"Cast-off" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sorry for a married man, Harvey," said he, "as I do for a half-starved dog. I'm always going out of my way to feed some of these cast-off dogs around town, so why shouldn't I do the same for a poor devil of a husband? I'll make you comfortable until you get into Davis', but don't you ever let on to these damned women that you're a failure, or ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... he said, 'give me some of my brother's cast-off clothes, and a few days' food, and I'll go out into the world and try my luck; you have children enough as it is, that I ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... I thinking of!" I said, half aloud—"I am not my true self to-day,—some remnant of a cast-off pride has arisen in me and made me less of a humble student. I must not yield to this overpowering demand on my soul,—it is surely an evil suggestion which asserts itself like the warning pain or fever of an impending disease. Can it be the influence ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... to his neighbour, "I hope thou admirest the magnanimity of our sovereign, who deems he is performing a most generous action in presenting Manuel with his cast-off mistress, who has tried to poison him, and with whom he has been at his wits' end what to do, and in dowering her at ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... bend that form to completest and most delicate expression, and the part of the ghost in the play offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse—whose frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... this ungrateful land, and many sick who rather than men seemed to be marble statues, who had no recourse but to stand in line, without one word of consolation; therein figured some who wore religious garb, others in secular dress limited to a pair of rumpled trousers and a cast-off coat, the lack of this luxurious garment being replaced in some instances ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... of indigestion, Sunars from bile, and Kunbis from ghosts'; because the Brahman is always feasted as an act of charity and given the best food, so that he over-eats himself, while the Sunar gets bilious from sitting all day before a furnace. When somebody falls ill his family get a Brahman's cast-off sacred thread, and folding it to hold a little lamp, will wave this to and fro. If it moves in a straight line they say that the patient is possessed by a spirit, but if in a circle that his illness is due to natural causes. In the former case they promise an offering to the spirit to ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... are the chiton or tunic, flowing to the feet; the chitoniskos, a shorter and more ornamental garment worn over it; and the mantle, himation. Pieces of cloth or rags are also mentioned among the entries; these were probably the remnants of cast-off garments dedicated by their wearers. Some of the dresses are described as embroidered with ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... "be not deceived by the fascinating Riga—that gay Lothario of all inexperienced, sea-going youths, from the capital or the country; he has a Janus-face, Harry; and you will not know him when he gets you out of sight of land, and mouths his cast-off coats and browsers. For then he is another personage altogether, and adjusts his character to the shabbiness of his integuments. No more condolings and sympathy then; no more blarney; he will hold you a little better than ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... "Upon my word, and a very good thing you must make of it; for I see you dressed like a gentleman from top to toe. Are you not ashamed to go about the world in such a trim, with honest folk, I daresay, glad to buy your cast-off finery second-hand? Speak up, you dog," the man went on; "you can understand English, I suppose; and I mean to have a bit of talk with you before I march you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... haggard; for he had passed through three judicial ordeals since the last sunset, besides being scourged with the flagellum horrible and exposed to the rude buffeting of the midnight guard. He had been clothed in the cast-off purple of the Roman procurator and wore a derisive crown of thorns. But, as he issued from the Hall of Judgment, such was his commanding presence that the multitude was hushed and ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... said Sir Richard, "that you have roused a degree of interest in poor old women which I never felt before, and it does seem to me that we might do a good deal more for them with our mere superfluities and cast-off clothing. Do the old women receive any food on these working nights ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... homesteads? Could I not be happy dissevered eternally from billiard-room and kursaal, race-ground and dancing-rooms? Yes, completely and unreservedly happy—happy as a village curate with seventy pounds a year and a cast-off coat, supplied by the charity of a land too poor to pay its pastors the wage of a decent butler—happy as a struggling farmer, though the clay soil of my scanty acres were never so sour and stubborn, my landlord never so hard about his rent—happy as a pedlar, with ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... richest amongst them are generally contrabandistas, and in the large towns go from house to house with prohibited goods, especially silk and cotton, and occasionally with tobacco. They likewise purchase cast-off female wearing-apparel, which, when vamped up and embellished, they sometimes contrive to sell as new, with ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... with the remark that it has precedence of its fellows in financial success as well as in time, having cleared a hundred and seventy-odd thousand pounds, and left the Kensington Museum as a memorial of that creditable feat, besides sending its cast-off but still serviceable induviae to Sydenham, where it enshrines another museum, chiefly of architectural reproductions in plaster, in a sempiternal coruscation of fountains, fireworks and fiddle-bows. The palace of industry has become the palace ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... minister of nature, who snaps you with unphilosophical as the clergyman once frightened you with infidel, is still a recognized member of society, wants taming, and will get it. He wears the priest's cast-off {195} clothes, dyed to escape detection: the better sort of philosophers would gladly set ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Generally speaking, the Negroes are still dependent on the white people for food and shelter. Although not exactly slaves, they are yet attached to the white people as tenants, servants or dependents. Accepting this as their lot, they have been content to wear their lord's cast-off clothing, and live in his ramshackled barn or cellar. In this unhappy state so many have settled down, losing all ambition to attain a higher station. The world has gone on but in their sequestered sphere progress ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum[Lat], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity[obs3]; triviality &c. (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum[Lat][obs3], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. litter, rubbish, junk, lumber, odds and ends, cast-off clothes; button top; shoddy; rags, orts[obs3], trash, refuse, sweepings, scourings, offscourings[obs3], waste, rubble, debris, detritus; stubble, leavings; broken meat; dregs &c. (dirt) 653; weeds, tares; rubbish heap, dust hole; rudera[obs3], deads[obs3]. fruges consumere natus &c. (drone) 683[Lat][Horace]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pedlar of sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off finery ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... itself, and which, if uncultivated or neglected, any amount of expenditure in building will fail to give that completeness and perfection of character which every homestead should command. Thus the tawdry erections in imitation of a cast-off feudalism in Europe, or a copying of the massive piles of more recent date abroad, although in miniature, both in extent and cost, is the sheerest affectation, in which no sensible man should ever indulge. It is out of all keeping, or propriety with other things, as we in this ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... something—simplicity in ceremonies. For when Miss Kemp went to see the palace of the King all the decoration she saw there was a simple table and chair. A Tibetan kitchen was a very popular slide. In that country they apparently use a golf-bag to brew tea in, and cast-off bicycle wheels for plates. There prevails in Tibet some element of democracy, for Miss Kemp's cook was also a J.P., a Civil Servant, and held other such offices of fame. One of her assistants was a positive marvel—a ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the man who is "poor" all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man who on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streets under the banner of the unemployed, or trembles—in another man's cast-off clothing, and with an infinity of hat-touching—on the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the child that he was to live among orphans or cast-off children, and would be himself as much cast off as if he had ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has won the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old time prejudices and slow conservatism, clinging to its creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the cast-off shell of oyster or clam, still resist it. The great body of the Christian laity looks askance on it. And even in progressive America, one of the largest and most liberal of American denominations has recently formally tried and condemned one of its clergy for heresy, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... up those stairs, zealous to explore the mysteries of that dark garret. There perhaps he saw the cat, with "eyne of burning coal, crouching 'fore the mouse's hole." Doubtless in this old garret were wonderful mysteries to him, curious stores of old cast-off goods and furniture, and rats, and mice, and cobwebs. I fancied the indignation of some belligerent grandmother or aunt, who finds Willie up there watching a mouse hole, with the cat, and has him down straightway, grumbling that Mary did not ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... it?" he said; "there are tears enough in this world, and we need not deposit a few more in the heart of man. These," said he, showing the verses, "are the cast-off, useless feathers of my soul; it has moulted since then, and spread its bolder wings for eternity!" He then continued to burn and destroy, while I looked out of the broken window at the ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... always better than the other little fellows, who ran around in their shirttails because I was always in the house of the "Widow." They used red clay to do the dyeing with. In the winter time cracked feet were common. The grown people wore heavy shoes called brogans while I wore the cast-off shoes of the white ladies. We all wrapped our feet in bagging sacks to help them to keep warm. We were given one complete outfit of clothes each year and these had to last until the time for ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... mother, brother, guardian, she had none, Save Zoe, who, although with due precision She waited on her lady with the Sun, Thought daily service was her only mission, Bringing warm water, wreathing her long tresses, And asking now and then for cast-off dresses. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... much more exemplary Chevalier de Malte than the usual run of those dignitaries, who differed chiefly from their uncrossed comrades and brethren in having no wife to be unfaithful to. He is never false to Manon—the incident of one of Manon's lovers trying vainly to tempt his rival, with a pretty cast-off mistress of his own, is one of the most striking features of the book. He positively reveres, not his mother, who is dead, and reverence for whom would be nothing in a Frenchman, but his father, and even, it would seem, his elder brother—a last stretch of reverence quite unknown to many young ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... climbed in the struggle of life, was with your face smiling on me from the past. All my hopes and ambitions I owe to you. The last message you spoke to me has been my guiding star. And when this man threw you from him as a cast-off garment—you, the beautiful queen of my soul—I would have killed him but for the fierce joy that now I ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... sir," said Tommy, entering, and depositing his bag on the counter, "have you got any cast-off clothes you don't want?" ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... suit he displayed for my inspection. "Nay," I said, "I care nothing for the plague, but find me something better than the cast-off clothing of a brandy-soaked Englishman. I would rather wear the motley garb of a fellow who ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... nigh, Bailey junior, testifying great excitement, appeared in a complete suit of cast-off clothes several sizes too large for him, and in particular, mounted a clean shirt of such extraordinary magnitude, that one of the gentlemen (remarkable for his ready wit) called him 'collars' on the spot. At about ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... its fore paws and head across them, and continued in this position for several hours. Early one morning its mournful cries aroused the household, and exactly a week, to the very hour, after its mistress's death, the poor terrier expired beside the bed, its head and paws still resting on the cast-off shoes. This story shows how keenly some animals feel the loss of those who have ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... he said. "You dear, kind, good fellow, consider for a moment, and you will see that it can't be. What would be said of her and of me, if you made Susan rich with your money, and if I married her? The poor innocent would be called your cast-off mistress. People would say: 'He has behaved liberally to her, and his needy friend has taken ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... most unexceptionably genteel book ever written, being the principal favourite. It makes the young Jew ashamed of the young Jewess, it makes her ashamed of the young Jew. The young Jew marries an opera dancer, or if the dancer will not have him, as is frequently the case, the cast-off Miss of the Honourable Spencer So-and-so. It makes the young Jewess accept the honourable offer of a cashiered lieutenant of the Bengal Native Infantry; or if such a person does not come forward, the dishonourable offer of a cornet of a regiment of crack hussars. It makes ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... thus bartered did not long remain in the hands of the Jews, and there must have been a great demand for them among the belles of Mayence, for I remember a ball there at which the Empress might have seen all the ladies of a quadrille party dressed in her cast-off clothes.—I even saw German Princesses wearing them" (Memoires de ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... your roaming about you run across an old cast-off suit of Mr. Black Snake, or of any other member of the Snake family, I wish you would remember me and let me know. Will you, Peter?" ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... his nest in a hollow limb and though he seems to care very little about its appearance he has, nevertheless, an idea of his own about decoration and evidently thinks no nest is complete without a bit of cast-off snake skin. ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... many things since her father's imprisonment—had learned that a girl of fifteen couldn't run barefooted in the open with impunity. She had found a pair of Daddy's old cast-off boots, tied rags about her feet, ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Thorpe entered the elevator on the first floor of the building and went up together to the apartment of Simeon Dodge. Anne had lifted her veil,—a feature in her smart tribute to convention,—and her lovely features were revealed to the cast-off sister- in-law. For an instant they stared hard at each other. Then Anne, recovering from her surprise, bowed gravely and held out ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... to support your skirts properly—draggle-tails! I see you taking the morning's milk from the hearty milkman, or going an errand in your apron and a coat too small for you, or in your mistress's or mother's cast-off jacket, out at the seams, puffy-sleeved, years behind the fashion and awry at the shoulders because it is too big. I see your floppety hat which you cannot pin down tightly to your hair, because there isn't enough of it;—your courageous attempts to be prettier than you are, or else your carelessness ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... whose shoes he had had the honor of polishing. The only person in whose presence he restrained his braggadocio style was Phillis. Her utter contempt for nonsense was too evident. Bacchus was the same size as his master, and often fell heir to his cast-off clothes. A blue dress-coat and buff vest that he thus inherited, had a great effect upon him, bodily and spiritually. Not only did he swagger more when arrayed in them, but his prayers and singing were doubly effective. He secretly prided himself on a likeness to Mr. Weston, but this must ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... arrived at the sepulchre before any of the other women, and conversed with Jesus. Though the disciples, in visiting the tomb, saw nothing but