"Worm-eaten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his company. What shall I do? by my troth, anatomise his purse in his absence. Plutus send there be jewels in it, that I may finely geld it of the stones—the best, sure, lies in the bottom; pox on't, here's nothing but a company of worm-eaten papers: what's this? Memorandum that Master Prodigo owes me four thousand pounds, and that his lands are in pawn for it. Memorandum that I owe. That he owes? 'Tis well the old slave hath some care of his credit; to ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... one of the many sacks, in which certainly there is only wheat. "Well, I hope it's moldy enough," remarks the inspector. "Probably there is only wheat in the other sacks, and very likely even more worm-eaten." ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... a strange look, with half unpacked boxes serving for wardrobes, piles of band boxes, and for seats there was an array of worm-eaten armchairs, into which bits of velvet and silk, which had been cut from old dresses, had been festooned anyhow, and along the walls there were rows of rusty nails which made one think of old portraits and of pictures full of associations, which had one by one been bought for a low price ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... way; — the hangings were parted from the walls, and shaking in mouldy remnants; the glasses were dropping out of their frames; — the family-pictures were covered with dust. and all the chairs and tables worm-eaten and crazy. — There was not a bed in the house that could be used, except one old-fashioned machine, with a high gilt tester and fringed curtains of yellow mohair, which had been, for aught I know, two ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... framed in chipped wreaths of delicate Dresden china—mouldering old portraits of dead-and-gone court beauties in powder and patches, warriors in wigs, and prelates in point-lace—whole suites of furniture in old stamped leather and worm-eaten Utrecht velvet; broken toilette services in pink and blue Sevres; screens, wardrobes, cornices—in short, all kinds of luxurious lumber going fast to dust, like those who once upon a time enjoyed and ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... were visible; market people, cloaked and furred, went by on the water or on the banks; the deep woods of the shores were black and gray and brown. Poor August could see nothing of a scene that would have delighted him; as the stove was now set, he could only see the old worm-eaten wood of ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... anemones. Everything basked in sunlight and glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood in a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let me see inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a wooden praying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no flowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On the floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water vessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... in spite of his pleading, was seized and his hands bound behind him. Then, while one man held guard over the captive's wife and children, the other ransacked the house, rummaging through filthy and worm-eaten closets, and exploring dirty coffers, into which had been thrust a wretched assortment of rags—the garb of slavery. Every scrap of paper was captured and jealously guarded. During this time, the greatest ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... and bitterly. "You think I care for the world? Then you read me wrongly at the very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught! To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... so true at first? my office is To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword, And that the king before the Douglas' rage Stoop'd his anointed head as low as death. This have I rumour'd through the peasant towns Between that royal field of Shrewsbury And this worm-eaten hold of ragged stone, Where Hotspur's father, old Northumberland, Lies crafty-sick: the posts come tiring on, And not a man of them brings other news Than they have learn'd of me: from Rumour's tongues They bring smooth comforts false, ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... persuaded that the laws in such governments are incomparably better and more surely directed to the good of mankind than in any other; that the courage of such a people is the aptest tinder to noble fire; that the genius of such a soil is that wherein the roots of good literature are least worm-eaten with pedantism, and where their fruits have ever come to the greatest maturity and highest relish, conceived such a loathing of their ambition and tyranny, who, usurping the liberty of their native countries, become slaves to themselves, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... window. These articles, with two small wicker-work chairs, made up all the furniture in the room save for a square of Wilton carpet in the centre. The boards round and the panelling of the walls were of brown, worm-eaten oak, so old and discoloured that it may have dated from the original building of the house. Holmes drew one of the chairs into a corner and sat silent, while his eyes travelled round and round and up and down, taking in every detail ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... but recently published. A prebendary of Perigord, travelling through this province to make researches relative to its history, arrived at the ancient chateau of Montaigne, in possession of a descendant of this great man. He inquired for the archives, if there had been any. He was shown an old worm-eaten coffer, which had long held papers untouched by the incurious generations of Montaigne. Stifled in clouds of dust, he drew out the original manuscript of the travels of Montaigne. Two-thirds of the work are in the handwriting of Montaigne, and the rest is written ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the defenders, and drove them further up to the first floor of the keep. They had scarce reached it, however, ere they found that the wooden joists and planks of the flooring were already on fire. Dry and worm-eaten, a spark upon them became a smoulder, and a smoulder a blaze. A choking smoke filled the air, and the five could scarce grope their way to the staircase which led up to the very summit of the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hovering around the richest and silliest women, their eyes glittering with eager avarice for a chance at their millions. It seemed a joke that any sane American mother could conceive the idea of selling her daughter to these wretches in exchange for the empty sham of a worm-eaten dishonoured title. And yet it had become so common that the drain on the national resources from this cause constitutes ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... melodramatic and silly, his idea of purity mere foolishness. If the body was excrement, as from his youth he had been taught, what could it matter how one used it! Did anything matter, when a few years would see the flesh he had thought divine corrupt and worm-eaten? James was willing now to float along the stream, sociably, with his fellows, and had no doubt that he would soon find a set of high-sounding phrases to justify his degradation. What importance could his actions have, who was ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... You know I am worm-eaten and my club is no longer to be relied upon.... But the Elm and ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a great hall. Round the walls hung pictures in tarnished frames. Rich furniture, damp-stained and worm-eaten, stood stiffly arranged as if for some great function. Only here and there was evidence of some disorder. A table was upset near the fireplace. The covering of a chair had been torn, and the hair stuffing ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... she went up to her bedroom at the top of the house. It had served as a nursery for many generations of Caresfoots; indeed, during the last three centuries, hundreds of little feet had pattered over the old worm-eaten boards. But the little feet had long since gone to dust, and the only signs of children's play and merriment left about the place were the numberless scratches, nicks, and letters cut in the old panelling, and even on the beams which supported the ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... when, on returning to our own room, and hastily turning the pages, only an old, battered worm-eaten Latin work greeted my eyes! Without loss of time I retraced my steps. Just when I was about to replace the book I heard a noise in the corridor outside, and the sound of footsteps approaching. Fumblingly I hastened to complete ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... song. But the old man got there first, and crumpled the beautiful paper in his hand. 'What does this mean?' he said. 'Who is this fellow?' 'He is one of the gentlemen from the chancery,' she replied, throwing a worm-eaten pea a little farther away than the rest. 'A gentleman from the chancery,' he cried, 'in the dark, without a hat?' I accounted for the absence of a hat by explaining that I lived close by; at the same time I designated the house. 'I know the house,' he cried. 'Nobody lives there but the Court ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... each child's heart. Stones, sticks, anything that cannot be—explained." Sandy gave a low laugh. He was harking back to the old shed beside his father's cabin and the gay prints tacked to the worm-eaten boards. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... side through a door with small leaded panes, such as might still be seen at Versailles before Louis-Philippe turned that Chateau into an asylum for the glories of France. The pavilion is divided inside by an old staircase of worm-eaten wood, full of character, which leads to the first story. Above that is an immense garret. This venerable edifice is covered by one of those vast roofs with four sides, a ridgepole decorated with leaden ornaments, and a round projecting ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... continually reshaping and realtering. The figure stood upon the margin of the pool; and near by were two stones overgrown with moss, and supporting a cross of old worm-eaten wood, which commemorated what had ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... clerks. Upon my inquiring for Mr. Shaw, one of them went into another room to fetch him, and I took the opportunity to note the peculiarities of the place. It was a long room with a sloping ceiling; there were two or three very old, ink-stained, worm-eaten desks; a dingy map hung here and there, and a few shelves and wooden presses were arranged upon the walls. The place had been whitewashed once, no doubt, but the colour was now about the same as that of a macadamised road, and the whole place seemed ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the mills, a Portuguese trader arrived with a quantity of worm-eaten logs of this cedar, which he had gathered from the floating timber in the current of the main Amazons. The tree producing this wood, which is named cedar on account of the similarity of its aroma to that of the true cedars, is not, of course, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... good fire. The roof collapsed and with the incantations of the cowboys, the stout walls, worm-eaten and bullet-splintered, falling gradually, ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... dungeon still I see, This drear accursed masonry, Where e'en the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes, Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, grey with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep Against the smoky paper thrust, With glasses, boxes, round me stacked And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber stuffed and packed— Such is my world! And what a world!... Alas! In living Nature's ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... gun, but in place of the clean, well-oiled fowling piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel incrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock worm-eaten. He now suspected that the grave revelers of the mountain had put a trick upon him and, having dosed him with liquor, had robbed him of his gun. Wolf, too, had disappeared, but he might have strayed away after a squirrel or partridge. He whistled ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... exception of the Natchalnik and another man. "This is new," said he; "I never knew them to be so wary and suspicious before." We now found ourselves within the walls of the fortress. A shabby wooden cafe was opposite to us; a mosque of the same material rose with its worm-eaten carpentry to our right. The cadi, a pompous vulgar old man, now met us, and signified that we might as well repose at his chardak, but from inhospitality or fanaticism, gave us neither pipes nor coffee. His worship ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... the stage it should be recalled with interest, for it was in this gay comedy that the ravishing Nance shone forth in all the silvery light of her resplendent genius. Read the pages of the old play in unsympathetic mood and they may look musty and worm-eaten, but imagine Oldfield as the sprightly Lady Betty Modish, the elegant Wilks as Sir Charles Easy, and Cibber[A] himself in the empty-headed role of Lord Foppington, and, presto! everything is changed. The yellow leaves are white and fresh, the words stand out clear ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... reached a wide plateau just above Government House, where the best view in the whole island was to be obtained, above which towered the old battery on Richmond Hill, armed with obsolete and worm-eaten thirty-two pounders, once deemed sufficient protection for the Carenage or harbour below, which it commanded. Fort George, another fortification equally powerless nowadays either for attack or defence, lay on the right; and looking ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. It opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky, plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, which could be seen from the street, running straight up like a ladder and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the threshold, so surprised that he hesitated to enter, surprised as a deceived husband who beholds his wife's crime. A confusion of anger and mingled emotion suffocated him, revealing to him the fact that his heart was worm-eaten with love! All that they had hidden from him, and all that he had concealed from himself appeared before him as he perceived the Marquis installed in the house, as a ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... emancipating future! that is what that stranger was, that is what he did on that platform! At his word, which at certain moments was as the thunder, prejudices, fictions, abuses, superstitions, fallacies, intolerance, ignorance, fiscal infamies, barbarous punishments, outworn authorities, worm-eaten magistracy, discrepit codes, rotten laws, everything that was doomed to perish, trembled, and the downfall of those things began. That formidable apparition has left a name in the memory of men; he should be called ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... the narrow barrier of the Fuisa. The whole rear of the Tamaseses was enfiladed by this flank fire; and I have seen a house there, by the river brink, that was riddled with bullets like a piece of worm-eaten wreck-wood. At this point of the field befell a trait of Samoan warfare worth recording. Taiese (brother to Siteoni already mentioned) shot a Tamasese man. He saw him fall, and, inflamed with the lust of glory, passed the river single-handed in that storm of missiles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that stuff. And indeed there was a strange mustiness in everything. The wooden dining-room stuck out over the mud of the shore like a lacustrine dwelling; the planks of the floor seemed rotten; a decrepit old waiter tottered pathetically to and fro before an antediluvian and worm-eaten sideboard; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... place where Jacques Cartier wintered, since there are still, a league up the river, remains of what seems to have been a chimney, the foundation of which has been found, and indications of there having been ditches surrounding their dwelling, which was small. We found also, large pieces of hewn, worm-eaten timber, and some three or four cannon balls. All these things show clearly that there was a settlement there founded by Christians; and what leads me to say and believe that it was that of Jacques Cartier ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... concluded, she conducted me up a rickety, worm-eaten staircase, to a small room above that which we had just left; and indicating one of the two beds therein as the one belonging to her Jean, and the one, therefore, which I was to occupy, bade me good-night ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... gate on the road to Caunewitz. To the right and left stretched ancient ramparts, and behind, rows of houses. We were posted in covered roads, near this gate, which the sappers had strongly barricaded. Captain Vidal then commanded the battalion, reduced to three hundred and twenty-five men. A few worm-eaten palisades served us for intrenchments, and, on all the roads before us, the enemy were advancing. This time they wore white coats and flat caps, with a raised piece in front, on which we could see the two-headed ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... Shakespeare's mind; and his words describe a passion no longer in generation. The King of Denmark's lord chamberlain had no precedent in Herod, when 'he was eaten of worms'; the original, γενόμενος σκωληκόβρωτος, yielding, but for its participle, 'he became worm-eaten.' ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... with an almost reverent finger first one worm-eaten object and then another, as if by so doing she could make the imagined scene more real. Her eyes were downcast; the blood beneath her rich dark skin came and went in brilliant flushes on her cheeks; the bronze hair, piled in heavy ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... knowledge apart from the art of singing, was at the age of sixteen turned out on the world. A compassionate barber, however, took him in, and Haydn dressed and powdered wigs down-stairs, while he worked away at a little worm-eaten harpsichord at night in his room. Unfortunate boy! he managed to get himself engaged to the barber's daughter, Anne Keller, who was for a good while the Xantippe of his gentle life, and he paid dearly ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... take a good look at our hero as he stands for a moment in the golden evening light on the planks of the wooden structure which, supported by ricketty, worm-eaten piles, does duty as a wharf. Like a thorough seaman as he is, he is taking a last glance at the schooner before he leaves her, to see that everything is thoroughly "ship-shape and Bristol-fashion" on board her. She is a small and ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... of bread and dripping; he was not squeamish and could eat most things now with a good appetite. Some of the houses he went to, in filthy courts off a dingy street, huddled against one another without light or air, were merely squalid; but others, unexpectedly, though dilapidated, with worm-eaten floors and leaking roofs, had the grand air: you found in them oak balusters exquisitely carved, and the walls had still their panelling. These were thickly inhabited. One family lived in each room, and in the daytime there was the incessant noise of children ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... arms sufficed to tip the chest quite over. As it fell it burst. Down in a mass of pulverized, worm-eaten ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... and Clarence turned eagerly to the shelves. They were old books, some indeed very old, queerly bound, and worm-eaten. Some were in foreign languages, but others in clear, bold English type, with quaint wood-cuts and illustrations. One seemed to be a chronicle of battles and sieges, with pictured representations of combatants spitted with arrows, ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... it, she will take down the great key from its nail, and swinging back the new doors of the meeting-house, will show you the old worm-eaten ones inside, which, pierced through and through with bullet-holes, once served as a rampart against the enemy. And she will tell you, in the quaint Friend's language, how her great-great-grandmother carried, over a hundred years ago, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... last he said: "There has been something worm-eaten in you from your birth." He used ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... strew faint sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud 10 Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Moldering her lute and books among, 15 As when a queen, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... their persons, made with three notches and full of malice and spite.[584] Formerly it sufficed to purchase a ring marked with the same sign for three obols, to open the most securely sealed-up door;[585] but now this pestilent Euripides has taught men to hang seals of worm-eaten wood about their necks.[586] My opinion, therefore, is that we should rid ourselves of our enemy by poison or by any other means, provided he dies. That is what I announce publicly; as to certain points, which ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Carlo that as we go from room to room. We have no carpets here—plain honest brick floors—the chairs, indeed, have once been covered with velvet, but they are now so worn that one can scarcely detect that they have been so, the tables warped and worm-eaten, the few, that is, that remained there, the shutters cracked and dry with the sun and summer of so many hundred years—no Renaissance work here, yet for all that there was something about it which made it to me the only really pleasurable nobleman's mansion that I have ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... the Lump, for want of tar to pay her bottom, was worm-eaten; but, being a serviceable boat, it was intended to repair ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... now—with that small, firm hand she would catch hold of me with when I hurt her. By Jove, if she had been a man, she would have made her mark in the world! She had a will and a way with her! If it hadn't been that she loved me—me, do you hear, you dog!—though there's nobody left to care a worm-eaten nut about me, it makes me proud as Lucifer merely to think of it! I don't care if there's never another to love me to all eternity! I have been loved as never man was loved! All for my own sake, mind you! In the way of money I was no great catch; ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... by-courses, and that timely too. Name me a profest poet, that his poetry did ever afford him so much as a competency. Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against, but with hallow'd lips and groveling adoration, what was ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... 1879, a stranger on horseback rode up the straggling red road that formed the principal business thoroughfare of Gullettsville, and made his way toward the establishment known as the Gullettsville Hotel. The chief advertisement of the hotel was the lack of one. A tall worm-eaten post stood in front of the building, but the frame in which the sign had swung was empty. This post, with its empty frame, was as significant as the art of blazonry could have made it. At any rate, the stranger on horseback—a ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... awake. A small nightlight in a saucer of oil shed a sickly glare upon the worm-eaten old furniture, distorting the most innocent articles into ghastly shapes. A wilder gust than usual almost deprived her of the protection afforded by that poor light, and she lay listening fearfully to the creakings and ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... perfectly free from grit and dirt, remove the black fur, and reject all those that are at all worm-eaten; put them into a stewpan with the above ingredients, but without water; shake them over a clear fire, till all the liquor is dried up, and be careful not to let them burn; arrange them on tins, and dry them in a slow oven; pound them to ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... last I toiled up to my attic, and dropped on my knees by the open window, I was shaking from head to foot with exhaustion. The dust was thick on my hands and arms, and as I turned them over eagerly by the red light of the sunset, the worm-eaten bindings left queer greenish stains on my fingers. Among a number of loose magazines called The Farmer's Friend, I found an illustrated, rather handsome copy of "Pilgrim's Progress," presented, as ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... this he clothed with real draperies, from which he painted most beautiful things, being able to keep them in position as long as he pleased, until he had brought his work to perfection. This figure, worm-eaten and ruined as it is, is in our possession, treasured in memory ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... the chimney, and down came a pair of little mouldering ankles. 'What makes your ankles so small?' asked the woman. 'Worm-eaten, worm-eaten,' answered the mouldering ankles, and the wheel ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... remarks upon this subject, in the 73d section of the Legacy: "Virtuous men have said, both in poetry and in classic works, that houses of debauch, for women of pleasure and for street-walkers, are the worm-eaten spots of cities and towns. But these are necessary evils, and if they be forcibly abolished, men of unrighteous principles will become like ravelled thread, and there will be no end to daily punishments and floggings." In many castle-towns, however, such houses ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... yet, they were modest in number and respectable in appearance. H.C. had not commenced his raid upon the old curiosity shops; had not yet encumbered himself with endless packages, from deal boxes containing old silver, to worm-eaten, fourteenth century carved-wood monks and madonnas, carefully wrapped in brown paper, and bound head, hand and foot (where these essentials were not missing) with cord. All this came in due time, but to-day we ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... light falling from heaven as if by special favor on those puny flowers and the vigorous wheat-ear brought out in full relief the dust, the grease, and that nameless color, peculiar to Parisian squalor, made of dirt, which crusted and spotted the damp walls, the worm-eaten balusters, the disjointed window-casings, and the door originally red. Presently the cough of an old woman, and a heavy female step, shuffling painfully in list slippers, announced the coming of the mother of Ida Gruget. The creature opened the door and came out upon the ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... statues, weed grown walls, and dark and tangled pine grove, there were more hints for sadness than I should willingly surround myself by in a residence. The harsh grating of a heavy door behind roused me; I turned and beheld an old man in a species of tarnished and worm-eaten livery, who, holding the door, again gazed at me with a mingled expression of fear and curiosity. Having briefly explained the circumstances which had befallen me, and appealed to the broken caleche upon the road to corroborate a testimony that I perceived needed such aid, the old man ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... looked upon Revelation as a tottering edifice, and set itself busily at work to destroy the entire superstructure. But sometimes it is the surrounding vines and trees that shake in the autumn storm, and not the building itself; and often beneath the worm-eaten bark there is a great oaken heart, which no arm is strong enough and no axe sufficiently keen ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... "how awful! It must have been them nasty jiggers, that got in there; they tell me they are dreadful thick in the West Indies; Joe Crow had them in his feet, and lost two of his toes. Worm-eaten, dear, dear! but still that ain't so bad as having them great he-fellows strip one. I promise you if them Gulards had undertaken to strip me, I'd a taught them different guess manners; I'd a died first before I'd a submitted to it. I always heerd tell the ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... it was too! It consisted chiefly of worm-eaten grain. A pint was served out daily for each man, and this boiled and made into a sort of porridge formed their chief food. Their drink was cold water. For tea and coffee were unknown in those days, and beer they had none. To men used to the beer and beef of England ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten russet apple tree in the yard; an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front porch; and an uncut brush of sunburnt grass and weeds all about. From May until September you never passed the Decker place without hearing the plunketty-plink of a mandolin from somewhere behind the ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... honest story—of how Christmas came to a poor cold home, and made it bright, and warm, and glad. A very poor home it was, up three flights of worm-eaten, dirt-stained stairs, in the old gray house that stood far up a narrow, crooked alley, where the sun never shone except just a while in the middle of the day. He tried hard to brighten up the place a little, but the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... half past seven and nine in the company of the prisoner of darkness, and she was beginning to look forward to it as the event of the day. She scarcely expected to be sent for on Sunday evening, but Jumbo came as usual with the invitation, and she was far from sorry to quit a worm-eaten Baxter's Saints' Rest which she had ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... afforded—a level place of sand and sea grass, about six yards square, defended on the south-west by a miniature cliff. There a lot of seaweed had accumulated, and the driftings of many gales collected. Several barrel staves, a large worm-eaten ship's knee, part of a vessel's stern, with all but the letters "Conq" obliterated, (the name had probably been Conqueror, conquered now, as Alfred observed, by old ocean); and many pieces and splinters of spar. The Captain made the discovery with us, and immediately suggested ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Banquet Hall; for what art thou now but an empty nut-shell? The kernel—the worms have eaten that many a winter agone. What say you, Biorn—may not one call Norway's land an empty nut- shell, even like the helmet here; bright without, worm-eaten within? ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... home. The vast and often decaying timbers, hewn out of the very forests they loved, cried out with all the old associations they bore and held them. The miniature citadel contained within the trenchant stockade, the old pelt stores, roofless and worm-eaten, the armory which still suggested the clank of half-armored men, who lived only for the joy of defying death. The factor's house, whence, in the days gone by, the orders for battle had been issued, and the sentence of life ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... was presumably a meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such scanty features so much expression should linger. But the structure has an ancient ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old papiers a ramages on the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden ceilings. Madame de Warens's bed remains, with the narrow couch of Jean-Jacques as well, his little ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... with its low mullioned window the Maid began her life. Here, in the larger room below, is the kneeling statue which the Princess Marie d'Orleans made of her. Here, to the right, under the sloping roof, with its worm-eaten beams, she ...
— The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France • Henry Van Dyke
... as they shook hands, and Ethne wondered why. She followed the direction of his eyes towards the violin which lay upon a table at her side. It was pale in colour; there was a mark, too, close to the bridge, where a morsel of worm-eaten wood ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... any virtues ourselves of which to boast, we owe them to a long growth of civilization, as a child owes its manners to its mother; the men of the Renascence had behind them chaos, the ruin of a slave-ridden, Hun-harried, worm-eaten Empire, in which law and order had gone down together, and the whole world seemed to the few good men who lived in it to be but one degree better than hell itself. Much may be forgiven them, and for what just things they did they should be honoured, for the hardship of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... heedless of wet trousers, and seize the shy lily by its slender stem. Thus I make prize of five or six, which are as many as usually blossom within my reach in a single morning;—some of them partially worm-eaten or blighted, like virgins with an eating sorrow at the heart; others as fair and perfect as Nature's own idea was, when she first imagined this lovely flower. A perfect pond-lily is the most satisfactory of flowers. Besides these, I gather whatever else of beautiful chances to be growing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... jelly. An excellent way to keep them for winter use is to dry them. It gives a little trouble, but one is well repaid for it, for the home-dried apples are superior in flavour to any bought apple-rings or pippins. Peel your apples, cut away the cores and all the worm-eaten parts—for nearly the whole of the windfalls are more or less worm-eaten. The good parts cut into thin pieces, spread them on large sheets of paper in the sun. In the evening (before the dew falls), they ...
— The Allinson Vegetarian Cookery Book • Thomas R. Allinson
... nearing the cabin occupied by Tobe Barnett. It was a most dilapidated shack. It was made of pine logs, the bark of which had become worm-eaten and was falling away. The spaces between the logs were filled with dried clay. It had a mud-and-stick chimney, from the cracks of which the smoke oozed. It contained only one room, was roofed with crudely split boards of oak, and ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... years it stood open to the thirsty public. Then the City Council passed a Sunday-closing ordinance, and with the enforcement of this law came the discovery that through innocuous desuetude the hinges of the doors to the Sazeraz had rusted off, while the doors themselves had become so worm-eaten that they had to be replaced by new ones. The sheriff who pounced down on Billy Boyle's in his official capacity must have fancied he had struck a second Sazeraz, for the lock upon the door was so rusty ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... I see. This drear, accursed masonry, Where even the welcome daylight strains But duskly through the painted panes. Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, gray with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep, Against the smoky paper thrust,— With glasses, boxes, round me stacked, And instruments together hurled, Ancestral lumber, stuffed and packed— Such is my world: and ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... seemed to him that he had grown a century older. All at once he heard the creaking of the boards of the stairway; some one was ascending. The trapdoor opened once more; a light reappeared. There was a tolerably large crack in the worm-eaten door of his den; he put his face to it. In this manner he could see all that went on in the adjoining room. The cat-faced old crone was the first to emerge from the trap-door, lamp in hand; then Phoebus, twirling his moustache, then a third person, that beautiful and graceful figure, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... took his arm again. The house was a large, very old building of yellowish stone, worm-eaten by age, with two little square towers at the sides. Everything about it was shabby or worn out. Some bars were wanting in the stair-rails as well as in the balconies; the ceilings of the rooms were discoloured, the partition walls cracked, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... centre might be seen Venus-Anadyomene standing on a shell, then Hercules and Omphale, Samson and Delilah, Circe and her swine, the daughters of Lot making their father drunk; and all this in a state of complete decay, the chest being worm-eaten, and even its ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... usually adopted by those pitiless tour-writers who overwhelm their readers with dry architectural details, filling a page with a portico, and a chapter with a chapel—not letting one off a pane of a painted window or line of worm-eaten inscription however often those things may have been described already by previous travellers. M. Dumas prefers men to things as subjects for his pen; and the three chapters above named are filled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the old Fort Falconbridge. A worm-eaten gun or two, far more dangerous to those in rear than to those in front, rises en barbette. The affair would fall in half an hour before the mildest of gunboats. Yet by fortifying three points at an expense of some 6,000L to 8,000L Sa Leone might be decently ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Bantam. All their goods and other things were left behind, and seized by the king of Macasser, who refused to make restitution. At Jacatra the Hector sunk in three fathoms water while careening, her keel being exceedingly worm-eaten. The Concord is there also laid up, so rotten and leaky that they had to take out her provisions, and let her sink close to the shore. The Hosiander, on the 15th October 1616, was appointed to sail for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... uncanny repositor of secrets too dreadful to reveal, as it groaned and murmured to itself in the keen east wind. Dark deeds and foul wrong seemed written all over the fearful place, from the long strings of black moss that clung to the worm-eaten eaves, to the worn stone with its great blotch of something,—could it have been blood?—that served as a threshold to the door. Suddenly with the quickness of lightning the thought flashed across me, what could Mr. Blake, the aristocratic ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... darted by me, and lovely spotted lizards played about, and I was almost beginning even to forget my rock of gold. In self-defense it is right to say that for the gold, on my own account, I cared as much as I might have done for a fig worm-eaten. It was for Uncle Sam, and all his dear love, that I watched the gold, hoping in his sad disaster to restore his fortunes. But suddenly over the rim of the wheel (laid flat in the tributary brook) I descried across the main river ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... he was telling the audience. "But then this M. Leandre is himself akin to those who worship the worm-eaten idol of Privilege, and so he is a little afraid to believe a truth that is becoming apparent to all the world. Shall I convince him? Shall I tell him how a company of noblemen backed by their servants ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... surely have retraced their own footsteps. Of a sudden, however, they broke into a sort of rough stone passage, with concrete floor that ran on for a few yards and ended at a flight of well-made stone steps, above which was a square of polished oak, worm-eaten, heavily-carved, and surely not of this generation's make ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... hereditary knights came near being constituted out of the king quellers of the Revolution. And besides, there were the patents of nobility of German counts and barons, Spanish grandees, and English peers, from the worm-eaten instruments signed by William the Conqueror down to the bran-new parchment of the latest lord who has received his honors from the ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with screams and imprecations, the jingle of spurs, the clatter of sword-scabbards crossing and recrossing each other, excite and intoxicate me. Wild at my lack of energy and strength, I seize with both hands my stool. It is old and worm-eaten, and after I have several times flung it on the floor, the joints give way, and it falls to pieces. As I turn to find some other object for destruction, a flushed and agitated face appears at the wicket, and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... worm-eaten barriers have cracked all at once, their easy-going, timid, incapable guardians having allowed things to take their course. Society, accordingly, disintegrated and a pell-mell, is turned into a turbulent, shouting crowd, each pushing and being ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... intensely personal style of his own, in which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour. He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous, 'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phrase of Leon Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax,' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses, in the highest degree, that style tachete et faisande—high-flavoured and spotted with corruption—that he attributes to Goncourt and Verlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... rushing Dordogne mingled not unpleasantly with the impressions of dreams as I awoke. I got up and opened the small worm-eaten window-frame. High thatched roofs, not many yards in front, were covered with moss, which the morning rays, striking obliquely, painted the heavenly green of Beatrice's mantle. Down the narrow road goats were passing, followed by a sunburnt ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... led her under the plum-trees to the only green nook left in the garden. An old worm-eaten bench still stood there against the lilac-bushes. And in front of them Paris spread out its sea of roofs, looking light and fresh in the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... out this "lecture pieuse" for some nights as well as I could, and as quietly too; only once breaking off the points of my scissors by involuntarily sticking them somewhat deep in the worm-eaten board of the table before me. But, at last, it made me so burning hot, and my temples, and my heart, and my wrist throbbed so fast, and my sleep afterwards was so broken with excitement, that I could sit no longer. Prudence recommended henceforward a swift clearance ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... do this either from memory or from the understanding elevated by itself into the light of heaven. Nevertheless, what they say and do is comparatively like fruit that appears beautiful on the surface but is wholly rotten within; or like almonds which from the shell appear sound but are wholly worm-eaten within. These things in the spiritual world are called fantasies, and by means of them harlots, there called sirens, make themselves appear handsome, and adorn themselves with beautiful garments; but when the fantasy is dissipated ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... bandy-legg'd, high-shoulder'd, worm-eaten seat, With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet; But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there, I bless thee and love thee, old ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than it had appeared from the outside, but it looked poor and dilapidated. The bare pine walls were worm-eaten, and the beams were blackened by smoke. There were no curtains at the windows, and no cover on the table. It was evident that Strong Ingmar lived by himself. His children had all left him and gone to America, and the ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... curious worm-eaten bit of reddish brown wood, rudely ornamented with carved figures in relief. Old Sancho took it and turned it about, examining it with ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... indeed to his maw, whence he fetches out many things when they are now all rotten and stinking. He is one that hath that unnatural disease to be enamoured of old age and wrinkles, and loves all things (as Dutchmen do cheese), the better for being mouldy and worm-eaten. He is of our religion, because we say it is most antient; and yet a broken statue would almost make him an idolater. A great admirer he is of the rust of old monuments, and reads only those characters, where ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... aside the green window-blind, I saw all the stars twinkling; and the broad moon, a little worm-eaten about the upper edge, was flinging a pale light over the Forno glacier and the thick pines that ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... cart, and apparently without the most distant perception of what he is swallowing, then bleats forth another unnatural set of tones by way of returning thanks, stalks out of the room, and immerses himself among a parcel of huge worm-eaten folios that are as uncouth as himself! I could endure the creature well enough had I anybody to laugh at him along with me; but Lucy Bertram, if I but verge on the border of a jest affecting this same Mr. Sampson (such is the horrid man's horrid ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sapphire, save for its wistful translucence. And on the teapoy in the window stood two dainty baskets of clean willow, in which we had that day brought home chestnuts from the wood;—mine was full of nuts, but they were small and angular and worm-eaten, as the fruitage of a wet season might well be; hers scantily freighted, but every nut round, full, and glossy, perfect from its cruel husk, a specimen, a type of its kind. And on the handle of the basket hung a little kid glove. I looked at it closely; the tiny finger-tops and oval nails had ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... that city has a great abundance by reason of the River Adige, which brings a very great quantity of it from Germany, not to mention that no small amount comes from Sclavonia. It is much the custom in Venice, then, to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and does not grow worm-eaten, or because it enables pictures to be made of any size that is desired, or because, as was said elsewhere, they can be sent easily and conveniently wherever they are wanted, with very little expense and labour. Be the reason ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... According to Boece, then, "the nature of the seis" formed the chief element in the production of the geese, and our author proceeds to relate how "all treis (trees) that ar casein in the seis be proces of tyme apperis first wormeetin (worm-eaten), and in the small boris and hollis (holes) thairof growis small worms." Our author no doubt here alludes to the ravages of the Teredo, or ship-worm, which burrows into timber, and with which the barnacles themselves are thus confused. Then he continues, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... guest full liberty to investigate the personal annals of these pictured worthies, as well as all the rest of his progenitors; and ample materials were at hand in many chests of worm-eaten papers and yellow parchments, that had been gathering into larger and dustier piles ever since the dark ages. But, to confess the truth, the information afforded by these musty documents was so much more prosaic than what Kenyon acquired from Tomaso's legends, that even ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with one window and an unceiled roof that sloped very low at the sides. I suppose it had been used as a store-room for rubbish. Two worm-eaten chests were its only furniture. On one of these were a basin, a jug of water, and a towel. On the other were a blanket, a sheet, and a pillow. Here then were my bed and wash-stand. There was still space left on the first chest ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... would be ready to leave at 3:30 a.m. the day following. My boy did not venture to sleep at all. He stayed up outside my bedroom door—I say bedroom, but actually it was an apartment which in Europe I would not put a horse into, and the door was merely a wide, worm-eaten board placed on end. In the middle of the night I heard a noise—yea, a rattle. The said board fell down, inwards, almost upon me. A light was flashed swiftly into my eyes, and desultory remarks which ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... there; so were the chairs in which that worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton's or of Baxter's, or the table at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old friend—on the wrong side—Edmund Verney the standard-bearer. Only the worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there were rotten places ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... clearing off at noon, the storm increased in violence, and as night set in the wind whistled in a spiteful falsetto key, and the rain lashed the old tavern as if it were a balky horse that refused to move on. The windows rattled in the worm-eaten frames, and the doors of remote rooms, where nobody ever went, slammed to in the maddest way. Now and then the tornado, sweeping down the side of Mount Agamenticus, bowled across the open country, and struck ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... growing weakness, ushered in, it may be, by long agony; the alienation from things about me, while I am yet amidst them; the slow rending of the bonds which make this body a home, so that it turns half alien, while yet some bonds unsevered hold the live thing fluttering in its worm-eaten cage—but God knows me and my house, and I need not speculate or forebode. When it comes, death will prove as natural as birth. Bethink thee, Lord—nay, thou never forgettest. It is because thou thinkest ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... room opened before her—bare, save for a few worm-eaten chairs, a fragment of tapestry on the wall, or some tattered portraits in the Longhi manner, indifferent to begin with, and long since ruined by neglect. Yet here and there a young face looked out, roses in the hair and at the breast; or a Doge's cap—and beneath it phantom features still ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... startled, however, by discovering an exuberance of more youthful life than we had thought possible in so old a tree; for the faces of two children laughed at us out of an opening in the trunk, which had become hollow with long decay. On one side of the yew stood a framework of worm-eaten timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me exceedingly, till I made it out to be the village-stocks: a public institution that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent church-yard. It is not to be supposed, however, that this old-fashioned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... other pests. There was only one staircase, by which some hundreds of troops had to find access and egress. A curious fact was that the fumes of the spirit had eaten so into the woodwork, which was generally worm-eaten and rotten, that to strike a light near it was to incur the danger of igniting it and burning the building down. But our boys found a walled-in yard in the background covered by a tarred roof which had no windows, and this they converted ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... their Romania; but they played a poor game—the law protected the servants of Scripture, and the priest with his beads seldom ventured to approach any but the remnant of those of the eikonolatry—representatives of worm-eaten houses, their debased dependants and a few poor crazy creatures among the middle classes—he played a poor game, and the labour was about to prove almost entirely in vain, when the English Legislature, in compassion or contempt, or, yet more probably, influenced by that spirit ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of his pocket the little black nut, in which the best thing of all was said to be enclosed. He laid it carefully between the door and the door-post, and then shut the door so that the nut cracked directly. But there was not much kernel to be seen; it was what we should call hollow or worm-eaten, and looked as if it had been filled with tobacco or rich black earth. "It is just what I expected!" exclaimed Ib. "How should there be room in a little nut like this for the best thing of all? Christina will find her two ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... are like the kernels within as to their soundness and goodness, encompassed with their usual and natural husk; with the wicked, the case is altogether different, their internals are like kernels which are either not eatable from their bitterness, or rotten, or worm-eaten; whereas their externals are like the shells or husks of those kernels, either like the natural shells or husks, or shining bright like shell-fish, or speckled like the stones called irises, Such is the appearance of their externals, within which the above-mentioned internals lie concealed. ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... life had fostered the conviction in me that, outside of the family, the human world was as brutally selfish as the jungle, and that it was worm-eaten with hypocrisy into the bargain. From time to time the newspapers published sensational revelations concerning some pillar of society who had turned out to be a common thief on an uncommon scale. I saw that political speeches, sermons, and editorials had, with very few ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... protesting and crying out at outraged morality. I know them, these indignant voices of the defenders of morality. They arise every time that we unveil the vilenesses, that we expose the gangrenes of our institutions; corrupt magistracy, vicious clergy, rotten army; tottering tripod which holds up that worm-eaten scaffolding which ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... who, knowing neither, is praying equally for both. And when these brothers of mercy have quitted the house, the children whose father they have carried out, or the wife whose husband they have borne away, have but to look around them, and always, on some worm-eaten piece of furniture, there will be found a pious alms, deposited by an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... which we may term 'dry ulcerative,' the cartilage covering the ridge on the lower surface of the bone commences to become eroded, and in appearance has been likened, both by English and Continental writers, to a piece of wood that has been worm-eaten (see Fig. 161). ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... "I'll get it off." He raised his heavily booted foot, as Frank drew back, and brought it down with a crash on the massive brasswork. With a rending and tearing of the worm-eaten wood the lock ripped loose and the lid, operated by some ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... end of the street and the landing, what did I see of the bustle, business and life of forty-nine years ago—a small forest of worm-eaten piles sticking up in the water in front of me. They were the remains of a large dock which had been covered with warehouses and offices connected with the shipping of the port. The late Thomas Trounce, of this city, owned the property and managed it. Imagine what the ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... The worm-eaten gate gives into a little garden, a strip of turf, a few trees, and a wilderness of flowers and rose bushes—a garden won from the rock on the highest terrace of all, with the dark, old balustrade along its edge. Opposite the gateway, a wooden summer-house stands against ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... made at rush-lights and its God ever most prominent. Always within reach of hands which trembled with reverence as they turned its broad page could be found the Book that is compensation for all things, and that was never more at home than on bare dressers and worm-eaten looms. If you were brought up in that place and have forgotten it, there is no more hope ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... speech. I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn't any such thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at these antiquities ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... us when it was lowered into the grave. Rashid represented the dead man's kindred with much dignity. He held something in his hand which he planted in the ground before going away. It was that crescent of plain deal at the end of a stick which is still to be seen in the midst of the worm-eaten crosses, in the shadow of ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... from Kamakura to restore order. This expedition failed, and with its failure the prestige of the Hojo fell in a region where hitherto it had been untarnished—the arena of arms. The great Japanese historian, Rai Sanyo, compared the Bakufu of that time to a tree beautiful outwardly but worm-eaten at the core, and in the classical work, Taiheiki, the state ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... bandy-legged, high-bottomed, worm-eaten seat, With a creaking old back and twisted old feet; But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there, I bless thee and love thee, old ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Yada to follow him, and led the way up the stairs to the very top of the house. He conducted the Japanese into the small room in which were some ancient moth-and-worm-eaten bits of furniture, an old chest or two, and a plenitude of dust—and carefully closed the door when he and his ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... things I seemed to perceive as if a sort of vision had radiated from the old walls; there seemed to be the rustling of garments and the sound of voices in the deserted rooms; the pattering of feet on the worm-eaten staircase; the light of still, shady summer afternoons, a hundred years ago, seemed to fall through the casements and lie upon the floor. There was an interest to every thing about the house, even to the quaint iron fastenings ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... soft, thin and brittle, splitting easily, and are often opaque and lustreless, and may have a worm-eaten appearance. Several ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... was the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in directions so many and capricious that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them. The paving-stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the rankly-growing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... expressed it. We had no credit; we went in, called for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had confidence in Cypher's sullenness end smouldering ferocity. Deep down in his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist. He sat at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of waiters' checks so old that I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik Hudson had eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with Napoleon III. and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his eyes, rendering opaque the windows of his soul. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... immense strength, only to end in immense weakness. The force of the people is exhausted in indefinitely prolonging things long since dead; in governing mankind by embalming old dead tyrannies of Faith; restoring dilapidated dogmas; regilding faded, worm-eaten shrines; whitening and rouging ancient and barren superstitions; saving society by multiplying parasites; perpetuating superannuated institutions; enforcing the worship of symbols as the actual means of salvation; and tying the dead corpse of the Past, mouth to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... other times he said, "She is lucky for her health's sake." He shook his head, and at times read attentively a portion treating of heart-disease in Aviccunas, translated by Vossiscus Fortunatus, Louvain, 1650, an old worm-eaten book of his. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the verses that could be read: the rest, the characters being worm-eaten, were consigned to one of the Academicians, to find out their meaning by conjectures. We are informed he has done it, after many lucubrations and much pains, and that he designs to publish them, giving us hopes of ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... "habitation" could be seen from where they stood, its chimneys peeping from among the trees. The twins exchanged a meaning glance. Had they not all along suspected the Professor! His black skull cap, and his big hooked nose, and the yellow-leaved, worm-eaten books—of magic: all doubts were now removed—that for hours he would sit poring over ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... to Haydn a real fortune. He was able to leave the Spanglers and take up a garret of his own. There was no stove in it and winter was coming on; it was only partly light, even at midday, but the youth was happy. For he had acquired a little worm-eaten spinet, and he had added to his treasures the first ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... globe—that is to say, Gama and Columbus; the formation of the Turkish empire; and the preparation of the Russian empire. This tremendous hurricane, starting from the high Asiatic tablelands, felled the decaying oaks and worm-eaten buildings of the whole ancient world. The descent of the yellow, flat-nosed Mongols upon Europe is a historical cyclone which devastated and purified our thirteenth century, and broke, at the two ends of the known world, through two great Chinese walls—that ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... explosions was only revealed in a letter accidentally preserved. In the youth of our spirited archdeacon, when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it happened at the house of a relation, that on a rainy day he fell, among other garret lumber, on some worm-eaten volumes which had once been the careful collections of his great-grandfather, an Oliverian justice. "These," says he, "I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there became acquainted with the manners and principles of many excellent old ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... and cull apples may be divided into two grades. The first grade would include the whole reasonably sound fruit; the second grade the worm-eaten, partially decayed and injured fruit. Do not can any injured or decayed part nor allow apples to become overripe ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... spices thus, Cinnamon, &c., long Pepper. Have three basins and three straining-bags to them; hang 'em on a perch. Let your ginger be well pared, hard, not worm-eaten, (Colombyne is better than Valadyne or Maydelyne); your sticks of Cinnamon thin, hot and sweet; Canel is not so good. Cinnamon is hot and dry, Cardamons are hot and moist. Take sugaror sugar candy, red wine, graines, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, spice, and turnesole, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... your fault," she answered, tapping the worm-eaten arms of the old chair with both her white hands, for she herself was still annoyed and irritated. "Do not make me ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... way into his house under a rock. It is a mere hovel, but it has a wooden floor, and there are signs of personal dignity—what is known in England as 'respectability'—struggling with poverty. Perhaps the ancient clock, whose worm-eaten case reaches from the floor to the ceiling, and whose muffled but cheery tick-tack is like the voice of an old friend, impressed me in favour of this poor home as soon ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... all our Worm-eaten Plank, and clapt on new, by the beginning of December 1686, our Ships bottom was sheathed and tallowed, and the 10th Day went over the Bar, and took aboard the Iron and Lead that we could not sell, and began to fill our Water, and fetch aboard Rice for our Voyage: But C. Swan remain'd ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... midday sun when he came on deck. Its low, square houses were glaring white; here and there a splotch of vivid Cuban blue stood out; the rickety, worm-eaten piling of its water-front resembled rows of rotten, snaggly teeth smiling out of a chalky face mottled with unhealthy, artificial spots of color. Gusts of wind from the shore brought feverish odors, as if the city were sick and exhaled a tainted breath. But beyond, the hills were clean and green, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... Apartment next the great Orchard, and the Worm-eaten Gallery that opens to the River; which place for several Years no body has frequented; there all things shall be acted ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... area back of the first lines there is a wide one, crossed by many intersecting lines of trenches) he got well over them and chose a field as level as a billiard table for landing-ground. In the very center of it, however, there was one post, a small worm-eaten thing, of the color of the dead grass around it. He hit it, just as he was setting his Spad on the ground, the only post in a field acres wide, and it tore a piece of fabric from one of his lower wings. No doubt the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... knocking the stakes in for the railing round the rickyard, but why did it sound just exactly outside the shutters? When that ceased the staircase creaked, or the pear-tree boughs rustled against the window. The staircase always waited till you had forgotten all about it before the loose worm-eaten planks sprang back ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... tightened the bolts herself. It was true that their sockets in the brick floor were almost worn away; and the lock-case seemed scarcely to hold upon the rotten wood. The wood-work, indeed, throughout the whole villa was not only old and worm-eaten, but it had been originally of the rudest description, meant for summer uses, and a villeggiatura existence in which privacy was of small account. The Malestrini who had reared the villa above the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... looked out upon the street; then a few pots of dried, withered flowers—all was cracked, somber, moist. Only one or two hours during the day could the sun penetrate this loathsome spot; after that, the shadows took possession; then the sunshine fell upon the crazy walls, the worm-eaten balcony, the dull and tarnished glass, and upon the whirlwind of atoms floating in its golden rays, disturbed by no breath ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... good to be in when I returned from a long ramble on the downs, sometimes wet and cold, to sit by a wood fire and warm myself. At night when I climbed to my bedroom by means of the narrow, crooked, worm-eaten staircase, with two difficult and dangerous corners to get round, I would lie awake staring at the small square patch of greyness in the black interior made by the latticed window; and listening to the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson |
