerated States of his realm. He was Rhodolph, Margrave of Baden, Vicar of Upper Bavaria, Lord of Hapsburg, Arch Huntsman of the Empire, ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... was done; and this with such appearances of religion as might work on the people, and make them impute it to the piety of their prince, and to his tenderness for the lives of his subjects. A third offers some old musty laws, that have been antiquated by a long disuse; and which, as they had been forgotten by all the subjects, so they had been also broken by them; and proposes the levying the penalties of these laws, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... nestling among the hills, shaded by great spreading trees with flowers and vines and golden fruit all about it, rich plumaged birds and gorgeous butterflies. Oh! I can hardly wait. Who would live in a musty palace when one has within reach such a home, and that, too, ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... self-respect which Tom had gained that he walked past this place several times before he could muster the courage to enter. When he did enter, the old familiar, musty smell and the sordid litter of the shelves renewed ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh



Words linked to "Musty" :   fusty, moldy, malodorous, stinky, must, ill-smelling, frowsty, unpleasant-smelling, mustiness, stale



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