cast-off clothes, yet Mary sees and talks with angels and with Jesus. As usual, the woman is always most ready to believe miracles and fables, however extravagant and though beyond all human comprehension. Several women purposed to be at the tomb at ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... traveler is furnished with a stunted little boy called the skydskaarl, usually clothed in the cast-off rags of his great-grandfather; his head ornamented by a flaming red night-cap, and his feet either bare or the next thing to it; his hair standing out in every direction like a mop dyed in whitewash and yellow ochre, and his face and hands freckled and sunburned, and not very clean, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the wagon. Seen in the full, merciless glare of a Californian sky, she justified her father's description; thin and bony, her lank frame outstripped the body of her ragged calico dress, which was only kept on her shoulders by straps,—possibly her father's cast-off braces. A boy's soft felt hat covered her head, and shadowed her only notable feature, a pair of large dark eyes, looking larger for the hollow temples which narrowed the frame in which they ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... pathetic in the profound abasement of the common tramp—frouzy, unkempt, dirty, forlorn; without ambition further than to fill his belly with the cold leavings from decent folks' tables; without other pride than to clothe his dirty body with the cast-off rags and tatters of respectability; without further motive of life than to roam hither and yon—idle, useless, homeless, aimless. In all this there is indeed enough of the pathetic, but Sandy Graff in ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... breath. Thus he wrought me up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers on one side represented in lively figures, and indeed, heightened by my imagination of being turned out to the wide world a mere cast-off whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such, with little to provide for myself, with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world, out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay. All this terrified me to the last degree, and he took care upon all occasions to lay it home to me ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... in the deeps of the lustrous night, Cold and splendid as death if his dawn be bright; Cold as the cast-off garb that is cold as clay, Splendid and strong as a spirit ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... let us turn from the cast-off, from the forsaken, to the parents who had estranged themselves from ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... wretched semblance of a man. A tattered coat—some one's cast-off overcoat—green, greasy, mud-stained, clung round his shaking knees; trousers which might have been of any hue originally, but were now "sad-colored," flapped about his thin legs and fringed his ankles; shoes, slashed across the front for ease, revealed bare feet beneath; an antique ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... wheels, Rend and ravel and tear and pick; What can resist these hooks of steel, Sharp as the claws of the ancient Nick? Cast-off mantle of millionaire, Pestilent vagrant's vesture chill, Rags of miser or beggar bare, All are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... were renewing its life. In temperate latitudes the rattlesnake, like the leaves and flowers, retires from sight during the cold season, and at the return of kindly warmth puts on a new and brilliant coat. Its cast-off skin was carefully collected by the savages and stored in the medicine bag as possessing remedial powers of high excellence. Itself thus immortal, they thought it could impart its vitality to them. So when the mother was travailing in sore pain, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Then the fine material is used for various purposes too numerous to mention; and after it has performed its own proper work, and is cast away as rags, no more to be thought of by its owner, it is gathered up as a most precious substance by the papermaker, who shows us the true value of the cast-off rags. Subjected to the beautiful and costly machinery of the paper-mill, the rags turn out an article of so much value that without it the world would almost come to a stand-still. Yet further, ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... pawned it at the pawnbroker's for sixty francs. As soon as that sum was spent, the Thenardiers grew accustomed to look on the little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity; and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thenardier brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest had left—a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat. Moreover, the cat ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... steerage passenger smile when Mrs. Shuster accused him of being a gentleman and offered him cast-off clothes, I should have expected violence. He smiled much in the same way now, to Pat's relief and Larry's disappointment. "Perhaps it is," he said. "I've always thought it must be exciting to be a blackmailer. Anyhow, it ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... Ishmael, the screwtwar, as you call it, was among the old furnitur' sent down from the mansion-house here, to fit up this place when I first came into it; you see, the housekeeper up there sends the cast-off furniture to the overseer, same as she sends the cast-off finery ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... because she had been the mistress of the fat Molina. He had in his youth at Marseilles, in the Jewish quarter of the town, sold old clothes to the Piedmontese and sailors in port. Now it was his delight to behold the Parisians of the Boulevard or the clubs buy as sentimental rags the cast-off ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in a cast-off accent of jaded indifferentism, just touched with displeasure. "Yes," he added, dreamily, to Lydia, "it was divine, you know. You might say it needed training; but it had the naive sweetness we associate with your countrywomen. They're greatly ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... guard, and notable, even in that dissolute Court, for his pre-eminence in licentious disorder. He, at least, was prepared to publish himself in two of the most contemptible characters which human nature knows—the seducer who proclaims his stolen love, and the wretch that accepts the cast-off mistress of his patron. The author of the "Mmoires de Grammont," adds Lord Arran, [Footnote: With regard at least to Lord Arran, the son of Hyde's own chosen friend, Ormonde, we prefer to believe that the Grammont scandal is a falsehood.] ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... into Tode's head with that suit of new clothes with which he presently arrayed himself. Not particularly new, either. Tom Roberts was in college, and they were his cast-off attire, worn before he, too, in his way became a butterfly; and he would not have been seen in them—no, nor have had it enter into the mind of one of his college mates that he ever had been seen in them, for a considerable sum even of ...
— Three People • Pansy
... sunshade over her battered bonnet. Her attire was generally made up of very tarnished finery,—a befrilled skirt trailing in the dust behind her, and a tattered lace shawl disposed corner-wise over her shoulders. She seemed always to wear the cast-off garments of fine ladies, and we had an explanation of this fact. It was supposed that Mrs. Sheehy represented herself to pious Protestant ladies, for about a radius of twenty miles, as a Papist, who might easily be brought to see the error of her ways, and ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... came to, I was trembling violently both with cold and from the nervous shock. My assailants had made off with my suitcase ... I was in nothing but my B.V.D.'s and shirt. Even my Keats had been stolen. But beside me I found the ragged, cast-off suit of one of the tramps ... and my razor, which had dropped out of my coat pocket, while the tramp had changed clothes, and not been noticed. Gingerly, I put ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... of the old comedy, waited in the vicinity of the house inhabited by the unknown for the hour at which letters were distributed. In order to be able to spy at his ease and hang about the house, he had followed the example of those police officers who seek a good disguise, and bought up cast-off clothes of an Auvergnat, the appearance of whom he sought to imitate. When the postman, who went the round of the Rue Saint Lazare that morning, passed by, Laurent feigned to be a porter unable to remember the name of a person to whom he had ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... you would know Carew," explained Little Billy to Martin. "He is the best and least favorably known blackleg between the two poles. He is an Englishman—the cast-off son of some noble house, I believe. And he is a cruel, treacherous, brave, and cunning beast! No other words fit him. Add to that a really beautiful body, a brazen gall, and a well-bred and suave carriage, and you have Wild Bob. He ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... Grace may speak your pleasure on that point. It is chiefly your business which I have done of late; and if it were less strictly honest than I could have wished, the employer was to blame as well as the agent. But for marrying a cast-off mistress, the man (saving your Grace, to whom I am bound) lives not who ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... grass-grown now, and is full of small dingles covered with hawthorns. It is a great place for tramps to camp in, and half the dingles have little grey circles in them where the camping fires have been lit. I did not mind that evidence of life, but I did not like the cast-off clothing, draggled hats, coats, skirts, and boots that lay about. I never can fathom the mystery of tramps' wardrobes. They are never well-dressed exactly, but wherever they encamp they appear to discard clothing enough for two or three persons, clothing ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and the sea spectacles are not found growing like limpets on the rocks, or shaking on the wind like the bog-flowers. The rule in Trimleston House with regard to these necessary articles was that Granny's cast-off spectacles fell to Nancy, who was younger than her mistress, and who was nicely suited by glasses that had ceased to be powerful ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... the cast-off coats That covered Will Shakespeare's back? What has become of the old row-boats Of Kidd and his ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... at least were able to make a colourable pretext of Honest Trade to such Constables and Market Conners who had a right to question them about their barterings. From the Fishmongers we took sometimes money and sometimes rich apparel—the cast-off clothes, indeed, of the Nobility, birthday suits or the like, which were not good enough for the Players of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn, forsooth, to strut about in on their tragedy-boards, and which they ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... blonde, with deep-set eyes under the shadow of sweeping, black lashes. Thick masses of hair framed her sad but splendid brow; and she was badly, or rather poorly dressed, never condescending to wear the cast-off clothes of her relatives, but preferring gowns of simplest material made by her own hands. These draperies gave her the ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... some danger. Oh! it is a very easy thing to sit in one's study and demolish an opponent, who after all is generally no opponent at all, but only a man of straw, dressed up for the occasion with a few purposely-tattered shreds of the adversary's cast-off garments. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... in every conceivable attitude, and, uncovering their feet, commenced pelting each other with the cast-off leathers. When the sport had lasted a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... them wore shoes with hobnails just as you see on this old cast-off shoe here. A third one had on American-made brogans, and I expect they hurt him some, too, because he was limping as he walked. He is undoubtedly the chap who used to own these old ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... for you to think up another kind lie. God knows I don't enjoy hurting Ted. He was born and raised a capitalist and an aristocrat. Now he is a cast-off wreck of the system that made him. I hate the system, not the men it makes—and least of all the weak ones it throws into the scrap heap. [Sees that all are hurt and offended.] Damn it, I'm sorry. My infernal sense of justice got ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... the labourer's cottage; and with regard to clothes—it is doubtful if anything new is bought, in many families, from year's end to year's end. At "rummage sales," for a few pence, the women are now able to pick up surprising bargains in cast-off garments, which they adapt as best they can for their own or their children's wear. Economies like this, however, still hardly suffice to explain how the scanty resources are really spread out. Apart from a few ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... the decapitation of saplings, might be added the debris and ruins of half-civilized occupancy. The ground before the cabin was covered with broken boxes, tin cans, the staves and broken hoops of casks, and the cast-off rags of blankets and clothing. The whole claim in its unsavory, unpicturesque details, and its vulgar story of sordid, reckless, and selfish occupancy and abandonment, was a foul blot on the landscape, which the first rosy dawn only made the ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... wind which, as they roared by over a thousand straining trees and passed off with hoarse, volleying sounds, seemed to mimic the echoing thunder. And the leaves—the millions and myriads of sere, cast-off leaves, heaped ankle-deep under the desolate giants of the wood, and everywhere, in the hollows of the earth, lying silent and motionless, as became dead, fallen things—suddenly catching a mock fantastic life from ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... up such a promising burg. I crossed the river to Quincy in a small dug-out; but I came back in a large riverboat, down to the gunwales with the results of my thrown feet. Of course I kept all the money I had collected, though I paid the boat-hire; also I took my pick of the underwear, socks, cast-off clothes, shirts, "kicks," and "sky-pieces"; and when Company M had taken all it wanted there was still a respectable heap that was turned over to Company L. Alas, I was young and prodigal in those days! I told a thousand ...
— The Road • Jack London
... of bringing the flash and heavy, dull report of the old, cast-off military muskets which the Malays were using; and as these weapons flashed, the defenders of the various buildings seized the opportunity to return the fire, guessing at the ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... not available for some secondary use in Nature's realm; and the hairs that fall from animals are not all left to return unused to their original elements. The sharp eyes of birds spy them out, and thus the lining to many a nest is furnished. I knew of one feathered seeker of cast-off clothing which met disaster through trying to get a supply at first hand—a sparrow was found dead, tangled in the hairs of a pony's tail. The chickadee often lights on the backs of domestic cattle and plucks out hair with which to line some snug ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... your antipathies may be to bulls and bears, you have no objection to wolves." "Yes," he answered, "I equally abominate the whole tribe of lion, bull, bear, boar, and wolf similes. They are more thread-bare than a beggar's cast-off coat. From their rapid transition from hand to hand, they are now more hot and sweaty than halfpence on a market day. I would as soon meet a wolf in the open field, as in a friend's poem." I then rejoined, "Your objection, once at least, to wolf similes, was not quite so strong, seeing you prevailed ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... set white and careless teeth In the Ripe Fruits of Pleasure while they last, Later, creep back to gnaw the cast-off sheath, And find there is no ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... the disorder of her appearance. Over her rough peasant's clothes, some article of cast-off apparel cuts a strange and lamentable figure: a muslin morning-wrap, once white and covered with filmy lace; long, faded ribbons, which fasten a showy Watteau pleat to the back, with ravelled ends spreading over the thick red-cotton skirt; old pink-satin slippers, with pointed heels ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... some men's clothes while she awaited him in a little wood close by. The good man was overjoyed to be of use, and started at once for the nearest town, where he soon discovered a shop where the court lackeys were accustomed to sell their masters' cast-off clothes. The princess dressed herself at once in the disguise he had brought, which was of rich material and covered with precious stones; and, putting her own garments into a bag, which her servant hung over his shoulders, they both ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... at that time, and I resolved to get into the first empty shell I could find where I might hide. There was soon an opportunity. A heap of cast-off shells presented itself, and I popped into an enormous crab cover, where I waited for my unknown ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... peace sent him to request me to call on him. I went to his office in a lemon grove on a hill at the edge of the town; and there I had a surprise. I expected to see one of the usual cinnamon-colored natives in congress gaiters and one of Pizzaro's cast-off hats. What I saw was an elegant gentleman of a slightly claybank complexion sitting in an upholstered leather chair, sipping a highball and reading Mrs. Humphry Ward. I had smuggled into my brain a few words of Spanish by the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... provided they took his advice, and followed the plan which he would afterwards impart to them in confidence at the proper time, he could almost take it upon himself to say, that in a short time, no tyrannical usher, or cast-off tutor of the Squire, should venture to show his face, with or without tawse or ferule, within the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... as "GooseGrease," dressed in a cast-off suit of his big brother's, with his father's hat set rakishly back on his head and over his ears, was coming proudly down the ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... entered shortly after MRS. KRAUSE. She is small, slightly deformed and gotten up in her mistress's cast-off garments. While MRS. KRAUSE is speaking she looks up at her with a certain devout attention. She is about fifty-five years old. Every time she exhales her breath she utters a gentle moan, which is regularly audible, even when ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... armature, case, exoskeleton, shale; carapace, plastron; cockle, conch, periwinkle, cowrie, whelk, mitre shell, abilone shell; exuviae (cast-off); conchite (fossil). Associated Words: conchology, conchologist, malacology, testaceous, cockled, mollusk, conchiferous, conchiform conchometer, conchometry, crustacean, exuvial, exuviate, exuviation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the material itself, to say nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs, I reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched, and compromised on a flat bottom. Observe how the ways of deception lead to transgression: I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis, the carpenter, a good-natured Englishman, coarse and fat: in our neighbourhood his reputation for obscenity was so well known to mothers that I had been forbidden to go near him or his shop. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the mode; for the new stomacher, so admired in London, had been the last alteration in female garniture at Paris a month before my father died. Is not this "Fashion" a noble divinity to possess such zealous adherents?—a pitiful, lackey-like creature, which struts through one country with the cast-off finery ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... greatest part of men are utterly destitute of this godly jewel, this treasure, the fear of the Lord. Poor vagrants, when they come straggling to a lord's house, may perhaps obtain some scraps and fragments, they may also obtain old shoes, and some sorry cast-off rags, but they get not any of his jewels, they may not touch his choicest treasure; that is kept for the children, and those that shall be his heirs. We may say the same also of this blessed grace ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a body of red embers would after a little while invite them to place their frying-pan and coffee-pot on the iron grating they carried for the purpose, and which was really the gridiron-like contrivance belonging to a cast-off ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... decided to call upon the lady of his heart and demand an explanation. After some rehearsal of what he wanted to say, Ambrose betook himself to the tenement in which the Tate family dwelt. At sight of her cast-off swain, Miss Aphrodite showed the whites of her eyes and narrowed her lips to a thin straight line—perhaps an inch and a half thin. Evidently ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... that they did, but it was perfectly possible that Mr. Montfort might have given some of his old clothes, a cast-off smoking-jacket, for example, to his gardener and confidential servant. There would be nothing remarkable in that, surely. Besides, were they absolutely certain that the mysterious individual was dressed ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... floors were stained with mud. The sedate chairs that usually lined the walls were pushed aside and left to stand crooked and awry, the very mockery of their former dignity. Here and there a roll of parchment, an ink-stained pen, a cast-off cloak littered the hall and looked curiously provocative and out of place—an insult to the majesty of the dead and mighty Caesar, who had caused the stately columns to be reared, and the massive walls to raise their pure lines upwards ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Dame Tremblay, aunt," replied she; "I preferred to live with Mademoiselle Angelique. She is a lady, a beauty, who dresses to surpass any picture in the book of modes from Paris, which I often looked at on her dressing-table. She allowed me to imitate them, or wear her cast-off dresses, which were better than any other ladies' new ones. I have one of them on. Look, aunt!" Fanchon spread out very complacently the skirt of a pretty ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and the top of the Coustous as well. The first-named is the fruit, flower, and vegetable market; the second, the grain and potato; and the third, the iron and old shoe market. The amount and variety of old iron and cast-off shoes exposed for sale is astonishing. And if the vendors were given to crying their wares they might indulge in something like the ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... side, finding that her rage was wasted, sat down to recover herself, and then began to jeer at her victim, criticising her appearance, and asking her for the cast-off garments—"for which your la'ship will have no further use." Finding that her ridicule was received in the same silent passive way, she became more demonstrative. "Somebody's been trimming you," she said. "I s'pose Miss Starbrow was your barber—a nice thing for a lady! Well, I ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... keep; but if I should be a wife, all I had then was given up to the husband, and I was henceforth to be under his authority only; and as I had money enough, and needed not fear being what they call a cast-off mistress, so I had no need to give him twenty thousand pounds to marry me, which had been buying my lodging too ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... shop. The door was open, and she stepped inside. It was a dingy place, filthy, and littered, without the slightest attempt at order, with a heterogeneous collection of, it seemed, every article one could think of, from scraps of old iron and bundles of rags to cast-off furniture that was in an appalling state of dissolution. The light, that of a single and dim incandescent, came from the interior of what was apparently the "office" of the establishment, a small, glassed-in partition affair, at the far ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... theatre, it was seen that Dickey and Mopsey had not been wasting their time, for there was such a collection of cast-off uniforms and weapons as would have furnished a much larger company than theirs with outfits. The two who had gathered this remarkable collection together were standing over it in conscious pride; but Mopsey did not give ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... "I found that skin over yonder in the pasture. You know that A-tos-sa the Snake sheds his skin when it grows old and stiff, and grows a new one that fits him better. We just pick up the cast-off skins and build them ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... center stood the deaf and dumb child, dressed in a white frock, with a little silk mantilla over it, made from a cast-off garment belonging to one of the ladies of the circus. She wore a plain straw hat, ornamented with a morsel of narrow white ribbon, and tied under the chin with the same material. Her clear, delicate complexion ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Circle. There is always a Ladies Sewing Circle! But, somehow, the making up of barrels of cast-off clothing for unfortunate missionaries in the West, or up in Canada, or the sewing together of innumerable ill-cut garments, which must, of course, be "misfits" for the unknown infants for whom they were intended,—all this never could seem sufficient to "feed the spirit," ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... Indian lodges are scattered along the shore. The Indians, a hearty and apparently an industrious and willing race, do most of the work about here. A few boats and canoes are drawn up upon the beach. The atmosphere is heavy with the odor of ancient fish. The water-line is strewn with cast-off salmon heads and entrails. Indian dogs and big, fat flies batten there prodigiously. Acres of salmon bellies are rosy in the sun. The blood-red interiors of drying fish—rackfuls of them turned wrong side out—are the only ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... I could safely count on the occupier's hospitality for the night, and his help in the morning. If he had any spare ——, I would borrow them; if not, I would, first thing in the morning, send him cadging round the neighbourhood for cast-off clothes, while I sought ease-with-dignity in his blanket. This was not too much to count on; for I have yet to find the churlish or unfeeling swagman; whereas, my late experience of the respectable classes had not been satisfactory. At all events, the fire ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons, Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper in the ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... the rear, excited general attention. Spruggins was a little thin man, in rusty black, with a long pale face, and a countenance expressive of care and fatigue, which might either be attributed to the extent of his family or the anxiety of his feelings. His opponent appeared in a cast-off coat of the captain's—a blue coat with bright buttons; white trousers, and that description of shoes familiarly known by the appellation of 'high-lows.' There was a serenity in the open countenance ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... political manoeuvering, of cold worldly wisdom, with the pure impassioned movements of the young heart, as yet unsullied by the tarnish of every-day life, inexperienced in its calculations, sick of its empty formalities, and indignantly determined to cast-off the mean restrictions it imposes, which bind so firmly by their number, though singly so contemptible. The idea is far from original: this is a conflict which most men have figured to themselves, which many men of ardent mind are in some degree constantly ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... come a flush of hope that some trifling temporary help would be hers. Madame Dalmas called herself a Frenchwoman, and signed herself "Antoinette" but she was really an English Jewess of low extraction, whose true name was Sarah Solomons. Her "profession" was to purchase—and sell—the cast-off apparel of ladies of fashion; and few of the sisterhood have carried the art of double cheating to so great a proficiency. With always a roll of bank-notes in her old leather pocket-book, and always a dirty canvass bag full of bright sovereigns in her pocket, she had ever the ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... thousands. She is occasionally informed that the writer has a baby named Ida Greeley, and it is intimated that a present from the godmother would be acceptable. Again she is asked to assist in building a church, or to clothe and educate some poor girl—her own cast-off wardrobe of colored clothes will be accepted, the writer graciously says, although ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland |
