"Tattered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the narrow footpath that leads to the lodge, and let us see what is going on inside. Opening the first door, we walk into the entry. Here along the walls and by the stove every sort of hospital rubbish lies littered about. Mattresses, old tattered dressing-gowns, trousers, blue striped shirts, boots and shoes no good for anything —all these remnants are piled up in heaps, mixed up and crumpled, mouldering and giving ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... could not defend themselves—a miserable sickly Spaniard, who had been forced to work until he had actually dropped, having recently been more especially the object of their attentions. Their supremacy, however, was contested by a party of seven or eight tattered countrymen of the latter, with one or two Portuguese, who were always ready with their knives, and who formed a sort of opposition. To this party ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... sorcerer's malison on me, No ghostly hauntings like his Highness. I Flatter myself that always everywhere I know the substance when I see it. Well, Are castles shadows? Three of them? Is she The sweet proprietress a shadow? If not, Shall those three castles patch my tattered coat? For dear are those three castles to my wants, And dear is sister Psyche to my heart, And two dear things are one of double worth, And much I might have said, but that my zone Unmanned me: then the Doctors! O to hear The Doctors! O to watch the thirsty plants Imbibing! once ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... he took down a tattered arithmetic and a slate and pencil, and, going out of doors, flung himself down on the cliff and opened the arithmetic well toward ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... tattered flower caught her glance, shaking chilly in the damp wind, and once more she heard the ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... wind-tattered, snow-frozen, Stopping in sheer weariness Between the gnarled red pine trees Twisted ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... tattered flag, its broad stripes and bright stars still gleaming through the smoke of a fierce battle, moved Francis Scott Key to scribble a few words on the back of an envelope, the words that became our National Anthem. Today, that Star-Spangled ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon's roar; The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... like a scene in some military melodrama, with its tattered roof, its tripod binoculars peering at the enemy, the businesslike officers dusty and unshaven, the field-telegraph operator squatting in one corner, with a receiver strapped to his ear. We walked across the rafters to an adjoining room, where there were two or three chairs and an old sofa, had ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... the winds of heaven, but here and there sporting a ghastly kind of drapery, remnants of their grave-clothes as it might be, in the shape of long hanging streamers of dead bark, which moaned and rustled eerily in the night breezes. High above the tattered grave-clothes of their lifeless trunks, the knotted, tortured-looking arms and fingers of the trees groped painfully after the life that ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... 2 days in office, once the ministry is able to plot against the country is 'suspect.' "[3132]—Bestir yourselves, then, ye unfortunates in town and country, workmen without work, street stragglers without fuel or shelter sleeping under bridges, prowlers along the highways, beggars, tattered vagabonds, cripples and tramps, and seize your faithless representatives!—On July 14th and October 5th and 6th, "the people had the right not only to execute some of the conspirators in military fashion, but to immolate them all, to put to the sword the entire body ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Stumpy himself dangled an idly swinging sleeve that was stained dark-red to the shoulder. A red sear across his nose and cheek rendered him a demoniacal figure through the powder, smoke and sweat. And his mates were tattered and cut, their shirts bore red splashes to a man; their grimed faces and fiery eyes held the passions of blooded men who see their reward flying ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... the beautiful, Donal the poet, and it never could but from her own lips have found way to his belief that she had turned her regard upon wee Sir Gibbie, a nobody, who to himself was a mere burning heart running about in tattered garments. His devotion to her had forestalled every pain with its antidote of perfect love, had negatived every lack, had precluded every desire, had shut all avenues of entrance against self. Even if "a ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... low perch, with his poor aching head beneath his wing; his pretty brown feathers were no longer smoothly plumed, but hung ragged and tattered around his wasted form, so different to the bright, bonnie bird of the long-ago! But she heeded not the change; to her he was as beautiful, ay, and more dear than ever, so, flying up, she clung with eager feet to the cruel bars ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... that particular infirmity, which recalled to him the sad spectacle of wounds and amputations, touched, on that account, the old soldier. He felt almost a constriction of the heart at the sight of that sorry creature, half-clothed in her tattered petticoats and old chemise, bravely running along behind her geese, her bare foot in the dust, and limping on ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Bible renown, he dreamed a dream. But unlike the royal dreamer, he asked no seer or prophet to interpret his dream to him. He merely drove his hand down into his inside pocket, and fished up an ancient dream-book, greasy and tattered with use. Over this he pored until his eyes bulged and his hands ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... his London, in describing 'the blockhead's insults,' while he mentions 'the tattered cloak,' passes over the ript shoe. Perhaps the wound had gone too deep to his generous heart for him to bear ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... opened where they stood, the youth he wished to find made his appearance, coming along talking to himself in a way that would have been unintelligible near at hand, much more at a distance. His garb was what has been described, save that as he drew near, Don Quixote perceived that a tattered doublet which he wore was amber-tanned, from which he concluded that one who wore such garments could not ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... these things! My lords, do you know who pays the taxes you vote? The dying! Alas! you deceive yourselves. You are going the wrong road. You augment the poverty of the poor to increase the riches of the rich. You should do the reverse. What! take from the worker to give to the idle, take from the tattered to give to the well-clad; take from the beggar to give to the prince! Oh yes! I have old republican blood in my veins. I have a horror of these things. How I execrate kings! And how shameless are the women! I have been told a sad story. How I hate Charles II.! A woman ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... having lost fourteen thousand. He had but twenty-three thousand left. McClellan had lost twelve thousand, but had seventy-five thousand left. And yet so desperate had been the deadly courage with which the grey tattered army had fought that McClellan lay on his arms ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... from the North were keen and biting, and the mist-like snow fell fitfully. An old man, his once tall form bent by the burdens and sorrows of sixty odd years, his step slow and shuffling, his clothes unkempt and tattered, his long beard flowing down upon his breast, his eye still bright and in his face lingering traces of refinement, made his way along the deserted street. He was accompanied by a dog, whose long, shaggy hair indicated a blooded ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... high out of the water, and amidships close down to the water-line. The Arabs squatting on the painted poops of these ships seemed sullen. They looked as cut-throat a lot as you could desire. When the boats were loaded up they drifted off, and by means of a tattered bit of sacking for a sail, and a long pole, managed to reach their destination somehow. It was curious to see these primitive craft filled with the black cases of ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... lend me your torn and tattered coat. Thou shalt have my scarlet cloak in its place. Thy staff, too, I must have. Instead of it thou shalt ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... a straggling flock of military objects, some with fragments of shoes on, others bare-footed, many of the latter's feet bleeding. The arms and waists of some are clutched by women as tattered and bare-footed ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... in the ring. Mrs. Braddock stood over by the tattered red curtains, peering out into the "big top." He knew just where to look for her; she always stood there while her daughter was performing with old Tom Sacks. Not Tom Braddock, but all the others, noted the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... alacrity, the man in charge of them ran into an adjoining tent, and brought them forth, carefully wrapped in an oil-silk covering. He drew it off and flung the folds to the breeze. 'What does this mean?' I said. 'How soiled and tattered, and rent and faded they look—I should not know them.' The man who held them said, 'Why, ma'am, 'twas the smoke and balls did that.' 'Ah! so it must have been,' I said. 'Well, you have covered them with glory, but how about ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... Lemmy's boy and mine," answered Scraggy, lifting her eyes once more to Ann. "Look! He were hurt here by the hook when he were a baby." She drew aside Everett's tattered shirt-front and displayed a ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... the gin-shop which the man's appearance and voice betrayed. How dreadful to the sight are those watery eyes; that red, uneven, pimpled nose; those fallen cheeks; and that hanging, slobbered mouth! Look at the uncombed hair, the beard half shorn, the weak, impotent gait of the man, and the tattered raiment, all eloquent of gin! You would fain hold your nose when he comes nigh you, he carries with him so foul an evidence of his only and his hourly indulgence. You would do so, had you not still a respect for his feelings, which he himself has entirely forgotten to maintain. How terrible ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... processes by the joint labor of his son and heir, a ragged ruffian some sizes smaller than himself, and of a half-starved jackass, harnessed together to the plow he was holding; occasionally the team was composed of the quadruped and a tattered and fierce-looking female biped, a more terrible object than even the man and boy and beast whose labors ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... schooner came drifting into Lewes harbor—shattered, wounded, her forecastle splintered, her foremast shot half away, and three great tattered holes in her mainsail. The mate with one of the crew came ashore in the boat for help and a doctor. He reported that the captain and the cook were dead and there were three wounded men aboard. The story he told ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... in sad array before my memory—maids with slip-shod French kid slippers, that had never been large enough for their feet—love-locks on either side of their cheeks, twirled up during the day in brown curl-papers—faded lawn dresses, with dangling flounces and tattered edging; then such sentimental entreaties that I should not make them answer the door-bell if Ike, the black boy, might happen to be away on some errand, or expose them to the rude gaze of the multitude ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... had risen, and as they stood side by side, one thing was now strangely emphasized. Travel-soiled as he was, and tattered and marked with signs of conflict, Blue Jeans was the cleaner of the two, the more wholesome, and immaculate. For what he was stood out upon the huge man in ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... handful of hair had been removed by the roots. He had stood aloof during the fracas in the dirty garish dance house under the sidewalk, laughing consumedly; and had awakened the next night to find the victor mending her tattered finery. She made him an excellent cup of coffee, and he had told her curtly that ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... therefore, to lie down in his clothes. There were two doors on the further side of the room, with keys in them; being not at all sleepy, he resolved to examine them; he attempted one lock, and opened it with ease; he went into a large dining-room, the furniture of which was in the same tattered condition; out of this was a large closet with some books in it, and hung round with coats of arms, with genealogies and alliances of the house of Lovel; he amused himself here some minutes, and then ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... climbing a ladder and walking through a narrow passage, they came to a secret door which opened into a bedroom. Alfred Banford looked about him, and was startled when he saw in a mirror the reflection of such a pale, hungry-looking visage and such tattered clothes. ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... the fatted beam, You may, who can say, fall into some place of easy virtue! Through your dislike of the gauze hat as mean, You have come to be locked in a cangue; Yesterday, poor fellow, you felt cold in a tattered coat, To-day, you despise the purple embroidered dress as long! Confusion reigns far and wide! you have just sung your part, I come on the boards, Instead of yours, you recognise another as your native land; What utter perversion! In one ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... at his father's face, at his tattered garments and bandaged leg, and read the whole story. It was a familiar page to him. He paled first and then flushed, and then, with an odd glitter in his eyes, said, "Take me with you, father. Do! You always did before. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... nothing. A beautiful male—always an anomaly—never attracts a beautiful woman. That other anomaly, a man of inherited wealth, is disgusting to the anarchist. Cassy was a beauty and an anarchist. She was also an aristocrat. The tattered portieres of the House of Casa-Evora, the bedrabbled robes of the marquisate, all that was ridiculous to her. She was an aristocrat none the less. She had a high disdain for low things. In the kitchen, which she ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the position of a trader who ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... hour's time all were upon the deck of the vanquished Britisher. No one was left on the Richard but the dead. The torn and tattered flag was still flying from the gaff, and, as the battered sea-warrior gradually settled in the long swell, the unconquered ensign fluttered defiantly in the slight breeze. At length the Bon Homme Richard ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... unmitigated blackguards, dog-stealers, robbers of hen-roosts, assaulters of innocent citizens, and recklessly daring heroes in the Army List. Half Europe and half Asia has had cause to know the Black Tyrone—good luck be with their tattered Colours as Glory has ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... said. The sky was banked up from horizon to zenith, all round, with enormous cloud-piles, black as ink in the body of them, but their fringes or edges, which had a curiously tattered appearance, were of a distinct fiery red hue. All this time there was not a breath of wind save what was created by the schooner as she rolled heavily on the gathering swell; not a sound save those which arose within her as ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... they came with the tattered Thing, as children after play, And they said: "The soul that he got from God he ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... it warrum, as your honour said; Long life to yees, and may you niver walk, Not even to your grave, but ride foriver; Good luck to yees," and without more of talk He pulled the forelock 'neath his tattered hat, And started off; but plans of mice and men Gang oft agley, again and yet again. Full half a mile upon his homeward road Poor Patrick toiled beneath his heavy load. A hilltop gained, he stopped to rest, alas! He laid his mare's egg on some treacherous grass; ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... little purpose, he thought at first, since the irreclaimable cow appeared to be the sole denizen of the shrinking beach. However, when he had shouted and scrambled for some time without result, he came abruptly upon a nook among the piled-up rocks, where a very small black-headed boy in tattered petticoats was digging the ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... cliff, he came upon a man who stood under it catching the trickle in a stone basin, and halted a few paces off to watch him. The man's hair and beard were long and unkempt, his legs bare, and he wore a tattered tunic which reached below the knees and was caught about his waist with a thong girdle. For some minutes he did not perceive the Singer; but turned at length, and the two eyed each ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... her brother would often say to me, sighing and flinging back his hair in his picturesque literary way, "one must never judge by appearances! Look at this book: it has long ago been read. It is warped, tattered, and lies in the dust uncared for; but open it, and it will make you weep and turn pale. My sister is like that book. Lift the cover and peep into her soul, and you will be horror-stricken. Vera passed in some three ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... is washed clear and bright, the atmosphere is glowing and transparent; destruction and ruins everywhere stand out in sharp and ghastly relief. On the distant horizon, beyond the Rhine, the dark clouds drag their tattered shreds; the angry lightning still flashes and thunder yet rumbles yonder—on German and ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... poisonous. To touch them meant sores, swellings, and suffering. But it was only for a moment he paused. The thought of how much might depend on his errand drove him on. Tearing two strips from his already tattered shirt, he wrapped them around either hand, and dropping on hands and knees he cautiously wound his way ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... which so often wounds us is, if viewed aright, but an outward sign of those good things which a new country has produced for its people. Men and women do not beg in the States; they do not offend you with tattered rags; they do not complain to heaven of starvation; they do not crouch to the ground for half-pence. If poor, they are not abject in their poverty. They read and write. They walk like human beings made in God's form. They know ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play the part of Jem Baggs, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player, who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson, who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a very shrewd and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... go into camp; but the Lyakhs showed themselves again on the city ramparts with tattered mantles. Many rich caftans were spotted with blood, and dust covered the ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the quiet of his own dwelling. She came joyfully, bringing an ancient and obsolete arithmetic and a much tattered book, which Jose discovered to be a chronicle of the heroic deeds of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... retires. She breaks out into an ode bewailing her own fate and that of her father. Hereupon the chorus, consisting of rustic virgins, makes its appearance, and exhorts her to take a part in a festival of Juno, which she, however, depressed in spirit, pointing to her tattered garments, declines. The chorus offer to supply her with festal ornaments, but she still refuses. She perceives Orestes and Pylades in their hiding-place, takes them for robbers, and hastens to escape into the house; when Orestes ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and prolonged shout, from fort and fleet, greeted the old flag as, all tattered with shot and shell, it rose above the battlements into its native air. The whole audience sprang to their feet. Several bands began to play their most inspiring music. Men swung their hats and grasped ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... friends would have known us, so changed had we become during our captivity. Rice and other grain diet may suit the natives of those regions, but it certainly does not agree with an Englishman's constitution. We were all pale and thin, our hair long and shaggy, our clothes worn and tattered. We had darned them and mended them up as best we could with bits of native cloth, but in spite of our efforts we officers had a very unofficerlike appearance; while the two men might have served for street beggars, representing shipwrecked sailors, but were very unlike British men-of-war's ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... and if Fanny had been a woman with the slightest sense of humor, she could not but have been amused at the picture which he presented in the revealing fire-light with his elfish and ape like body much too small to fill out the tattered and ill-fitting garments that hung about it. But she only wondered at him and his rags, and at ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... gathered his driver inside, and pulled up the tattered lap robe and said cheerfully, "Sporting life, this, eh?" But at the same time he was thinking regretfully of his ill-spent afternoon, and more than ever convinced that jests of a public nature were not worth while. ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... in New England on the shelves of old libraries, in the collections of antiquaries, or in the attics of old farm-houses, hidden in ancient hair-trunks or painted sea-chests or among a pile of dusty books in a barrel,—there are found dingy, mouldy, tattered psalm-books of other versions than the ones which we know were commonly used in the New England churches. Perhaps these books were never employed in public worship in the new land; they may have been brought over by some colonist, in affectionate ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... they covered, at a man-killing pace that brought them into the fort, hollow-eyed and gaunt, and with their bodies swollen and raw from the sting of black flies and mosquitoes that swarmed through the holes in their tattered garments. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... development she was about to make. A decrepit old woman, resting with bent form upon a staff, which was planted firmly before her, seemed wrapped in the general interest pervading the court. The woman was huge of frame and rough of make; her face was large and swollen, and the tattered cap and bonnet, the coarse and soiled materials which she wore, indicated one of the humblest caste in the country. Her appearance attracted no attention, and she was unmarked by all around; few having eyes for anything but the exciting ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... space was naturally more contracted, but the click of the opposite gate, the sound of the next door dinner-bell and gramophone remained, as it were, common property! The tiny hall was choked with umbrellas, wraps, tennis shoes, and tattered sixpenny books; the drawing-room, with its pink casement curtains, gaudy cretonne covers, huge signed photographs, jars of dusty artificial bowers, packs of dingy cards, and scraps of millinery, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... protective cross—the symbol of that religion to which Hamlet so frequently recurs. The expedient was found to justify itself and he made it a custom. In the graveyard scene of this tragedy he directs that one of the skulls thrown up by the first clown shall have a tattered and mouldy fool's-cap adhering to it, so that it may attract attention, and be singled out from the others, as "Yorick's skull, the king's jester." These are little things; but it is of a thousand little things that a dramatic performance is composed, and without this care for detail—which ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... 'bus and tram horses, almost the only representatives of English horseflesh. There are always a few detached horses stampeding round ownerless, or limping feebly down with a lost, hopeless look in their eyes, tripping at every step over a tattered head-rope, and seeming to belong to nobody and care for nothing. We always ride down in strict order, each man ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... colours. There were no strangers on that day, no acquaintances; those only were called who would deeply feel the loss. At one o'clock a body of powerful Samoans bore away the coffin, hid beneath a tattered red ensign that had flown above his vessel in many a corner of the South Seas. A path so steep and rugged taxed their strength to the utmost; for not only was the journey difficult in itself, but extreme care was requisite to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in Drury-lane be lesson'd! An' if the wives an' dirty brats E'en thigger at your doors an' yetts, Flaffan wi' duds an' grey wi' beas', Frightin' awa your deuks an' geese, Get out a horsewhip or a jowler, The langest thong, the fiercest growler, An' gar the tattered gypsies pack Wi' a' their bastards on their back! Go on, my Lord! I lang to meet you, An' in my house at hame to greet you; Wi' common lords ye shanna mingle, The benmost neuk beside the ingle, At my ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... hatefully. When a cold wind blows and ruffles up the water, which now after the floods is the colour of coffee slops, one feels cold and bored and miserable; the strains of a concertina on the bank sound dejected, figures in tattered sheepskins standing motionless on the barges that meet us look as though they were petrified by some unending grief. The towns on the Kama are grey; one would think the inhabitants were employed in the manufacture of clouds, boredom, soaking ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... shop front, and hurled at Colomban oranges, lemons, pots of jam, pieces of chocolate, bottles of liqueurs, boxes of sardines, pots of foie gras, hams, fowls, flasks of oil, and bags of haricots. Covered with the debris of the food, bruised, tattered, lame, and blind, he took to flight, followed by the shop-boys, bakers, loafers, citizens, and hooligans whose number increased each moment and who kept shouting: "Duck him! Death to the traitor! Duck him!" ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... starvation, thinned by fatigue, watching, and wounds, they had already buried fifteen hundred soldiers. The town was in ruins, and they lived amongst the mire and water of their ditches, exposed to the inclemency of a rigorous season, without shoes and in tattered clothing. As far as their vision stretched over the waves they beheld only Turkish flags. The plain was studded with Mussulman tents and standards; and the gradual appearance of new batteries more skilfully disposed, the field days of the Arabs, and the noise ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... and bower-roof The snow-storm spreads its ivory woof; It paves with pearl the garden-walk; And lovingly round tattered stalk And shivering stem its magic weaves ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... through, stockings—thick, ugly stockings—to darn, stuffy respectability!—A timid knock came at the door, and Wilhelmine called the permission to enter, in a voice still clouded and harsh from her dreary reflections. The door opened, disclosing a curious and pathetic figure wrapped in a tattered ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... seated upon a basket; the girl, warming her hands by a few withered sticks that are blazing on the ground, and a wretched mendicant,[3] wrapped in a tattered and parti-coloured blanket, entreating charity from the rosy-fingered vestal who is going to church, complete the group. Behind them, at the door of Tom King's Coffee-house, are a party engaged in a fray, likely to create business for both ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... Then he beheld, at a little distance, the immense portals of the cathedral; light streamed forth from the arches that were so dim and gloomy above; and there came a strong scent from the incense. Even the poorest, most tattered beggars ascended the wide stairs to the church, and the sailor who was with Joergen showed him the way in. Joergen stood in a sacred place; splendidly-painted pictures hung round in richly-gilded frames; the holy Virgin, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... News, whither we next went, we saw a spectacle that affected us with far profounder emotion. It was the sight of the few sticks that are left of the frigate Congress, stranded near the shore,—and still more, the masts of the Cumberland rising midway out of the water, with a tattered rag of a pennant fluttering from one of them. The invisible hull of the latter ship seems to be careened over, so that the three masts stand slantwise; the rigging looks quite unimpaired, except that a few ropes dangle loosely from the yards. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and the ragpicker, who was then below the window, lifted her head and showed herself by the yellow flare of her lantern. Framed among rags, a perfect bundle of them, a face looked out from under a tattered kerchief—a blue, seamed face with a toothless, cavernous mouth and fiery bruises where the eyes should be. And Nana, seeing the frightful old woman, the wanton drowned in drink, had a sudden fit of recollection and saw far back amid the ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... been better perhaps for me to feel the comic side of it. At any rate, whether I had given cause or not it went without saying that I could not pay the price. I could not accept. I could not, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman. It was a proof that she did not think the idea would come to me, her having determined to suggest it herself in that practical, argumentative, heroic way, in which the timidity however had been so much more striking than the boldness ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... his fat and accounting his tight blue tail coat and brass buttons a victory. His tightness made his fatness elastic; he looked wound up for a dance, and could hardly hold on a leg; but the presentation of a creature in a battered hat and soiled garments, carrying a tattered knapsack half slung, lank and with disorderly locks, as the Earl of Fleetwood's friend—the friend of the wealthiest nobleman of Great Britain!—fixed him in a perked attitude of inquiry that exhausted interrogatives. Woodseer passed him, slouching a bow. The ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... delicate tracery of the windows, the exquisite carving of the pillars, and the splendid old oak choir stalls that had formed part of a tenth-century abbey. At the west end hung a collection of banners, won by Monica's ancestors in many a hard-fought battle, and, all tattered and faded as they were, still bearing tribute to the glories of the past. There were monuments, too, in memory of the Courtenays: stone effigies of knights in armour, lying under carved canopies emblazoned with their coats-of-arms; ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... of natural wonders, no camp or place of rest on our journey has afforded our party greater satisfaction than the one we are now occupying, which is our first camp since emerging from the dense forest. Filled with gloom at the loss of our comrade, tired, tattered, browned by exposure and reduced in flesh by our labors, we resemble more a party of organized mendicants than of men in pursuit of Nature's greatest novelties. But from this point we hope that our journey will be comparatively free from ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... we marched into "that beautiful city called Cork," our band playing "Garryowen"—for we had been originally raised in Ireland, and still among our officers maintained a strong majority from that land of punch, priests, and potatoes—the tattered flag of the regiment proudly waving over our heads, and not a man amongst us whose warm heart did not bound behind a Waterloo medal. Well—well! I am now—alas, that I should say it—somewhat in the "sear and yellow;" and I confess, after the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... was about to ascend the stairs, with the sullen look deepening or changing into a sort of gloomy apprehension, she hesitated, glanced behind her, and finally, with a muttered "Plague take the young one," turned back, and, catching him by the arm of his tattered dress, landed him on the topmost step, in a mud-puddle! but she did it because she remembered that he would be very likely to climb into the tub of soapsuds that stood at the foot of the bed, and ...
— Three People • Pansy
... in the open, his own somewhat tattered hope that Ashe had been able to impress his captors with his knowledge and potential. Trained to act as contact man with other races, there was a chance that Gordon had saved himself from whatever fate had been planned for the prisoners the Foanna had claimed. ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... There was a tattered man, fouled with dust, blood and powder stain from hair to shoes, who trudged quietly at the youth's side. He was listening with eagerness and much humility to the lurid descriptions of a bearded ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... put dese t'ings on, Marse Benson, ef yo' please, sah," mocked the mulatto, tossing down some woefully tattered, nondescript garments, and, after them, a battered, rimless Derby hat and a pair of brogans ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... up the noble fortune my pen was to earn for me in the dim, delightful future. That afternoon my sisters made a pilgrimage to behold this famous placard, and finding it torn by the wind, boldly stole it, and came home to wave it like a triumphal banner in the bosom of the excited family. The tattered paper still exists, folded away with other relics of those early days, so hard and yet so sweet, when the first small victories were won, and the enthusiasm of youth ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... long after. It felt almost like sacrilege to peer thus into the privacies of such people; but I hope they did not feel as if it had been done offensively. We called next at the cottage of a hand-loom weaver—a poor trade now in the best of times—a very poor trade—since the days when tattered old "Jem Ceawp" sung his pathetic ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... with tattered garments, walked along the platform with the help of a cane. His face was covered with a beard, and his head was bowed so that his chin almost touched his breast. One foot was partially covered by a cut shoe, while on the other foot he wore a boot from which the heel was missing. This was Stephen ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... with groggeries, flaunting, flashy, and reeking with iniquity. The residents were of the lowest and poorest order. Filth, vice, and poverty, held high carnival the whole year round. In the day time crowds of tattered roughs played rudely with one another in the streets, and after dark, drunken soldiers, sailors, and wharf men, made night hideous with their degraded revelry ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... prairie like sledge-hammers. He showed a curious mixture of eagerness and terror, straining to overtake the panic-stricken herd, but constantly recoiling in dismay as we drew near. The fugitives offered no very attractive spectacle, with their enormous size and weight, their shaggy manes and the tattered remnants of their last winter's hair covering their backs in irregular shreds and patches, and flying off in the wind as ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... able to determine. She only knew that when she got there her boots were torn to pieces, and any respectable dealer in rags would hardly have demeaned himself by bidding for her clothes. Pepin was a curious sight, for his garments looked like so many tattered ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... handful of small silver coin into the middle of the first group of boys I find in my path. The next time they see me coming they cry out lustily, 'Off with your hats, boys: here comes the rich lady!' Off go the tattered hats and caps, and my small ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... he retaliates by approaching the sex somewhat gingerly. His women, in the main, are no more than soiled and tattered cards in a game played by the gods. The effort to erect them into the customary "sympathetic" heroines of fiction always breaks down under the drum fire of the plain facts. He sees quite accurately, it seems to me, how vastly the role of women has been exaggerated, how little they amount to in the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... that he had a tattered piece of a book in one hand, which he slipped inside his jacket as carefully as if it were ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... observe a barque a little on the starboard bow, heading north under two close-reefed topsails. She was low in the water, and making heavy weather of it. The crew were seen in the mizen rigging, frantically waving. A tattered flag was flying beside them, but its nationality could not be discerned. It was impossible to render the assistance that was so eagerly sought for, but even if it had been possible it was too late, ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... aside his tattered leggin, and pointed to a huge blister on his leg, made by the fire into which he had rolled in his drunken frenzy. Then he pointed to me, and as he did so, his bloodshot eyes lighted up with rage and malice. I understood him to charge me with the infliction ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... the history of Venice the name of the Giustiniani stood brilliantly forth, and the stained and tattered banners in the great hall of the arsenal were so many laurel leaves for this patrician house, keeping the memory of the brilliant victory of Lepanto green in the hearts of the Venetians. It was a Giustinian, "Gonfaloniere," standard bearer, who had brought the glorious news on his triumphant ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... shape of ships, are to be found on every sea where England's flag waves. Occasionally the smoke of an Indian wigwam would rise in a thin blue cloud from among the dark foliage of the hemlock; and by the primitive habitation one of the aboriginal possessors of the soil might be seen, in tattered habiliments, cleaning a gun or repairing a bark canoe, scarcely deigning an apathetic glance at those whom the appliances of civilisation and science had placed so immeasurably above him. Then a squaw, with a papoose ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... one little hand sticking to her plump, molasses-smeared cheek, the other holding fast to her headless doll. Beside her on the floor lay a tattered picture-book, a big bottle half full of red shelled corn, and John Jay's most precious treasure, a toy watch that could be endlessly wound up. He had heaped them all beside her, hoping they would keep her occupied ...
— Ole Mammy's Torment • Annie Fellows Johnston
... In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars, And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars, Away from the world and its toils and its cares, I've a snug little kingdom up ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... crimson and gold, and provided with the softest of cushions, which were tasseled and fringed with gold cord. Each of the strangers was invited to sit down; and there they were, two and twenty storm-beaten mariners, in worn and tattered garb, sitting on two and twenty cushioned and canopied thrones, so rich and gorgeous that the proudest monarch had nothing more splendid ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... pi flches-canne,—filled with the plumes of the sugar-cane. A cheap trunk with broken hinges contains her modest little wardrobe: a few mouchoirs, or kerchiefs, used for head-dresses, a spare douillette, or long robe, and some tattered linen. Still she is always clean, neat, fresh-looking. I see a pair of sandals in the corner,—such as the women of the country sometimes wear—wooden soles with a leather band for the instep, and two little straps; but ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... church were covered. He was so charitable that he would have pawned himself to save an infidel from distress. His servants were obliged to look after him carefully. Ofttimes he would scold them when they changed unasked his tattered vestments for new; and he used to have them darned and patched, as long as they would hold together. Now this good archbishop knew that the late Sieur de Poissy had left a daughter, without a sou or a rag, after having eaten, drunk, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... son." She spoke calmly and impersonally, without even a quickening of the breath. The thin hand, lying on the tattered cover, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... severely cuffed by a righteously indignant family, and sent flying in a whirlwind of tattered "Tiddlers," as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... "take this first, and see it put into the hands of the person mentioned on it, sir." The trooper pulled from his breast a piece of paper soiled and crumpled, and George, wondering much, took it at the man's hands. His foot still on his fallen foe, Fairburn unfolded the dirty and tattered paper. It was the cover of a letter, and he read with staring eyes the address on it, "To Captain M. Blackett,—Dragoons." The handwriting he well knew; it was that ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... Jules, Henri had, because no other change was possible for the moment, borrowed an old pair of trousers hanging on the wall, which, from their dilapidated and mud-stained appearance, may well have belonged to the farm hand—the usual occupant of the building. An equally tattered coat was over his shoulders, while his bare feet were thrust into a pair of heavily nailed boots, which had been cleaned perhaps a year before. There was no hat on his head, and, thanks to his swim in the river, his hair—which had grown excessively long in ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... courtyard gate, he entered a large plot of ground, planted by Laertes as a garden and orchard; and there he found the old man, who was digging about the roots of a young tree. With strange emotions Odysseus noted every detail of his dress and figure—the soiled and tattered coat, the gaiters of clouted leather, the old gauntlets on his hands, and the goatskin cap. He who had once been the wealthiest prince in Ithaca had now the appearance of an ancient serving-man, broken down with ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... result of his games and his scrapes he got his clothes so dirty and torn that the landlady nicknamed him the page Don Rompe-Galas, recalling a tattered character from a sainete that Dona Casiana, according to her affirmations, had seen played in her ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... one player would not yield the halfpenny he had certainly lost, and the altercation must have ended in blows if a corpulent, elderly cleric had not indignantly reproved them, and boxed their ears. A row of tattered beggars, very well contented in the sunshine, were seated on a step, likewise smoking cigarettes, and obviously they did not consider their walk of ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... a fair courtyard, which I seemed to have seen before in the pages of Country Life. The house was beautiful. There it lay, in the hot sunshine, all grey and warm and peaceful—a perfect specimen of the Tudor period, and about its walls a tattered robe of wisteria. It seemed to be smiling in its sleep. As we drove up to the great stone steps, the studded door was opened and a ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... the 'wonderful boy,' who was regarded in Dublin as a second Chatterton. A poor scholar, the son of a drunken country schoolmaster, who turned him adrift at fourteen, Dermody had wandered up to Dublin, paying his way by reciting poetry and telling stories to his humble entertainers, with a few tattered books, one shirt, and two shillings for all his worldly goods. He first found employment as 'librarian' at a cobbler's stall, on which a few cheap books were exposed for sale. Later, he got employment as assistant to the ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... half-naked blackamoor lads the neat midshipmen who were wont to walk the deck of Her Majesty's ship Ranger, in all the pride of blue cloth, gold-laced caps, and gilt buttons. Now, except a pair of scanty drawers, a shirt fastened round the waist with a piece of rope-yarn, and a tattered straw hat, clothes they had none. Their feet were tolerably hard, from the custom in which they indulged, in common with most midshipmen, of paddling about without shoes or stockings when washing decks. They were not however unarmed, for both of them had a ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... grew rather to dislike them: most felt merely a vague sentiment of distrust and repulsion, alike for the haughty British officer in his scarlet uniform, and for the reckless backwoodsman clad in tattered homespun or buckskin. They remained the owners of the villages, the tillers of the soil. At first few English or American immigrants, save an occasional fur trader, came to live among them. But their doom was assured; ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... We see the tattered banner that he loved so well Again unfurled and fluttering in the breeze, And once again we hear the "rebel yell" Triumphant wafted ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... Cap Martin—the steep pathway to it—and Richard mounting it, with that pale look, those tattered, sea-stained leaves in his hand—and the tragedy that had to be told, in his eyes, and on his lips. Could any other human being have upheld her as he did through that first year—through the years after? Was it not to him that ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cheerfulness, and all her lightness of heart? Where? Let her ask that husband who once loved her so well, but who loved his own vile excesses and headlong propensities better. There, however, she sat, with a tattered cap on, through the rents of which her raven hair, once so beautiful and glossy, came out in matted elf-locks, and hung down about her thin and wasted neck. Her face was pale and ghastly as death; her eyes were without fire—full of languor—full of sorrow; and alas, beneath one of them, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... rocks, where it seemed he had crawled when he broke down on his last weary march, but the sun and the rain had worked their will, and there was very little left of him. Indeed, part of the bony structure had rolled clear of the shreds of tattered rags. Grenfell gazed at him fixedly, and neither of the men said anything for the next minute or two. The peak above them was fading in the growing night, and the stillness of the great desolation seemed intensified by the soft patter of the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... gloves, which was torn in his pocket while she was by. I did view it near and narrowly, and do seriously confess that it was torn so very accurately in all the seams and in other places, and laid abroad so artificially, and it is so dexterously tattered, (and all done in the pocket in a minute's time) as nothing human could have done it; no cutler could have made an engine to do it so. Other fantastical freeks have been very frequent, as the marching of a great barrel full of salt out of one room into another; an andiron ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... were covered with War Office maps, Home Office maps, district maps. There was an oak gun-rack with twelve rifles, all alike and of the latest pattern. Beside it, nailed flat to the wall and roughly stitched together, were three dirty, worn, tattered strips of bunting, blue, white ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... while only. She made his skin wither, and she dimmed his shining eyes. She made his yellow hair grey and scanty. Then she changed his raiment to a beggar's wrap, torn and stained with smoke. Over his shoulder she cast the hide of a deer, and she put into his hands a beggar's staff, with a tattered bag and a cord to hang it by. And when she had made this change in his appearance the goddess left Odysseus and ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... dead, and decay and neglect had impaired the few ornaments with which her taste had adorned it. The tapestry hung down from the walls in many places, and in others was tarnished and faded under the effects of the sun, or tattered and decayed by age. Desolate, however, as it was, this was the apartment of the castle which had been judged most fitting for the accommodation of the Saxon heiress; and here she was left to meditate upon her fate, until ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... which we freighted with our goods. After a month's voyage, we came to a city, in which we sold our goods at a profit of ten dinars on every one (of prime cost). And as we were about to take ship again, we found on the beach a damsel in tattered clothes, who kissed my hand and said to me, "O my lord, is there in thee kindness and charity? I will requite thee for them." Quoth I, "Indeed I love to do courtesy and charity, though I be not requited." ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... repulsive-looking creature, with unkempt hair and matted beard, his age apparently about fifty. The woman looked seventy or more. She too had once been tall, but now old age gave her a withered, witch-like appearance, in spite of her great height. She was dressed in limp, faded garments, with a tattered shawl crossed over her chest, and had a scared, miserable look in her bleared old eyes. There were a few words of explanation from the man who had come home, and then, in gruff but not unkindly tones, he bade Babette be seated, and told his mother to get ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... his sister's account of how the corn came into the country, that that very evening he dragged out a tattered old atlas which he had rescued from the Museum waste, and began to look for the places named by the Corn Woman. They found the old Chihuahua Trail sagging south across the Rio Grande, which, on the atlas map, carried its ancient name of River of the White Rocks. Then they found the Red River, but ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... the girls regarded her cautiously. There she stood in her bare feet, with a tattered dress, her hair cropped out as if cut with a single snip of a powerful scissors, and that pretty bird perched contentedly ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... diminutive and tattered Old Glory, whose shreds fluttered in the wind. It was tacked to a wooden box, which, mounted on a log at the entrance to a narrow, winding path, served as the Emperor's mail-box. ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... the wind should moan over this desolate patch, or that the tattered geranium should scatter its withered leaves on the unlovely ground. Were it as sweet as a garden in Delos, were the ground carpeted with violet and primrose and shadows of laburnum, the burying-ground of Mafeking would still be ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... short months this girl carried in her arms a baby. This baby was wrapped in a tattered shawl and cried piteously from hunger, for the mother had not enough to eat. She was cold, and sick, and in disgrace. Her husband, too, was ill, and sorely in debt. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard |
