"Sempstress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... called domestic, and as such are considered the peculiar business of the women among the lower classes in civilised society. The wife of one of these people, for instance, makes and attends the fire, cooks the victuals, looks after the children, and is sempstress to her whole family; while her husband is labouring abroad for their subsistence. In this respect it is not even necessary to except their task of cutting up the small seals, which is, in truth, one of ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... fleeing from the barbarous cruelty of their Spanish invaders, sought asylum in the Chaco, there finding it; and from these the Tovas and other tribes have long ago learnt many of the arts of civilised life; can spin their own thread, and sew skilfully as any sempstress of the palefaces; weave their own cloth, dress and dye it in fast colours of becoming patterns; in short, can do many kinds of mechanical work, which no white artisan need feel ashamed to acknowledge as his own. Above all, are they famed for the "feather-work," or plume embroidery—an ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... Jeanie was an excellent sempstress, and what between making waistcoats and trousers for the tailors, and binding shoes for the shoemakers,—a business that she thoroughly understood,—she soon had her little hired room neatly furnished, and her grandfather ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... worse Than the little city urchins who would greet you with a curse? Is not such a life much better than the squalid street and square Where the fallen women flaunt it in the fierce electric glare, Where the sempstress plies her sewing till her eyes are sore and red In a filthy, dirty attic toiling on for daily bread? Did you hear no sweeter voices in the music of the bush Than the roar of trams and 'buses, and the war-whoop of 'the push'? Did the magpies rouse your slumbers ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... succeed her, though very nearly her own age, being five-and-thirty. Around these gradually grew a small roomful of Girard's admirers, who became his regular penitents. Among them were sometimes introduced a few young girls, such as La Cadiere, a tradesman's daughter and herself a sempstress, La Laugier, and La Batarelle, the daughter of a waterman. They had godly readings together, and now and then small suppers. But they were specially interested in certain letters which recounted the miracles and ecstacies of Sister Remusat, who was still alive; her ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... situation was in one respect an exception to the lot of many others. Agricola, that he might not wound her delicacy, had come to a secret arrangement with the housekeeper, and hired a garret for her, just large enough to hold a small bed, a chair, and a table; for which the sempstress had to pay five shillings a year. But Agricola, in fulfilment of his agreement with the porter, paid the balance, to make up the actual rent of the garret, which was twelve and sixpence. The poor girl ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... bunch of mignonette upon her breast, just at the point where the slashing of her bodice ended, and the gray gave way to a wedge of virginal white, as if her sempstress had started to lay bare her heart. The flowers quivered as from some internal agitation, nestling their pale gold ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... guest's life. And wonderful as was the difference between the peasant maiden of Domremy and the most famous woman in France, the life of Jeanne, the Deliverer of her country, is as the life of Jeanne, the cottage sempstress,—as simple, as devout, and as pure. She loved to go to church for the early matins, but as it was not fit that she should go out alone at that hour, she besought Madame Marguerite to go with her. In the evening she went to the nearest church, and there with all her old childish love for the church ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... 'A needle,' says the interpreter. She knew the name. And thus the fool Addressed her as a tailor's tool: 'A needle with that filthy stone, Quite idle, all with rust o'ergrown! 30 You better might employ your parts, And aid the sempstress in her arts. But tell me how the friendship grew Between that paltry flint and you?' 'Friend,' says the needle, 'cease to blame; I follow real worth and fame. Know'st thou the loadstone's power and art, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... cotton shirt a week, and three or four fine linen fronts. Anne reports that this is Mr. Q.'s course of proceeding; and my portrait-painting friend told me that it was the case with pretty nearly all his sitters; so that when he bought a piece of cloth not long ago, and instructed the sempstress to make it all into shirts, not ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... dying, have died herself to save me? Alas, no! It was because I had been drawn on to Siena by that lovely, haunting, beckoning, beguiling vision of Aurelia, my torture and stem of shame. Why, finally, were my eyes not lifted up to her wistful eyes, as she sat—poor sempstress—in that upper room? It was because of my accursed prosperity. It was because my eyes were cased and swollen in pride; because my fine horse held them; because I thought I had but to nod and be obeyed by—my wife! Thy wife, sayest thou, Francis? Nay, wretched fool, but thy ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... woman, born to such beauty and witchery, been cradled less auspiciously. Her reputed father was a scullion, her mother a sempstress. For grandfather she had Fabien Becu, who left his frying-pans in a Paris kitchen to lead Jeanne Husson, a fellow-servant, to the altar. Such was the ignoble strain that flowed in the veins of the Vaucouleurs beauty, who five-and-twenty ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... master. They were to gather blackberries, highly esteemed by Mrs. Barton for preserves, and it was the great delight of the boys to supply her every year with this fruit. Blackberrying is a very amusing thing to country children. It is less so perhaps in its consequences to the nurse, or sempstress, who has to repair the terrible rents which merciless brambles make, but of that children, boys especially, think little or nothing. On they went, each provided with a basket and a long crome stick, for the purpose ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... Thursday, Nine. My sempstress. She has lost the measure of my wrist. Forced to be measured again. The baggage has got ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Eve hard at work at her sewing-machine, in the midst of an accumulation of dress stuff, such as might well have appalled one unused to the business. But the busy rush of the machine, and the concentrated attitude of the sempstress, displayed neither confusion nor worry beyond the desire to complete that which she was at ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... commiseration alternately with a word of gossip about the lodgers on the other side of the landing. The latter were a young and happy pair: the husband, a chorus singer at the Apollo, who worked at glove cleaning during the day time; his wife, a sempstress, who did repairs upon the costumes of the theatre. Their apartments consisted of two rooms and a kitchen, while Marzio and his family occupied the rest of the floor, and entered their lodging by the ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... readers a little more than is above told, I have had recourse to my botanical friend, good Mr. Oliver of Kew, who has taught me, first, of palms, that they actually stitch themselves into the ground, with a long dipping loop, up and down, of the root fibres, concerning which sempstress-work I shall have a month's puzzlement before I can report on it; secondly, that all the increment of tree stem is, by division and multiplication of the cells of the wood, a process not in the least to be described as 'sending down roots from the leaf to the ground.' I suspected as much in beginning ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... impossible to define romanticism. Half a century or more ago, a talented German writer (Hacklaender) wrote a book entitled European Slave-life, in which he attempted to show that, without knowing it, we were all slaves one of another, and, in fact, that the artisan working in a cotton factory or the sempstress employed in a milliner's shop was as truly in a state of slavery as the negro who at that time was working in the fields of Georgia or Carolina. In a sense, of course, it may be said that every one who ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... their girls to Europeans for a loan of money, and they are admitted under the pseudonym of sempstress or housekeeper. Natives among themselves do not kiss—they smell each other, or rather, they place the nose and lip on the cheek and ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... years older. They had married when she was twenty,—the usual age for marriage, as he told me. His daughter, rather a pretty and slight-made girl, was very busy making shoes for her brothers out of cured skin. I rewarded the youthful sempstress by giving her one of a number of dolls kindly sent me for the purpose by Mrs. W. of Woolwich; and could that kind friend have seen the joyful countenance of the Esquimaux child, she would indeed have been richly remunerated for her thoughtful little addition to my stock of presents. ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... dream-vision displayed to me the dress and movements of the actors, the appearance of the room, the furniture, and other accidents of the scene; till on one occasion, in a gamesome mood, I narrated to my family the secret history of a sempstress who had just before quitted the room. I had never seen the person before. Nevertheless the hearers were astonished, and laughed and would not be persuaded but that I had a previous acquaintance ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... grown stout. I, for my part, cannot boast of that; but how can anybody grow stout when they have eight children to work for! Do you know sisters, that in the last week before I left Stockholm, I cut out a hundred and six shirts! I hope I can meet with a good sempstress here; at home; look at my finger, it is quite hard and horny with sewing. God bless the children! one has one's trouble with them. But tell me, how is it with our mother? They have always been writing to me that she was better—and yet I find her terribly gone off; it really grieves ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... her inexorable prescriptions for him that he should drink a glass of warm milk-punch before breakfast, and smell the cow's breath during the operation. She was milking the white cow herself, while the pseudo sempstress, Nichols, waited with the goblet, and the bandy-legged shoemaker, Twiss, stood on guard, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... with deluge this devoted town, To shops in crowds the draggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy, The Templar spruce, while ev'ry spout's abroach, Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach, The tuck'd up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides; Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, Commence acquaintance underneath a shed, Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange |
