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More "Humdrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... despite religious dogma and fol-de-rol theory imposed from the top, was generally so. Was it not rather due to his inability to control without dominating personally—without standing out fully and clearly in the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so. The humdrum conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency was a taunt and a mockery to many. The hard implication of his eye was dreaded by the weaker as fire ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... fairly well instructed, he had never attended college. In his own opinion, he ought to see something of the world, and have his youthful fling. Later on, when he got ready to settle down, if Blanche were still in the humor, they might marry, and sink to the humdrum level of other old married people. The fact that Blanche Leary was visiting his mother during his unexpectedly long absence had not operated at all to hasten his return to North Carolina. He had been having a very good time at Clarence, and, at the distance of several hundred ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... grew tired of this quiet life. It seemed very stupid and humdrum when compared with Aunt Sheen's marvelous tales of the great ocean, and the strange sights and thrilling adventures that there awaited the voyager. He was larger than his brothers and sisters, his sea-going ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... in those few words! You have taken thought for that thing belonging to you called Claudine? This imbecile would never have opened my eyes; he thinks that everything I do is right; and besides, he is much too humdrum, too matter-of-fact to have ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... there; or possibly it would mean an isolated post out on the frontier, or down in the equally heroic field of the mountains of the South. He might leave some of you just where you are, in a commonplace, humdrum spot, as you think, when your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. The fighting and agonizing are here. Not with God but with yourself, ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... fear of the young witch. I used to think, as physician to a convent, that nothing was more erroneous than all the romancings of Diderot and Schubert (your Excellency sang me his "Young Nun" once: do you recollect, just before your marriage?), and that no more humdrum creature existed than one of our little nuns, with their pink baby faces under their tight white caps. It appeared the romancing was more correct than the prose. Unknown things have sprung up in these good Sisters' hearts, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Loving what was beautiful, hating what was sordid, drawn by nature towards all that was romantic and uncommon, but doomed by my straitened position and the loneliness of my widowhood to spend my days in the weary round of plain sewing, I had begun to think that the shadow of a humdrum old age was settling down upon me, when one morning, in the full tide of my dissatisfaction, Mary Leavenworth stepped across the threshold of my door and, with one smile, changed the whole tenor ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become the most fatal epoch of his life. The next morning he felt so harassed with the nightmare of consequences—he ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... 'personally conduct' his army of readers on a grand tour of the world, there will be a terrible scramble for excursion tickets—that is, the opening volume of the 'Globe Trotting Series.' Of one thing the boys may be dead sure: it will be no tame, humdrum journey; for Oliver Optic does not believe that fun and excitement are injurious to boys, but, on the contrary, if of the right kind, he thinks it does them ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... fairly certain that it won't be a fresh herring. Of our three survivors Rupert alone was to win the coveted distinction. He grew to be a fine boy and was eaten at Hammersmith, where his plump but delicate roe gave the greatest satisfaction. It was not eaten in the ordinary humdrum way, but was thickly spread on a piece of buttered toast, generously peppered, and devoured. And when his "wish" was placed on the kitchen-range, swelled rapidly and burst with a loud report, his cup ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... death with alarm. What is he to do in this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school. The old ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the stocks offered, proceeds in a monotonous, humdrum manner, but when "Erie," or "Pacific Mail," or any other favorite stock is called, each man springs to his feet. Bids come fast and furious, hands, arms, hats, and canes are waved frantically overhead to attract ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... in favor of the zeal and punctuality of these self-elected officials of the public whipping-post. The canons have not varied one iota for ages; if authors merely reflect the ordinary normal aspect of society, without melodramatic exaggeration or ludicrous caricature, they are voted trite, humdrum, commonplace, and live no longer than their contemporaries. If they venture a step in advance, and attempt to lead, to lift up the masses, or to elevate the standard of thought and extend its range, they are scoffed at ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... host, meditative. "My faith!" he commented, with brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to be true! And I've been growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will be of service to a young lady. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... means when he says that 'the great romance is reality'; for paradox, the unexpected, is, in a reality so framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out, paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society, as in Mr. de la Mare's Three Jolly Farmers, or Mr. Abercrombie's End of the World, or ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... town. But its voice speaks in its music, often bitterly sad and sweetly regretful, and there is little hint of sunshine or careless merrymaking there. Bach is steeped in cloister gloom, with frequent moments of religious ecstasy. Haydn is generally cheerful in a humdrum sort of way, but when his real feelings begin to speak, not even Mozart is sadder. They were human beings with greedy, desiring souls in them, these men and women of the dead eighteenth century, not delicate painted figures on screens and panels, ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... Each had its appropriate ceremonial, its traditional drink, the painstaking brewing of which was a sacred rite. On such occasions he tossed aside the cloak of the everyday. A "celebration" meant that you were different. Humdrum life and habits must be relegated to the background. It was permitted that, unabashed, you be as silly, as frivolous, as inconsequential, as boisterous, as lighthearted, as delightfully irresponsible ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... radiance with a wearily sympathetic smile—the Young Doctor, coming in briskly from his round of calls, was aware of her pink cheeks and her sparkling eyes. All at once he realized that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place; that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless slums. He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that a ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went out once ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... feelings of which the discreet novelist only details a selection. It is not customary to dwell upon thoughts of vague regret at the approaching withdrawal of a universal admiration—at the future necessity for discreet and humdrum behaviour quite devoid of the excitement that lurks in a double meaning. Let it, therefore, be ours to note the outward signs of a very natural emotion. Miss Chyne noted them herself with care, and not without a few deft touches to hair and dress. When Jack Meredith ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... The small tasks have been more than your patience and strength could manage. No doubt great exigencies often call forth great powers that were dormant in the humdrum of ordinary life. But the man who knows himself best will be the most ready to shrink with distrust from the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... In the long, lazy days When the humdrum of school made so many "run-a-ways," How pleasant was the jurney down the old dusty lane, Whare the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plane You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole They was lots o' fun on hands at ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... wanes; the children are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows; Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back again. ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... matters, the ultimate magic of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as she read them—the unreasoning jealousy that these children should ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... West Indies, and there was much eager speculation among us as to the vessels which would have the good fortune to sail with him. I hoped with all my heart that the Falmouth would be one of them, for I was weary of the humdrum life of idling on shore or aimless sailing up and down the channel. The admiral's was a peaceful mission, and no fighting was expected, but I felt a great curiosity to behold new scenes. To my vast delight, when the admiral came down ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... show—yes, I would!" declared the farmer energetically. "I tell you I believe circus is born in you, and you can't help it. You don't have much of a life at home. You're not built for humdrum village life. Get out; grow into something you fancy. No need being a scamp because you're a rover. My brother was built your sort. They pinned him down trying to make a doctor of him, and he ran away. He turned up with a little fortune ten years later, ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... answered, rather seriously. "I'm not altogether satisfied. I can't settle down to the idea of a dull, humdrum sort of life—and of Percy's ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... greatest enemy is man." There is ample room for double the population, and yet a million acres of virgin soil only awaiting the co-operation of husbandman and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons, shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, brigands, epidemics, devastating ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... existence which they lead. Boys so constituted run away to sea, take jobs with traveling circuses, or enlist as soldiers. The type is familiar and not uncommon. Such individuals cannot be content with the prosaic, humdrum, monotonous life of regular employment. As a rule we do not look upon this trait in boy ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... But the humdrum business of buying, selling, and adding up long rows of tiresome figures, did not please him, and so he neglected his duties to read books, mainly histories. His father, taking the advice of friends, placed young Alexander under the tutorship ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... bored. I was growing tired of my humdrum existence. So I'm ready to run risks.... Here's my ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... uncle:—Why, you know an a man have not skill in the hawking and hunting languages now-a-days, I'll not give a rush for him: they are more studied than the Greek, or the Latin. He is for no gallant's company without them; and by gadslid I scorn it, I, so I do, to be a consort for every humdrum: hang them, scroyles! there's nothing in them i' the world. What do you talk on it? Because I dwell at Hogsden, I shall keep company with none but the archers of Finsbury, or the citizens that come ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... his christening is shown off in a splendid robe, very much belaced and embroidered, and it is to be feared that it is a day of disturbance for him. Babies should not be too much excited; a quiet and humdrum existence, a not too showy nurse, and regular hours are conducive to a good constitution for these delicate visitors. The gay dresses and jingling ornaments of the Roman nurses are now denounced by the foreign doctors as being too exciting ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... nervous condition: people accustomed to the round arch finding the Gothic one unstable and eccentric; and, on the other hand, a person taking keen pleasure in the sudden and lurching lines of Lotto finding those of Titian tame and humdrum. But such intrinsically existing preferences and incompatibility are quite enormously increased by an emotional bias for or against a particular kind of art; by which I mean a bias not due to that art's peculiarities, but preventing our coming ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... have a good time. I like admiration. I like amusements. You men get the keenest sort of pleasure out of gambling in stocks and futures. All day long you are in a whirl of excitement. But you expect us women to stay at home and be as humdrum as hens in a chicken-house. You are to have your fun and come home and have us wives pet you and pamper you up for another day of delight. Dick, that may go all right with farmers' wives who haven't shoes to wear out to meeting, but ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... things impressed him. One was the tremendous amount of heroism that lay latent in the commonplace lads who had come out with him. He knew many of them before they joined the Army; knew them just as they were. Humdrum workaday boys who did not seem capable of anything like heroism; but the war had brought out new qualities, fine qualities. He saw how those men were willing to sacrifice themselves for others; saw them doing all sorts of glorious deeds. One fellow impressed ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... other man for her but him. Her love for him is like a flame, transforming her. I could never have called forth such passion from her. I see clearly now how foolish it was in me to have hoped it. There was nothing in the humdrum, commonplace brotherly affection which she thought I gave her to arouse the romance which I know slumbers under that calm, cold ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... or two old, which its mother has secreted in the woods or in a remote field, charge upon him furiously with a wild bleat, when first discovered. After this first ebullition of fear, it usually settles down into the tame humdrum ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... that she did not seem to tire of him: and he would often wonder what this lovely myth, so skilled and potent in arts wherein he was the merest bungler, could find to care for in Jurgen. For now they lived together like any other humdrum married couple, and their occasional exchange of endearments was as much a matter of course as their ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... judged altogether deficient in a wide outlook on events and in those masterly conceptions which mark the great warrior.[263] But nations are sometimes ruined by lofty genius, while at times they may be saved by humdrum prudence; and Barclay's common sense had no small ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... answered, "my humdrum life, my wealth, which came to me without any effort of my own, and the hitherto almost unruffled character of my relations with you have all conspired to make me satisfied with an easy and rather indolent existence. ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... invite her husband to join her in her Sabbath devotions, assured that he would claim an invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional worship. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... inability and ignorance of her own attitude fell upon him like a chill, for she had never written or said a word to him that might not have passed between any two college friends. Such thoughts occupied him, until finally, as often fortunately happens in our mental crises, a humdrum, domestic voice, the supper bell, called him, and leaving his garments strewn about the room, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... spawned, the season with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen treetops and among the loose stones. At rare intervals it beamed upon us from some still reach or dark cover, and won from us our best attention ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... dined at Mr Wodehouse's that night thought it a very agreeable little party, and more than once repeated the remark, so familiar to most persons in society in Carlingford—that Wodehouse's parties were the pleasantest going, though he himself was humdrum enough. Two or three of the people present had heard the gossip about Mr Wentworth, and discussed it, as was natural, taking different views of the subject; and poor Miss Wodehouse took up his defence so warmly, and with such tearful vehemence, that there were smiles to be seen on several faces. ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... rebellious of heart, and because they voiced the rebellion of numerous other young enthusiasts who, disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution to bring in the promised age of happiness, were ready to cry out against the existing humdrum order of society. Both poets were sadly lacking in mental or moral balance, and finding no chance in England to wage heroic Warfare against political tyranny, as the French had done, they proceeded in rather head long fashion to an ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... carefully, and I came to the conclusion that it was not good enough. You were always a dear good chap yourself, but your prospects were not quite dashing enough for your festive Violet. I believe in a merry time even if it is a short one. But if I had really wanted to settle down in a humdrum sort of way, you are the man whom I should have chosen out of the whole batch of them. I hope what I say won't make you conceited, for one of your best points ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... a gentleman, that I have sometimes a little difficulty to pass the day; but it is astonishing how idle a three weeks I have passed. If it is any comfort to you, pray delude yourself by saying that you intend "sticking to humdrum science." But I believe it just as much as if a plant were to say that, "I have been growing all my life, and, by Jove, I will stop growing." You cannot help yourself; you are not clever enough for ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... that will live with us for many years. See, they are running along the platform as the train steams out. 494 they shout, and bravely and with smiling face he calls out in return 494, and off they go, he to the work of his life, and we to the more humdrum but perhaps not less ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... for society grows dull with neglect. Those who have started out with the firmest determination to avoid the rock on which their fathers have split, give up the struggle at last, and settle down to a humdrum, uninteresting, and uninterested performance ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... very secluded and humdrum life. She will have to make home an ever-cheery place, an ideal that means hard work and self-sacrifice through lonesome years in which her nobility will ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Could it be that she did not even now take him seriously? Was her love so shallow a thing that it must be fanned into a flame by the winds of high adventure? He knew that the commonplaces of society bored her to extinction. Had the humdrum existence of civilization palled on her until her heart in very desperation had turned to her knight of the boundless plains. Had she deliberately planned this journey in order to be once more with the ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... Peter's worth the dozen of him any day of the week. He drags out all Peter's worst side. I wonder whether you'll understand what I mean when I say that Peter isn't meant to be happy—at any rate not yet. He's got something too big, too tremendous in him to be carved easily into any one of our humdrum, conventional shapes. He takes things so hard that he isn't intended to take more than one thing at a time, and here he is with Clare and Cards both, as it seems to me, in a conspiracy to pull ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... witches' one. He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making humdrum and workaday over to his heart's desire. The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough. These grew with him, it might be said—and indeed in his lifetime was often said—into wonders without a foot upon earth. But if one took as figures ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... Ordinary, humdrum life, an integral part of the national life, enacting by slow, imperceptible changes the processes of the Time-Spirit, still occupies Mr. Bennett's attention. He has again traced for a score of years the lives of a group of people belonging to the risen, well-to-do ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... a humdrum, comfortable, conventionally ordered life into a career of insane adventure is a step that is radical; but it can be exhilarating, and I proved the fact that day. To dwell on present danger was to forget the past hour in the garage, which I had to forget ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... pecuniary sacrifice for Carson to keep his promise, but he never failed to do so, when it was not absolutely impossible. Besides, it is fair to presume that the old life could never lose its charm for one of his disposition, and, contrasted with the humdrum existence of a farmer, he could not have been much grieved over the reception of the message. But it must be stated that both Owens and Carson sold out at much loss, and, putting their affairs in the best shape ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... Wisdom, you have hired a drummer to attend you in this tour of yours through France and Italy!—Psha! said I, and do not one half of our gentry go with a humdrum compagnon du voyage the same round, and have the piper and the devil and all to pay besides? When man can extricate himself with an equivoque in such an unequal match,—he is not ill off.—But you can do something else, La Fleur? said I.—O qu'oui! ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... Bill fairly burned with desire to go off and do something great. His soul was on fire with patriotic ardor. How could he stay quietly in Woodstock, and lead a humdrum life, when the soldiers of the tyrant were threatening all the Americans held most dear? But his friends at home did not encourage his practical patriotism. He was told that he must stay at home, and work on the farm, and get ready for college; the country ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... led by the model couple in the "New Heloisa" is one of humdrum, conscientious respectability. It is a country life, fairly simple and without ostentation; but it is as far removed as possible from all that can be connected with the noble savage. Julie and Monsieur de Wolmar, her husband, rule their little world strictly and kindly. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... often that the ordinary person has any need to see what he can do in the way of detection. He gets along very comfortably in the humdrum round of life without having to measure footprints and smile quiet, tight-lipped smiles. But if ever the emergency does arise, he thinks naturally of Sherlock Holmes, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... Sir Thomas. Sir Thomas is very ill, and so also is Lady Fitzgerald; but I do not feel the same interest about them that I do about you. And they are such humdrum, quiet-going people. As for Herbert, I'm afraid he'll turn out ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough for—for marriage? Wouldn't I get horribly tired? Wouldn't Grant and humdrum be better? less wearying? "And when she awakened she found her problem all but solved." I'll send him packing and take Grant," she found herself saying, "unless some excellent reason for doing otherwise appears. Grandmother ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... and the 'York,' which last became the wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like 'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when it shovelled its way through the water with a ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... believe), his wife was far too innocent even to suspect it. She would not know evil if she saw it, he said to himself proudly; and then there was no chance that the Contessa, who loved merriment and gaiety, could long be content with anything so humdrum as his quiet life in the country. Thus it will be seen that Sir Tom had got himself innocently enough into this imbroglio. He had meant no particular harm. He had meant to be kind to a poor woman, who after all needed kindness much; and if the comic character of the situation touched his sense ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... picture!" she said disdainfully; "Miss Burton reading a newspaper to two stupid old people who ought to be abed! A more humdrum scene I never saw. Truly, both your breath and your words show that you have been drinking too much. But you need not expect me to share in your tipsy sentiment over Miss Burton. Did Mr. Van Berg ask you to show ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... church-yard cold and grey" would his lady begin to pity him, seemed to the Duke rather ridiculous; but not half so ridiculous as the Warden. This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, belike, was ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... for this event I had been happy and content, but a few days later, after the clubs had fallen back to their normal humdrum level I acknowledged with a sense of hopeless weariness that our huge city had a long way to go before it could equal the small Boston of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Howells. My desire to rejoin my fellows in New York was intensified. "As there is only one London for England so there ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... last of; be tired of, be sick of, be tired with &c. adj.; yawn; die with ennui. [of journalistic articles] MEGO, my eyes glaze over. Adj. wearying &c. v.; wearing; wearisome, tiresome, irksome; uninteresting, stupid, bald, devoid of interest, dry, monotonous, dull, arid, tedious, humdrum, mortal, flat; prosy, prosing; slow, soporific, somniferous. disgusting &c. v.; unenjoyed[obs3]. weary, tired &c. v.; drowsy &c. (sleepy) 683; uninterested, flagging, used up, worn out, blase, life-weary, weary of life; sick of. Adv. wearily &c. adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... he called himself a dolt for caring a straw what they thought of him. It was a little hard, however, to think that Matthew Blackett would be going back to his beloved school and studies, while he, also a Peterite, was engaged in such a humdrum task as weighing ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... Mecca, and invoke Mahound as much as they pleased, laughing in his sleeve at their simplicity in fancying they were still infidels. He had lions in cages, and fleet leopards trained by Orientals to run down hares and deer. In short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum virtues. For anything singularly pretty or diabolically ugly, this was your customer. The best of him was, he was openhanded to the poor; and the next best was, he fostered the arts in earnest: whereof he now gave a signal proof. He offered prizes for the best specimens ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... noblest, and that all the great people I mooned about said the same. I usually retorted to the effect that I was well aware that it was noble, and that I could write as good an essay on it as any philosopher. It was all very well for great people to point out the greatness of the little, empty, humdrum life. Why didn't ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... I lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town,"—a straggling, lay village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... man than they had suspected, while the black letter-press of Lorenzo Dow, and John Bunyan, and Fox's "Book of Martyrs" touches them like so much necromancy. The faithful old clock, whose disorders are crises in our humdrum pastoral year, is stopped and disjointed, much to our marvel, and all the spare straw in the barn is brought to protect the large gilt-edged cups and saucers, which say upon their edges, "To our pastor," and "To our pastor's wife." The thin rag carpets ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... movement; a little shiver ran through the house. Doors opened and shut; voices murmured; quick feet sounded on the stairs. Now the boarders were gathered in the parlor, very still and solemn, yet not to save their lives unaware that for them the humdrum round was to go on just the same. And here, of course, is no matter of a boarding-house: for queens must eat though kings ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... great reverence, is the mood for witnessing so delicate and strong, so racial a thing. Yet this love-light, seen in the eyes of a man and wife who have been married ten years, and have settled down long ago to the humdrum of married life, seems to me a far finer manifestation of the hither mysteries, a far greater triumph. What freshness, what perpetual rejuvenation they must possess! The more one regards such a thing, the more magnificent and far-reaching it appears. ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Rhinehart was not just a man; he was a walking story-book, and, like McPhearson, a thoroughly delightful companion. Oh, he did not consider his job a humdrum one, it was easy to see that. He had lifted the traffic of jeweled ornaments, by means of which he earned his daily bread, out of the class of ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... adventurous-minded, enterprising youth turns naturally from contemplation of the humdrum security of the multitudinously trodden path in which he finds himself to thoughts of the large new lands; of those comparatively untried and certainly uncrowded uplands of the world, which, apart from the other chances ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... Such humdrum items as railroad time tables were consulted. Having decided that the ideal location would be one in which the time required for train trip and motoring from house to station would come within an hour, we limited our search to that section just ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... this life. The battle of Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but, as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred other ways. Otherwise the tale runs on, with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze, just as their ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... she said. "I daresay I might be more like other people now, if—if I had been brought up differently. Not," she added, passionately, "that I want to be like others. Do you never feel, when you have been living a humdrum life for months, that you must break out of ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... 17th had been held while he was on his way; the glare of its illumination was extinguished, the smoke of its bonfires had been dissipated by the fresh Atlantic breezes, and its holiday insurgents had returned to the humdrum of their routine employments. It was, therefore, in uninterrupted quiet that on the 23d of November he in company with Captain Foster made a tour of inspection to the different forts, and on the same day wrote out and transmitted to the War Department a somewhat detailed ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... Bartenstein again, to the narrow humdrum life there. No poles, no flags, no illuminations, no cheers, no dignity! Diamonds even scarce and rare! I tried to take heart. It was something to ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... of this humdrum, treadmill life, and believe I'm destined to better things. If I could only get a good position in the army or navy, the world would hear from me. They say money opens every door, and mother must open some good ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the piano-player is turning thousands of supposedly humdrum, prosaic people into musical enthusiasts, to their own immense surprise. Many of these people are actually taking lessons in the subtle art of manipulating the machine. They are spending more money than they can afford on vast collections ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... copper and brass, are the hedges of beech and holly. Both are commonly planted and carefully tended as borders and shelters to the less important parts of gardens; as screens also to block out the humdrum but necessary portions of the curtilage, such as the forcing-pits for early plants, minor offices, timber yards, and the like; and to shelter vegetable gardens (for which the Dutch use screens of dried reeds). Holly makes the best and most impenetrable of all hedges ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... near at hand to the village, than to fill a basket from some far-famed and well-stocked water. It is the unexpected touch that tickles our sense of pleasure. While life lasts, we are always hoping for it and expecting it. There is no country so civilized, no existence so humdrum, that there is not room enough in it somewhere for a lazy, idle brook, an encourager of indolence, with hope ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... a fleeting look at things, but we'll get enough, I hope, to freshen your minds, change the humdrum, and ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... again into the gloom of wings and then on to the white, incredible humdrum of the side street, standing there beside the little door marked "Private," Bruce at her side, rather quivery at the flanges and mopping constantly at the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... student's life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in the same old way, precisely as though there ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... kings of the earth shall bring their glory and honor into it,' and I don't see why we all shouldn't have some chance to add our tiny scrap to the splendor. I know I shan't ever do much—only commonplace, humdrum things, but if I can come at last with the least, tiniest bit of a radiant snip to add to the glory and honor, I'll be ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... found liberty, and those same rakes and libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king particularly wanted to visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was enough for ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... true force. Light, which is silent, is mightier than all lightnings. The Spirit, which is the 'Spirit of love,' is therefore 'the Spirit of power.' The true type of Christian character, which the gospel has brought into being, looks modest, inconspicuous and humdrum, by the side of the more brilliant and vulgar beauties of the world's ideals. Just as the iridescent hues on a dove's neck, and the quiet blue of its plumage, look modest and Quaker-like beside gaudy parroquets and other bedizened birds, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... when she arrived last night, but waking early she dresses hastily in order to survey the surrounding country, an outing before breakfast she delights in, when all the world seems fresh and clean, and the humdrum business of ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... existence have not much prospect of anything so peaceful. And then domestic comfort is often so sure that nothing but its own virtue could have purchased such an exemption from the ills of life. The Warren had been a few months ago a pattern of humdrum peacefulness. The impatience that sometimes lit up a little fire in Mrs. Warrender's eyes was so out of character, so improbable, that any one who suspected it believed himself to have been deceived; for who could suppose the mother to be tired of her quiet existence? And the girls were ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the "every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation". Housewives with perambulators and oil-cloth shopping bags. Children on rollerskates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unbearded all summer and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... live as husband and wife. So she took the name of Mme. de la Garde, in order to approach, as closely as Parisian usages permit, the conditions of a real marriage. As a matter of fact, many of these unfortunate girls have one fixed idea, to be looked upon as respectable middle-class women, who lead humdrum lives of faithfulness to their husbands; women who would make excellent mothers, keepers of household accounts, and menders of household linen. This longing springs from a sentiment so laudable that society should take it ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... encyclopaedia I could hardly have satisfied that man's greed for information touching that particular spot. What knew I of tracts, of townships, of quarter sections or of subdivisions? Were I filled with a knowledge of these humdrum commonplaces, should I know aught of that enthusiasm which thrills the being who, after many and long years of weary hoping and waiting, sees the object of his desires just within his grasp? Should Moses just in sight of the promised land be expected to give the dimensions of that delectable ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... which one always finds in living within one's income. Frugality, exactitude in business, faithfulness to all engagements, great or small, punctuality, that economy of time, are usually set down among the minor moralities of life, more humdrum than heroic; but under how many circumstances and conditions do they reveal themselves as cardinal virtues, as things on which depend the comfort and dignity of life! It seems that these things were so impressed on the mind and heart of the young ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... and stores were to be left behind, as a strenuous time was in store for us, and all ranks responded with a will to the hard work these preparations necessitated. Drivers were elated at the prospect of a change from their humdrum existence, and their enthusiasm knew no bounds. New reinforcing batteries appeared like mushrooms during the night, and lay safely ensconced in their appointed places in readiness for the coming fray, while the ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... wife to her room and soon left her in an unusually contented frame of mind to develop strategy for the coming party. Mrs. Allen's nerves utterly incapacitated her for the care of her household, attendance upon church, and such humdrum matters, but in view of a great occasion like a "grand crush ball," where among the luminaries of fashion she could become the refulgent centre of a constellation which her fair daughters would make around her, her spirit rose ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... when he was four until he was thirteen Buddy's life contained enough thrills to keep a movie-mad boy of to-day sitting on the edge of his seat gasping enviously through many a reel, but to Buddy it was all rather humdrum and monotonous. ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... it dull," she said. Nevertheless, the contrast smote her more and more, between what Mr. Knowlton was accustomed to in his world, and the very plain, humdrum, uneventful, unadorned life she led in hers. And this elegant creature, whose very dress was a sort of revelation to Diana in its perfection of beauty, she seemed to the poor country girl to put at an immense distance from Mr. Knowlton those who could not be charming ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... ancestors did not possess the variety of amusements which now exists, their life was far from a humdrum one. Theatres were tabooed, but were beginning to hold their ground here and there, though not, we may be sure, in New England. There were, however, private theatricals and charades, which became at one period very much in vogue in the aristocratic houses of New ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... it up again. Come, now, Mr. Lover in Check,—and when I first heard your name I had no idea how well it fitted,—confide in me. It would delight me to be in this fight; and you can see for yourself that it would be a very humdrum matter for me to join your opponents, even if I should be of their opinion. They ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... then, this town and this people (which were all of a humdrum sort), and going out by the gate, the left side of which is made up of a church, I went a little way on the short road to San Lorenzo, but I had no intention of going far, for (as you know by this time) the night had become my day and ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... and the reputation he had gained in the vicinity gave weight to his words; and "The Band" subsided into the most humdrum farmers of the region. Rita had ample information of his safety, for it soon became known that he had killed two of the most active and daring of the guerillas and captured three others; and she worshipped the hero of her girlish fancy all ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... own humdrum existence Eleanor laughs again with a return of that superabundant vitality which ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... restored to her again; for Di fell into literature, and Laura into love. Thus engrossed, these two forgot many duties which even blue-stockings and innamoratas are expected to perform, and slowly all the homely humdrum cares that housewives know became Nan's daily life, and she accepted it without a thought of discontent. Noiseless and cheerful as the sunshine, she went to and fro, doing the tasks that mothers do, but without a mother's sweet reward, holding ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day that shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left with me, I should ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... that she has only very humdrum stories to tell in return for these; but she ekes out her letters pretty well, after all, and what they lack in novelty is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... little while young Edison began to get tired of the humdrum life of a telegraph operator in Boston. As I have told you, after the vote-recorder, he had invented a stock ticker and started a quotation service in Boston. He opened operations from a room over the Gold Exchange ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... The islanders are of a kind with their islands. Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland Germans, or from the bon sens francais which can be at will trenchant or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... and all helping to work out the final settlement. When that final settlement came after all the tumults and blood it had cost, it is scarcely possible not to feel the downfall from those historical commotions to the dead level of a certain humdrum good attained, which was by no means the perfect state hoped for, yet which permitted peace and moderate comfort and the growth of national wellbeing. The little homely church towers of the Revolution, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... end in October 1796; and it may astonish some wise people, accustomed to regard Scott as a rather humdrum and prosaic person, who escaped the scandals so often associated with the memory of men of letters from sheer want of temptation, to hear that one of his most intimate friends of his own age at the time 'shuddered at the violence of his most irritable and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... conduct of the different parts of the service, however, there was nothing humdrum, or that savoured of routine. Mr. Beecher was a remarkable reader. Delicate shades of meaning came out in the very tones of his voice, and his power of intense sympathy made it easy for him to impersonate ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... days, too, which kept our Plymouth stones rattling. Besides the coaches—the "Quicksilver," which carried the mails and a coachman and guard in scarlet liveries, the humdrum "Defiance" and the dashing "Subscription" or "Scrippy" post-chaises came and went continually, whisking naval officers between us and London with dispatches: and sometimes the whole populace turned out to cheer as trains of artillery wagons, escorted by armed seamen, ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ranchman and cow-puncher in pages which are sure to be read as long as posterity takes any interest in knowing about the transition of the American West from wilderness to civilization. He shared in all the work of the ranch. He took with a "frolic welcome" the humdrum of its routine as well as its excitements and dangers. He says that he does not believe that there was ever any more attractive life for a vigorous young fellow than this, and assuredly no one else has glorified ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... stopped for a second in front of an archaic Apollo of no great merit—because it reminded her of the unknown; and she wished with all her might something new and swift and rushing might come into her humdrum life. ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... power of imagination was such as enabled him to look clearly along extensive lines of possible action in Europe, America, and the East. For there is a poetic as well as a commonplace side to business; and the man of business genius lights up the humdrum routine of daily life by exploring the boundless region of possibility wherever it may lie open ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... undisturbed that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... were a stout set of palings with "No Right of Way" written across them in large letters. Outside, the waves of emotion might surge in vain, while within, she and Roger would settle down to the humdrum placidity of married life. But the dull, ceaseless ache at her heart made her sometimes question whether anything in the world could keep at bay ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... success, that Granville, who was very much in love, regarded her disappointment as a proof of her affection instead of resentment for an offence to her self-conceit. After all, could he expect a girl just snatched from the humdrum of country notions, with no experience of the niceties and grace of Paris life, to know or do any better? Rather would he believe that his wife's choice had been overruled by the tradesmen than allow himself to own the truth. If he had been less in love, he would ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... Half open, in the topmost chest, Of depth enough, and none to spare, Invited her to slumber there; Puss with delight beyond expression, Surveyed the scene and took possession. Recumbent at her ease, ere long, And lulled by her own humdrum song, She left the cares of life behind, And slept as she would sleep her last, When in came, housewifely inclined, The chambermaid, and shut it fast, By no malignity impelled, But all unconscious whom ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... had been! He had started out in the morning, vaguely hoping to divert his mind with some of those trite little happenings that for lack of a better term we call adventures in this humdrum world. And then, with the miraculous, unbelievable luck of youth, he had stumbled plump into the middle of the most wondrous adventure it was possible to conceive. And yet this wasn't adventure, after all—it was something bigger, finer, more precious. With a suddenness that was blinding he ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... to keep up our standard if this goes on year after year? It is outrageous! And the worst of it is that the "vocation" is catching! The clever ones catch it because they are the most sensitively organised, but not the good, simple, humdrum little women who would be far better at nursing lepers than at a case of appendicitis—and better in heaven than in a leper asylum, for ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... of music while he predicted that only when he were "laid within the church-yard cold and grey" would his lady begin to pity him, seemed to the Duke rather ridiculous; but not half so ridiculous as the Warden. This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, belike, was in ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... method Hannah, who could only have been developed by forces applied from without, was painstaking, humdrum, and limited; while Rebecca, who apparently needed nothing but space to develop in, and a knowledge of terms in which to express herself, grew and grew and grew, always from within outward. Her forces of one sort and another ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not turned out as happily as, long ago, he had pictured it to himself. Away from home, and with comparatively few friends, he had felt himself losing somewhat of his freshness and boyish enthusiasm, and settling down rather to habits of a humdrum commonplace official. Books he had very few, and congenial society still less. Quartered as he had been during the first two years in dull country stations, he had grown weary of the routine of everyday life, and longed for the sight of fresh ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... Jean Dwight was the boy of the V, a strong, hearty, happy young woman of fourteen, who succeeded in getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this humdrum, work-a-day world. Her rosy cheeks glowed and her brown eyes shone with health; for Jean was as full of life as a young colt, and vented her superfluous energy in climbing trees, walking fences, and running races, until Aunt Jane and her followers raised their hands and ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... the county paper, but was not specially interested in the questions of the day; and Retty and her husband never went beyond stock, and the crops, and the baby. Ben kept his brother supplied with books that opened a wider outlook for him, and made him a little discontented with the humdrum round. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... exclaimed, to the astonishment of all:—"Have courage, good Stephanus! Strike! strike! Kill the tyrant!" On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this "miracle" is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... be?" soliloquised he, from his seat on the gate, as he plucked thin branches off from the bare winter hedge, and scattered them. "Old stepfather's wiry yet, he may last an age, and this is getting a horrid, humdrum life. I wonder what he'll leave me, when he does go off? Mother said one day she thought it wouldn't be more than five hundred pounds. She doesn't know; he does not tell her about his private affairs—never has told her. Five hundred pounds! If he left me a paltry ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... afraid not. We cannot all see it, although I must only speak for myself. Can't you appreciate that we are not all possessed of the artistic temperament and gifted with the power of seeing visions? I am a humdrum person who ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... did talk. She was an American girl, she told him, and had studied art a little, but would never be much of a painter. She had been teaching classes in a city high school in the Middle West, when suddenly life there seemed to have gone humdrum and stale. She had a little money saved, not much, but enough if she managed well, and she'd boldly resigned and determined, once at least before she was too old, to follow spring around the world. She had almost given up the idea of painting ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... efficient methods of liberation. In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind us of the more reckless virtues of the Maccabees or the Zealots. A man may be a good citizen of anywhere, but he cannot be a national hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... I could derive no comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever, or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less, since, although I was not exactly small of stature, and had, moreover, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... about it. Of course, he does not like leaving you, but he says that he should like it a thousand times better than, perhaps, having to go into some humdrum office ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... man,—but the sense of its duty? And I swear that the eyes of the haughtiest beauty Have never inspired in my soul that intense, Reverential, and loving, and absolute sense Of heart-felt admiration I feel for this man, As I see him beside me;—there, wearing the wan London daylight away, on his humdrum committee; So unconscious of all that awakens my pity, And wonder—and worship, I might say? "To me There seems something nobler than genius to be In that dull patient labor no genius relieves, That absence of all joy which yet never grieves; The humility of it! the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... at once clear out of one's life. There is no drudgery nor humdrum nor hardship, because everything is for Jesus, and seen through His eyes. Whatever comes in the pathway of his work is gladdest joy, whether an obscure narrow round of home work or shop or store, or leaving home for a strange land far across the sea with a peculiarly ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... and unaccustomed student's life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in the same old ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... young lady, I had a mother; I loved her in my humdrum way very dearly. She promised me faithfully not to die till I should be a colonel; and she went and died before I was a commandant, even; just ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... boys who go into the vegetable and flower-raising business instead of humdrum commercial pursuits. The characters and situations are ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... which are sure to be read as long as posterity takes any interest in knowing about the transition of the American West from wilderness to civilization. He shared in all the work of the ranch. He took with a "frolic welcome" the humdrum of its routine as well as its excitements and dangers. He says that he does not believe that there was ever any more attractive life for a vigorous young fellow than this, and assuredly no one else ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... "you are a queen, if ever there was one. And that you should think of such a simple thing when we had all given up! They would not have touched Umballa. Kit, Kit, whatever will you do when you return to the humdrum life ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... payment of his father's, grandfather's, and great-grandfather's debts or mortgages. He spent about a fourth of it annually, and consequently the property was still greatly encumbered and he knew that to reside on it and clear it he would be obliged to live in a very humdrum style, or else add to the burden of debt already incurred. He preferred, remaining in the army, and being a general favourite in society, and having no near relations in Wales, it never occurred to him to spend his furloughs in his native county. He had always some distant ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the other house," cried Eugenia, "they are terrible people! I don't know what they may do over there. I am a quiet little humdrum woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them. One of them is not to have visitors in the small hours—especially clever men like ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies of a world of which I knew so little, it is not to be doubted that I constructed ideals far beyond the humdrum reality of home life, impracticable ideals that tended only to separate me more from other men. Their world was not my world; this I knew full well, and I sometimes thought they knew it; for while no rude treatment ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... thought, wouldn't you," T.O. murmured after a while, "that places like this would be humdrum-y and commonplace? But I guess there are 'stories' everywhere. I'm beginning to ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... street, when the system really needed toning up, for the matter of a couple of paltry pounds was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead of being always and ever cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum months of it and merited a radical change of venue after the grind of city life in the summertime for choice when dame Nature is at her spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life. There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... understand me," she said. "I daresay I might be more like other people now, if—if I had been brought up differently. Not," she added, passionately, "that I want to be like others. Do you never feel, when you have been living a humdrum life for months, that you must break out of it, or ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... at the expense of the King. He and his wife removed to Vienna, where they remained till 1775, when they retired to Venice, Faustina's birthplace. Two years before this Dr. Burney visited them at their handsome house in the Landstrasse in Berlin, and found them a humdrum couple—Hasse groaning with the gout, and the once lovely Faustina transformed into a jolly old woman of seventy-two, with two charming daughters. As he approached the house with the Abate Taruffi, Faustina, seeing ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... someway he did not seem to get on. Men who have managed the finances of a nation often have not been able successfully to control their own; and more than once we have had the spectacle of one who could do the thinking for a world failing in the humdrum duties of a citizen and neighbor. Coleridge tried various things, among others a secretaryship that took him to Malta, but the lack of system in his habits and his absent-mindedness made him the prey ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... very next day the machinery was set in motion for the advance against the French. Colonel Joshua Fry was selected to head the expedition, and Colonel Washington made second in command. Colonel Fry at one time taught mathematics at William and Mary, but found the routine of the class-room too humdrum, and so sought a more exciting life. He had found it along the borders of the frontier, and in 1750 was made colonel of militia and member of the governor's council. Two years later, he was sent to Logstown to treat with ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number Five" leaped ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... breast. The least of them interested him, and, too, there were those with whom he always made friends easily, and there were his hereditary enemies whose presence gave a spice to life that might otherwise have become humdrum and monotonous. ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of emperors has to a great extent become the pastime of King Moneybags. And there is no place for ancient crusaders like Old Man Curry, so he has taken the remnants of his stable and gone back to the farm or merged into the humdrum and neutral tinted landscape which always ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... well, that Mae Madden, naughty, idle, and silly, may be, after all, not so stupid; but get me good, industrious and wise, and it will take all of my time when I'm not asleep to keep so. No, there'll be nothing to say about me any more. I'll be as humdrum as—" ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... issued to wagon lines that all surplus kit and stores were to be left behind, as a strenuous time was in store for us, and all ranks responded with a will to the hard work these preparations necessitated. Drivers were elated at the prospect of a change from their humdrum existence, and their enthusiasm knew no bounds. New reinforcing batteries appeared like mushrooms during the night, and lay safely ensconced in their appointed places in readiness for the coming fray, while the neighbourhood behind the lines bristled ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... George and Mary Rabbit, and always used to sleep side by side. But after a few weeks they must have felt tired of their humdrum life; for one bright morning they ran away. I hope they are living happily together in the fragrant woods from which ...
— The Nursery, July 1877, XXII. No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... deeds and high positions, away from the pettiness and humdrum of ordinary life. Yet success is not occupying a lofty place or doing conspicuous work; it is being the best that is in you. Rattling around in too big a job is much worse than filling a small one to overflowing. Dream, aspire ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... said, "that I have already wearied your friend. My life must seem so humdrum to him, and to you, who have travelled so far and seen so much. For I, monsieur, as I have told your friend, have lived all my days in one quiet country place, and this journey is a great ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... is! After looking at her I've given up all hope. I suppose all I'm fit for is Mrs Eweword—Mrs 'Dora' Eweword; do my housework in the morning and take one of these sulkies full of youngsters for a drive in the afternoon like all the other humdrum, tame-hen, respectable married women! It's a sweet prospect, isn't it?" she said vexedly, throwing herself ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... if we weren't applying a salve to somebody's sore; and I suppose that's what almost all work amounts to—salving somebody's sore, easing the wheels of life somewhere," was that gentleman's reply. "And the humdrum drudging of a schoolboy, in learning and unlearning, is but the easing the wheels of ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... is also great in argument. He infinitely enjoys a long humdrum, drowsy interchange of words of dispute about nothing. He considers that it strengthens the mind, consequently, he 'don't see that,' very often. Or, he would be glad to know what you mean by that. Or, he doubts that. Or, he has always understood exactly the reverse of that. Or, he can't admit that. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... government, whenever they chose to drive, they were soon restored to her again; for Di fell into literature, and Laura into love. Thus engrossed, these two forgot many duties which even blue-stockings and innamoratas are expected to perform, and slowly all the homely humdrum cares that housewives know became Nan's daily life, and she accepted it without a thought of discontent. Noiseless and cheerful as the sunshine, she went to and fro, doing the tasks that mothers do, but without a mother's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... think how all the girls would envy me—and they just living along their humdrum, everyday existence with fathers and mothers already married and living together, and nothing exciting to look forward to. For really, you know, when you come right down to it, there aren't many girls that have got the chance ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... the spirit of work was lacking. Theodora was domestic, and she found it good to take up her household cares again, so for a month after her return she turned a deaf ear to her publisher while she and her husband revelled in their coming back to humdrum ways much as a pair of children play at housekeeping. Then Theodora's conscience asserted itself, with the discouraging result that she became undeniably cross and, over his paper of an evening, Billy watched her in respectful ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... the Muley Cow and Spot the dog were in the back pasture one day, where the Muley Cow had strayed. And as Johnnie paused to pick a few blackberries he thought what a humdrum place Pleasant Valley was, anyway, and how he would like to go off where there were real ...
— The Tale of the The Muley Cow - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... they had ceased to regard the West with dread. Curiosity, blended with the hope of bettering their condition, turned their faces to that "fresh, unbounded, magnificent wilderness." Accustomed to camp life and scenes of exciting interest, the humdrum days at the old homestead became distasteful. The West was the hunter's paradise. The toil held beneath it the potency of harvests of extraordinary richness, and the soldier who had faced the disciplined ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... upon her, the contrast of her friend's safe and sheltered life. No care for her; no anxiety about ways and means; no need to work for money; and no need to fear for anybody dear to her. Christina's father was her guardian, not she his; he might be a very humdrum man, and no doubt was, but his daughter had no cause to be ashamed for him; had not the burden of his life and character on her own shoulders to take care of. A swift, keen feeling of this contrast would come over Dolly; but she put it ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... have attempted murder. That she was young and pretty made matters worse. Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the hollow of his hard, ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... them. His depression was due to that feeling which takes possession of one before any change of place, a feeling experienced by all melancholy, dreaming people and unknown to those of energetic, sanguine temperaments, who always rejoice at any break in the humdrum of their daily existence, and welcome a change of abode with pleasure. Nejdanov was so lost in his meditations that his thoughts began quite unconsciously to take the form of words. His wandering sensations began to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... sudden opportunity of saving Evie from moral disaster, he rises to the height of his chance and fulfils his ideals. But he is misunderstood by his wife, who sues him for a divorce but fails to bring conclusive evidence. The book ends happily, and throughout its course is a fine picture of a rather humdrum soul seeking—and reaching—the heights ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... but then Lady Glencora is so much more advanced than we are! After all, we are but humdrum people, as the world ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... end? The first steps in education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... husband to join her in her Sabbath devotions, assured that he would claim an invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional worship. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... frightened almost out of its wits. Well, but just think of the state of satisfaction and rejoicing that she must be in now at having escaped. Had it not been for that trial she would now have been in her ordinary humdrum condition. I quite agree with Ralph that trials are really a blessing ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... delights of travel, he could not endure the thought of a quiet humdrum life in the little cave at Kyllene, and he besought the King to send him on ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... not smile; I love this kind of thing, These cooped traditions with a broken wing, This freehold nook in Fancy's pipe-blown ball, This less than nothing that is more than all! Have I not seen sweet natures kept alive Amid the humdrum of your business hive, Undowered spinsters shielded from all harms, By airy incomes from a coat ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... all our societies, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat—not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... acquirement, take courage in the fact that six of our number are reaping the benefits even thus early. Wait patiently; do not let the work end with to-night, and become discouraged because of the same old humdrum duties. Remember that in filling the old post honorably, you are doing the work assigned by the Master who in His own season will send what is for your best good. Add to your store of knowledge from day to day, and be able to say ...
— Silver Links • Various
... reality so framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out, paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society, as in Mr. de la Mare's Three Jolly Farmers, or Mr. Abercrombie's End of the World, or Mr. Munro's ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... large, tranquil way he has, which is like an Indian plain full of ripe corn. "I find it curious," he said, "to compare the process which goes on here in the daily humdrum of trade about this place with that which one would see if one were far up yonder at the northward, in the appalling solitudes of the mountains, where trade has never been and will never be. Have you visited ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... country town. The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there, continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even misadventure, jostling at his elbow. After two and a half years of exile, however, John James Abbleway had embarked on only one hazardous undertaking, and that was ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... bachelor who, whilst not over ambitious, was nevertheless a brilliant physician. He had worked for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and had spent several years in India studying snake poisons. His purchase of this humdrum suburban practice had been dictated by a desire to make a home for a girl who at the eleventh hour had declined to share it. Two years had elapsed since then, but the shadow still lay upon Stuart's life, its influence being revealed ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... the maintenance of certain humdrum but necessary human virtues, we are dependent upon these middling rich. It has been frequently remarked that a lord and a working man are likely to agree, as against a bourgeois, in generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to make sporting spirit. The right measure of these qualities ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... care," said the boy to himself. "Anything for a change. I do get so tired of this humdrum steaming here and steaming there, and going into port to fill up the coal-bunkers. Being at sea isn't half so jolly as I used to think it was, and it is so cold. Wish we could get orders to sail to one of those beautiful countries in the East Indies, or to South America—anywhere ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... Gasparini, the pedlar, selling few volumes, but reaping a rich harvest of stolen pleasure, and revelling in an adventure which added such a new zest to a life sated with more humdrum love-making. But even the Duchess's charms began to pall; the ladies he had left so disconsolate in Paris were inundating him with letters, begging him to return to them—letters, all forwarded to him from his chateau at Richelieu, where he was supposed ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... expect?' he replied. 'My ambition could not endure such a humdrum existence as yours; with these gay-coloured wings of mine I shall soar to higher realms, and be courted ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... to spring from a strong inner life. Religious life in the Holy Orthodox Church, with its many ordinances and its extraordinary proximity to everyday life, is not allowed to be monotonous and humdrum. Each day at New Athos is beautiful in itself, and if a monk's life were made into a book of such days one would not turn over two pages ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... safety and dignity which one always finds in living within one's income. Frugality, exactitude in business, faithfulness to all engagements, great or small, punctuality, that economy of time, are usually set down among the minor moralities of life, more humdrum than heroic; but under how many circumstances and conditions do they reveal themselves as cardinal virtues, as things on which depend the comfort and dignity of life! It seems that these things were so impressed on the mind and heart of the ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... there are times when he is positively unfit for human society. Last week, for instance, when for three days on end we did not exchange a single word, not even at dinner, where the amenities should come on at least with the walnuts. I grant you that humdrum wears upon the spirit, that the flatness of the daily road may be a harder thing to get over than even Mr. Bunyan's hill Difficulty, but for a man to surrender himself mind and body to solitaire argues weakness. Moreover, it was a ridiculous combination ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... is intermittent. He can be dull and null enough with us sometimes—a mere asker of questions, or drawer of comparisons between this and that brand of cigarettes, or full expatiator on the merits of some new patent razor. A whole hour and more may be wasted in such humdrum and darkness. And then—something will have happened. There has come a spark in the murk; a flame now, presage of a radiance: Comus has begun. His face is a great part of his equipment. A cast of ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... hills and plains graze thousands of head of cattle; whose pastures breed their own cowhorses; whose cowmen, wearing still with a twist of pride the all-but-vanished regalia of their all-but-vanished calling, refuse to drop back to the humdrum status of "farm hands on a cow ranch"; even here has entered a single element powerful enough to change the old to something new. The new may be better—it is certainly more convenient—and perhaps when all is said and done we would ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and to what more worthy purpose could a man devote himself? When I landed here yesterday—when I walked again through these old streets—I was a being without purpose; I was like a battery that had dried up. All these petty affairs of life seemed so useless, so humdrum, so commonplace, I knew I could never settle down to them again. Then last night from some unknown source came a new idea—an inspiration—and presto! the battery is re-charged, life again has its purposes, and I am eager to be ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... this was accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... they were only lawyers, tradesmen, mechanics, and clerks, living in Jersey City, and going over to New York on their daily, humdrum business. It was not the business that attracted them, but the demon of American restlessness that pushed them on. They went back at night in just the same hurry, and made equally hazardous jumps on the Jersey side. They were mere shuttlecocks ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... now was the very humdrum one of stealing treasure that he was supposed to guard. That he was innocent there is no doubt: whatever the man was, he was no thief. The charge against him was a trumped-up one to get him out of the way. He was painfully in evidence—he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... to the oft-repeated charge of morbidity and pessimism. Gissing understood the theory of compensation, but was unable to exhibit it in action. He elevates the cult of refinement to such a pitch that the consolations of temperament, of habit, and of humdrum ideals which are common to the coarsest of mankind, appear to elude his observation. He does not represent men as worse than they are; but he represents them less brave. No social stratum is probably quite so dull as he colours it. There is usually a streak of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... neither of which belong to this family. Here every law of health is violated, foresight in providing for the physical comforts of the home is wanting; little attention is given to the education of the children; no sacrifices to-day enrich to-morrow; life is a humdrum, a routine, a dread, with no exuberance, joy, or hope. In time, such a life leads to failure and gloom, to secret, then to open vice, and to a final shipwreck of the home and of the individual. In a similar yet in ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... contrast to the usual unhappy relations of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... unimportant and unsubstantial to her had appeared the events of daily life as compared with the incidents of the world the old books in the musty library opened to her. The life of these magic tomes was the real, and that humdrum state through which her visible pathway lay was the dream. To the imaginative girl, half child, half poet, her marriage had prospectively seemed merely an accident of the trivial outside existence which surrounded without penetrating her true being; and the sharpness of the rude ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... have made up my mind what I will do, and you shall not dissuade me. I will go to New Spain with you. That will be glorious—far better than the humdrum life of sitting at home—and ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... your cobwebs!" she exclaimed, gaily. "A whole skyful, and you can sweep away to your heart's content. You need have no more humdrum days unless you choose." ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the children are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows; Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back again. ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of finding that there is a moral for everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key, like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... kettle boils, watch the dark shadows of the hills take form, perspective, and finally colour, knowing that there is another whole day begun, bright with chance and interest, and free from all cares. All cares—for who can be worried about the little matters of humdrum life when he may be dead before the night? Such a one was with us yesterday—see, there is a spare mug for coffee in the mess—but now gone for ever. And so it may be with us to-morrow. What does it matter that this or that is misunderstood or ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... manners. Charlotte Bronte electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masque.' She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... these words and dwelt on them. 'The real thing!' Of course, that was what it was to be, her marriage,—the woman's symbol of the Perfect, not merely Success (though with John they could not fail of worldly success), nor humdrum content—but, as Alice said, the real thing,—a state of passionate and complete union. Something in those misty brown eyes, something in the warm, deep voice of the older woman, in the prayer-like form of the wish, sank deep into ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... horse's leg, is a question not more appropriate to every teamster than to every Christian worker. Having once got out of the old rut, the next thing is to keep out. There is nothing more killing than ecclesiastical humdrum. Some persons do not like the Episcopal Church because they have the same prayers every Sabbath, but have we not for the last ten years been hearing the same prayers over and over again, the product of a self-manufactured liturgy that has not the thousandth part ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... night, but I told her you wished it and she came like a lamb. I often wonder if I did a wise thing in introducing them to you. Your sort of culture-an'-refinement' may rather upset them when the play is over and we all settle back to the humdrum." ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... at Mr Wodehouse's that night thought it a very agreeable little party, and more than once repeated the remark, so familiar to most persons in society in Carlingford—that Wodehouse's parties were the pleasantest going, though he himself was humdrum enough. Two or three of the people present had heard the gossip about Mr Wentworth, and discussed it, as was natural, taking different views of the subject; and poor Miss Wodehouse took up his defence so warmly, and with such tearful vehemence, that there were smiles to be seen on several faces. ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... natural gift for boxing, and one of the best whips I ever knew—we raced our coaches to Brighton and back for a thousand a side and he beat me by six yards—a splendid all round sportsman—ruined by matrimony! He's buried somewhere in the country and passing his days in the humdrum pursuit of being husband and father. Oh, bruise and blister me! it's all very pitiful, and yet"—here the Viscount sighed again—"I do not quarrel with the state, for marriage has often proved a—er—very present help in ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... you can't be serious in what you say. Bonaparte's marshals are great men, who act under the guidance of an omnipotent master-spirit. Your Wellington is the most humdrum of commonplace martinets, whose slow, mechanical movements are further cramped ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... sure I can leave my men. I think I told you in my letter last night that we received a frantic message from our Brigadier-General to expect an attack at 4 p.m. As a matter of fact, there was less fighting than usual, and I lost fewer men. My night's experiences were almost humdrum! Leaving my ruin at 9.15 p.m., accompanied by my bugler and clad in my old waterproof, I sallied out and ran the gauntlet of some snipers from the German lines, then dived into my ditch, floundered up it in mud for about a quarter of a mile, perhaps more, ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Goethe's criticism:[7] Amid such influences and surroundings, occupied with fads and studies of this sort, lacking all incentive from without to any important activity and confronted by the sole prospect of having to drag out a humdrum existence, men began to reflect with a sort of sullen exultation upon the possibility of departing this life at will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. This disposition was so general that "Werther" itself exerted a powerful influence, ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... about it something extremely captivating. Not only a long-lost heir—an heir of the melodrama, strutting into your hitherto unsuspected kingdom at just the right moment, loaded up with the consciousness of unguessed merit and of rights so long feloniously withheld—but even to be a common humdrum domestic heir is a profession to which few ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... and tinged with a certain pensiveness, the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough than any society the humdrum neighborhood could offer her. And when at the call of social duty she did go into company, she exercised a refining and subduing influence, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... was more like play than work. Oh, then it was April and I felt the rising tide of spring in my blood, and a bit of free activity like this under the blue sky suited my humour. A boy likes almost any work that affords him an escape from routine and humdrum and has an element of play in it. Turning the grindstone or the fanning mill or carrying together sheaves or picking up potatoes or carrying in wood were duties that were a drag ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went out ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... to operate the busy machinery. It was a noisy, monotonous occupation; a stretch of dull, wearisome hours, and frequently the boy and girl were so tired at night they had scarcely energy to move. And yet they toiled at the humdrum task gratefully, rejoicing in their wages which not only kept body and soul together but provided for the feeble mother ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... delight, to throw over life a pleasing glamor; it generally deals with love or heroic adventure; and it generally locates its scenes and characters in distant times and places, where it can work unhampered by our consciousness of the humdrum actualities of our daily experience. It may always be asked whether a writer of Romance makes his world seem convincingly real as we read or whether he frankly abandons all plausibility. The presence or absence of a ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... sir, I made no promise," said Mrs. Polly, walking up and down the perch very fast, turning at each end with a graceful and coquettish air. "After such a wonderful story as we have heard, it would quite spoil it to listen to such an old, humdrum affair as mine." ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... had trembled. He had chosen the Right—but the Right was ineffective, impotent, almost ludicrous. It left him shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The world had suddenly left him, as the vision of Carrie Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an insignificant cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery. His chance to do and thereby to ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the youth, with an apologetic air, as if he hardly cared to own such a humdrum relationship. 'Seraphine, the dressmaker, was complaining—wanted to see the colour of Lady Lesbia Haselden's money—vulgar curiosity—asked my old mother if she thought the account was safe, and so on. That's how I came ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... another cousin whose history is quite as good as 'Robinson Crusoe,' and I have engaged him to write it, but he never will. If I lived near him I could gradually get the material out of him; but at a distance I cannot get him even to write rough notes. On the other hand, we literary people are quite humdrum people in our ways of life, and our autobiographies would generally ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the world expects it you know; I do so hate to fulfil people's expectations: it is so commonplace and humdrum! ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... consequence enormously distended. Eventually the strange spectacle is seen of miniature frogs jumping out of their father's mouth. Needless to say we are not citing these methods of parental care as examples of intelligence; but perhaps they correct the impression of amphibians as a rather humdrum race. Whatever be the mental aspect of the facts, there has certainly been some kind of experimenting, and the increase of parental care, so marked in many amphibians, with associated reduction of the number of offspring is a finger-post ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... to the loaves and fishes in the way of scholarships and fellowships, he is compelled, by the laws of his caste, to renounce some of the most sensible and healthful amusements which a university life offers. He must lead a very humdrum sort of life indeed. It is not enough that he should be free from the stains of vice and immorality; that his principles and habits should be those of a gentleman; that he should avoid excesses, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... father, a born soldier, to seek his line in diplomacy; wherein he had no sooner built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there can be no question whatever, since ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... surprised at you! What do you mean by such conduct? What has become of that big room in your heart, which you keep brimful of love for babies and little bits of children? Do you want them to sit humdrum on rainy days, when they are tired of playing with dolls, and tops, and kittens, and have no story book for their kind mammas to read to them? This will never do, Aunt Fanny. Please to ...
— Little Mittens for The Little Darlings - Being the Second Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke six words or drank so much as a ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... unlimited field for self-indulgence. But, Sir, as every one will acknowledge who was brought into daily contact with him in the sphere of affairs, his duty to the State always came first. In this great business community there was no better man of business, no man by whom the humdrum obligations—punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy of time and speech—were more keenly recognized or more severely practised. I speak with the privilege of close experience when I say that wherever he was, whatever may have been his apparent ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... a low, newspaper, humdrum, lawsuit Country, where a young couple of the same ages Can't form a friendship, but the world o'erawes it. A verdict—grievous foe to those who cause it!- Forms a sad climax to romantic homages; Besides those soothing speeches of the pleaders, And ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough for—for marriage? Wouldn't I get horribly tired? Wouldn't Grant and humdrum be better? less wearying? "And when she awakened she found her problem all but solved." I'll send him packing and take Grant," she found herself saying, "unless some excellent reason for doing otherwise appears. Grandmother was right. Engaging ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... late darling, your late treasure, who is now merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to take your ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... England to continue his comparatively humdrum order of advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct topographical and antiquarian investigations in a country where practical exertions ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one of these flies, as it were, of life should get preserved in amber more than another. Talk, indeed, about luck and cunning; what a grain of sand as against a hundredweight is cunning's share here as against luck's. What moment could be more humdrum and unworthy of special record than the one chosen by the artist for the chapel we are considering? Why should this one get arrested in its flight and made immortal when so many worthier ones have perished? Yet ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... out of the national treasury. But Jackson drew from the experience only gall and wormwood. About the time when the men reached Natchez, Congress definitely authorized the President to take possession of Mobile and that part of Florida west of the Perdido River; and, back once more in the humdrum life of Nashville, the disappointed officer could only sit idly by while his pet project was successfully carried out by General Wilkinson, the man whom, perhaps above all others, he loathed. But other work was preparing; ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Fairfeather. "Here we are spending our lives in this humdrum place, and Spare making his fortune at the Court with two or three paltry green leaves! What would they say to our golden ones? Let us pack up and make our way to the King's palace. I am sure he will make you a lord and me a lady of honour, not to speak of all the fine clothes and ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... unwholesome competition. The temptation to "rustle" stock, to hold up outfits carrying pay to the soldiers, to live well merely as a gunman for one of the big interests on the river, made the honest business of every-day life a humdrum affair. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... Prescott, their aunt, Miss Sallie Prescott, with whom they made their home, and their chums, Jess and Jimsy Bancroft, had returned from the Nevada alkali wastes, the red building which engaged their attention that morning had caused a good deal of speculation in the humdrum Long Island village of Sandy Beach. In the first place, coincident with the completion of the building, a new element had been introduced into the little community by the arrival of several keen-eyed, close-mouthed men, who boarded at ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... various matters in Bath he should go down to stay with his sister for a time, joining me in Montague Street later on. While he was away in Birmingham, however, an extraordinary change came into my humdrum life, and when he rejoined me a few weeks later, I—selfish brute—was so overwhelmed with the trouble that had befallen me that I thought very little indeed of his affairs. He took this quite as a matter of course, and what I should have done ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... led a humdrum life for the past month. Marian and Elinor have begun to potter about in my laboratory. They come there every day for an hour to work and study, as they ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... college. In his own opinion, he ought to see something of the world, and have his youthful fling. Later on, when he got ready to settle down, if Blanche were still in the humor, they might marry, and sink to the humdrum level of other old married people. The fact that Blanche Leary was visiting his mother during his unexpectedly long absence had not operated at all to hasten his return to North Carolina. He had been having a very good time at Clarence, and, at the distance of several hundred miles, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Gilmour had taken more care of himself and lived longer?" I would answer: "I don't know. His life was beautiful, and I would not alter it if I could. A few years of such service as he gave Christ are worth a hundred years of humdrum toil. We need the inspiration of such a life as his. Heaven, too, is the richer for such a man and such a life. The pearly gates opened wide, I have no doubt, to receive him. Angels and men gave him glad welcome, and what a smile would light ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... turned on the hail light she saw an envelope on the floor. Evidently it had been shoved under the door. It was unstamped. She opened it, and stepped out of the humdrum into ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... themselves, of such as aim at a high standard of excellence, of such as have in them the makings of striking and eloquent preachers. Dull and stupid fellows never deviate into the extravagance and absurdity which I specially understand by Veal. They plod along in a humdrum manner; there is no poetry in their soul,—none of those ambitious stirrings which lead the man who has in him the true spark of genius to try for grand things and incur severe and ignominious tumbles. A heavy dray-horse, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... milk-pail under the pump. Pleasure softens pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day, that shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left with me, I should have made the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... Orion and Tristram of Lyonesse. Yet not so long as "African Game Trails" and the "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" endure, to lift the imagination to those noble sports denied to the run of mortals by poverty, feebleness, timidity, the engrossments of the humdrum, everyday life, or lack of enterprise and opportunity. Old scraps of hunting song thrill us with the great adventure: "In the wild chamois' track at break of day"; "We'll chase the antelope over the plain"; "Afar ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... thousands who enter it as brilliant young ladies, and come from it at the end of a few years morbid, harassed, depressed; sunk in all the graces and powers that make a woman's life beautiful and distinct from a man's. The circle in many cases is so narrow that there is no room for growth. The humdrum toils, the petty cares and rude contact with hired help, sink many a charming woman into a domestic ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Alexander should come over from Hanover and join him at Bath, which was done. Next they wanted to rescue their sister Caroline from her humdrum existence, but this was a more difficult matter. Caroline's journal gives an account of her life at this time that is instructive. Here are a few extracts ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... he records above, he made friends with that chivalric champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here also he obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless lawyer, who, like Page, was interested more in books and writing than in the humdrum of professional life, and who was then engaged in putting together a brochure on Congressional Government which immediately gave him a national standing. The name of this ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the ultimate magic of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a number of ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light; stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong. This explains the love which Heine, that Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France; it explains the preference ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... literal sense of the words, are entering on a path altogether new and untrodden. But they will be in the minority, and for the most of us the days that were full of new possibilities are at an end, and we have to expect little more than the monotonous repetition of the habitual, humdrum duties of mature life. We have climbed the winding paths up the hill, and most of us are upon the long plateau that stretches unvaried, until it begins to dip at the further edge. And some of us are going down that other side ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of them and so conclude myself escaped which is a small good Fortune in the midste of my Discouragements." * * A burst of gusty laughter still echoes along the crowded deck of the letter-of-marque schooner Success, whose master, Captain Philip Thrash, inserted this diverting comment in his humdrum record of the day's work: "At one half past 8 discovered a sail ahead. Tacked ship. At 9 tacked ship again and past just to Leeward of the Sail which appeared to be a damn'd Comical Boat, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... cruised the shores of the far-famed and much-written-about Barbary Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general metropolitan average—that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the avowedly wicked section of ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... lady politicians, made up as it is of these details and personalities. And the more interested I am in the thing itself, the more angry I am with the nonsense they talk about it, and had rather listen to the most humdrum domestic twaddle. Mind, I mean the regular hardened lady politicians who talk of nothing else, of whom I could name several, but ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... learned how people received, how they set their tables and served them, how they built their houses and furnished them. She learned not only the possibilities but the actualities of splendor and luxury in the town where she had led a retired and humdrum existence for nearly a lifetime. She now thrust her head forth from her dim old cavern, and fed her eyes on the flowers and fields and skies and goodly streams of ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... could run off with a circus! Wouldn't it be great? No more splitting kindling and carrying in coal; no more: "Hurry up, now, or you'll be late for school;" no more poking along in a humdrum existence, never going any place or seeing anything, but the glad, free, untrammeled life, the life of a circus-boy, standing up on top of somebody's head (you could pretend he was your daddy. Who'd ever know the difference?) ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... What a widespread, horrible butchery was being nursed and nourished here in this obscure family of peace? Surely this good folk did not appreciate the meaning of it all. Was it not merely something awfully exciting to talk about, argue about, puzzle over, in the prosaic humdrum at ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... where "man's greatest enemy is man." There is ample room for double the population, and yet a million acres of virgin soil only awaiting the co-operation of husbandman and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons, shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... at all; only humdrum work. You must not anticipate trouble. Soldiers, you know, jest and laugh even when going into battle, and they are all the better soldiers for the fact. No; I have given you a wrong impression. Nothing has been humdrum to-day. An acquaintance ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... pleasant voice. "We have heard so much of you from Cedric that you seem quite an old friend. I am afraid you will find us very quiet, homely people; but I daresay Cedric will have prepared you for that. He grumbles dreadfully, poor boy, at our old-fashioned, humdrum ways." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the time Paris lives an every-day, humdrum life, makes the best of everything, and ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... humdrum winter, for, as Harry said, "it was hard times for every one." Mr. Dean grew gray with the weight of business cares about which he never spoke; Mrs. Dean, laboring under the delusion that an invalid was a necessary appendage to the family, installed ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... I am asking you to say!" he answered. "My first and main object was to amuse you. Your life seemed so humdrum and lacking in the unexpected. Has it been ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... shouted at her. But there were few interests in Mrs. Quinlan's humdrum existence, and seldom did she have an exciting incident to relate and an eager audience to hang upon her words. She sat down ponderously and prepared to make the most of the ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... for me," he would exclaim every half-hour. He went to see people who were doing things. He went to see people who were doing nothing. In every town he would discover somebody of unusual attainment. He made every town an unusual town. He turned the humdrum travel map into a wonderland. He scolded lazy towns and praised enterprising ones. He stopped young fellows on the streets. "What are you going to do in life?" Perhaps the young man would say, "I have no chance." "You come to Chicago and ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... assumed most of those petty camp tasks which provoke tired trailers, those humdrum duties which are so trying to exhausted nerves, and of course they wore upon him as they wear upon every man. But, once he had taken them over, he began to resent Grant's easy relinquishment; it rankled him to realize how willingly the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... they satisfy her now? They should satisfy her. She'd work harder than ever on jam advertisements and when she had saved a lot of money she'd go to New York and get a big position and some people would have to admit that it would have been a waste to tie her down to a humdrum—what was it Mary Rose had said?—"home for a family." Her lip curled with scorn. Mary Rose was only a child. She didn't know that homes and families were not the most important things in the world. Someone else had ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... retorted Lorna petulantly. "There's no romance in you, Mary. You're just humdrum and old-fashioned and narrow. Think of the beautiful costumes, and the lights, the music, the applause of thousands! Oh, it must be wonderful to thrill an audience, and have hundreds of men worshiping you, and all ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... their spell; hard facts we prize In our humdrum philosophy; But, could we change, who would not be A suitor ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... answered the fairy. "I'm tired of being a humdrum fairy year in and year out. Of course, I do not wish to become a mortal for all time, for that would get monotonous, too; but to live a short while as the earth people do would amuse ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... smoke, Sweetly snoring in his cloak; Who is he? 'Tis humdrum Wynne, Half encompassed by his kin: There observe the tribe of Bingham, For he never fails to bring 'em; While he sleeps the whole debate, They submissive round him wait; Yet would gladly see the hunks In his grave, and search his ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... and for a while it was a humdrum time. Nothing happened. The edge of excitement had become blunted. The streets were not so crowded. The working class did not come uptown any more to see how we were taking the strike. And there were not so many automobiles running around. The repair-shops ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... can change a man from a law-abiding, self-respecting, and obedient husband into a demon and a housebreaker. And Mr. Cassidy has also clearly proven on the other hand how that same drink can change a man from the ordinary humdrum things of life and turn his mind to noble ideals, and make of him an artist and an inspired one at that. Now science has proved to us that in every one man there are two men,—the artist, if I might be permitted to use the term, ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... take Wargrave long to settle down again into the routine of regimental life and the humdrum existence of a small Indian station. But he had never before been quartered in so remote and dull a spot as Rohar. The only distractions it offered besides the shooting and pigsticking were two tennis afternoons weekly, one at the Residency, the other at the Mess. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... jungle peoples for whom familiarity had bred no contempt within his breast. The least of them interested him, and, too, there were those with whom he always made friends easily, and there were his hereditary enemies whose presence gave a spice to life that might otherwise have become humdrum and monotonous. ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... afraid A—— will miss us terribly, dear old soul! He is very fond of having us here, and is always bemoaning our departure. I think it will make a great difference to him and to his humdrum hard-working life, as we are always cheery and have never had a difficulty or annoyance ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... who in the turmoil of existence have not much prospect of anything so peaceful. And then domestic comfort is often so sure that nothing but its own virtue could have purchased such an exemption from the ills of life. The Warren had been a few months ago a pattern of humdrum peacefulness. The impatience that sometimes lit up a little fire in Mrs. Warrender's eyes was so out of character, so improbable, that any one who suspected it believed himself to have been deceived; for who could suppose the mother to be tired ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... his mind was everywhere acknowledged, but someway he did not seem to get on. Men who have managed the finances of a nation often have not been able successfully to control their own; and more than once we have had the spectacle of one who could do the thinking for a world failing in the humdrum duties of a citizen and neighbor. Coleridge tried various things, among others a secretaryship that took him to Malta, but the lack of system in his habits and his absent-mindedness made him the prey and butt ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Mrs. Bingle stepped into a new and hitherto unsuspected world the instant they entered Pierre's. They stepped out of it at ten o'clock that night and into a very commonplace, humdrum sort of automobile and were whisked homeward by an astonished, unbelieving chauffeur. They had drunk the health of Napoleon the present, Napoleon the past, and Napoleon the future, and they had done it from cobwebby, mouldy bottles out of the uttermost depths of ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... they made their home, and their chums, Jess and Jimsy Bancroft, had returned from the Nevada alkali wastes, the red building which engaged their attention that morning had caused a good deal of speculation in the humdrum Long Island village of Sandy Beach. In the first place, coincident with the completion of the building, a new element had been introduced into the little community by the arrival of several keen-eyed, close-mouthed ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... Annie was continuing her lecture. "I dare say Tom Robinson will do very well—all the better, perhaps, because he has no ambition, and is content to make money in the most humdrum way ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... His depression was due to that feeling which takes possession of one before any change of place, a feeling experienced by all melancholy, dreaming people and unknown to those of energetic, sanguine temperaments, who always rejoice at any break in the humdrum of their daily existence, and welcome a change of abode with pleasure. Nejdanov was so lost in his meditations that his thoughts began quite unconsciously to take the form of words. His wandering sensations began to arrange themselves into ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... retained—what I saw and heard; saw and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies of a world of which I knew so little, it is not to be doubted that I constructed ideals far beyond the humdrum reality of home life, impracticable ideals that tended only to separate me more from other men. Their world was not my world; this I knew full well, and I sometimes thought they knew it; for while no rude treatment marked their intercourse ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... was a man named Saynt Augustine got run out of Domingo, which is a Dago island. He come to Philadelphia, an' he was dead broke. But Saynt Augustine was a live man, an' he saw Philadelphia was full o' Quakers that dressed plain an' eat humdrum. So he started cookin' Domingo way for 'em, an' they caught right ahold. Terrapin, he gave 'em, an' croakeets, an' he'd use forty chickens to make a broth he called consommay. An' he got rich, and Philadelphia got well known, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... certain ignoramuses—that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there can be no question ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... pity, or of gratitude that she lived in a time when heroic things could happen right at home and to the lowliest, even to her; sweet woes like this, that let down, for virtuous love, the barriers of humdrum convention. But Flora draws us on, she and Anna. As she touched the bell-knob Constance sprang out to welcome her, though not to ask her in—till she could have a word with her alone, the young ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... unknown Antarctic land in which he extended Africa.[8] The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one side to the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west, though there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it was not yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a melange of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work of imaginary astronomical ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... which at best would only have displayed a little recently acquired book knowledge. When I thought of the number of scholars who could treat this part of the question infinitely better than myself, I realized how much wiser it would be—though the task is more humdrum—to deal with the present possibilities of story-telling for our generation ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... drifted down from high empyreans of great ideals and lofty speculations into a humdrum life, that was only saved from sordidness by the sacred duties of my office. After all, I find that we are not independent of our circumstances. We are fashioned and moulded by them as plaster of Paris is fashioned and moulded into angels or gargoyles by the deft hand of the sculptor. "Thou ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling." But this picture has also its obverse side. Whole generations then lived a monotonous, ignorant, prejudiced, and humdrum life. They had no enterprize, no energy, little industry, and were content to die where they were born. The seclusion in which they were compelled to live, produced a picturesqueness of manners which is pleasant to look back upon, now ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... fact, Vera Nevill was an incongruous element in the Daintree household. In that quiet humdrum country clergyman's life she was as much out of her proper place as a bird of paradise in a chicken yard, or a Gloire de Dijon rose in ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... young Edison began to get tired of the humdrum life of a telegraph operator in Boston. As I have told you, after the vote-recorder, he had invented a stock ticker and started a quotation service in Boston. He opened operations from a room over the Gold Exchange with ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... relapsing into his armchair and putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... thread of life, was the eldest of the three. She held in her hand a distaff, wound with black and white woollen yarn, with which were sparingly intermixed strands of silk and gold. The wool stood for the humdrum everyday life of man: the silk and gold marked the days of mirth and gladness, always, alas! too ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... adventurous, migratory existence which they lead. Boys so constituted run away to sea, take jobs with traveling circuses, or enlist as soldiers. The type is familiar and not uncommon. Such individuals cannot be content with the prosaic, humdrum, monotonous life of regular employment. As a rule we do not look upon this trait in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... been thinking and have made up my mind what I will do, and you shall not dissuade me. I will go to New Spain with you. That will be glorious—far better than the humdrum life of sitting at home—and will ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... perhaps would, compensate him for his misery. But there was the misery very plain. He must give up his clubs, and his fashion, and all that he had hitherto gained, and be content to live a plain, humdrum, domestic life, with eight hundred a year, and a small house, full of babies. It was not the kind of Elysium for which he had tutored himself. Lily was very nice, very nice indeed. She was, as he said to himself, "by odds, the ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... of which one can sell many and much,—such are the objects which claim the labor of genius now. Fools grieve that Art is dead; 'lives at best only in imitation;' and that we have chanced on a godless, humdrum, steam and leather age—one of prose and dust, facts and factories. Sometimes come gasping efforts—sickly self-persuasions that all is not so bad as it seems. Mr. Slasher of the Sunday paper is ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... days to her, for something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few small pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier. "I can't do it. I wasn't meant for a life like this, and I know I shall break away and do something desperate if somebody doesn't come and help me," she said to ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... author proposes to 'personally conduct' his army of readers on a grand tour of the world, there will be a terrible scramble for excursion tickets—that is, the opening volume of the 'Globe Trotting Series.' Of one thing the boys may be dead sure: it will be no tame, humdrum journey; for Oliver Optic does not believe that fun and excitement are injurious to boys, but, on the contrary, if of the right kind, he thinks ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale beatitude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It swept away hesitation, a sick man's nicety and doubts, all ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Charleston secession celebration on the 17th had been held while he was on his way; the glare of its illumination was extinguished, the smoke of its bonfires had been dissipated by the fresh Atlantic breezes, and its holiday insurgents had returned to the humdrum of their routine employments. It was, therefore, in uninterrupted quiet that on the 23d of November he in company with Captain Foster made a tour of inspection to the different forts, and on the same day wrote out and transmitted to the War Department a somewhat detailed report of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... boy," replied the agent, nodding; "why, we took several voyages together, and had lots of queer adventures. I never dreamed that my wild old friend Alan would settle down to this humdrum life, as a lumber merchant, and the head of a family. But I suppose it all came of his meeting a girl. And after knowing his fine wife I don't blame him a bit; though I've kept right along in the same old groove, and see ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... seemed to be expected, for no time was lost in procuring her former place beside the croupier. It is my opinion that though croupiers seem such ordinary, humdrum officials—men who care nothing whether the bank wins or loses—they are, in reality, anything but indifferent to the bank's losing, and are given instructions to attract players, and to keep a watch over the bank's interests; as also, that for such services, these officials are awarded prizes ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... hides; and though we were always in the water, the surf hardly leaving us a dry thread from morning till night, yet we were young, and the climate was good, and we thought it much better than the quiet, humdrum drag and pull on board ship. We made the acquaintance of nearly half California; for, besides carrying everybody in our boat,— men, women, and children,— all the messages, letters, and light packages went by us, and, being known by our dress, we ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... and the pearl of a woman who had given herself to him so long ago gained a more priceless value with every moment's thought, "Ah, sweet Madge! I'm the blessed idiot you loved and toiled for at Santa Barbara! I shouldn't have believed that such a thing could happen in this humdrum world." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... a long, lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke six words or drank so much as a single glass of wine, all through the dinner. The ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... and dignity which one always finds in living within one's income. Frugality, exactitude in business, faithfulness to all engagements, great or small, punctuality, that economy of time, are usually set down among the minor moralities of life, more humdrum than heroic; but under how many circumstances and conditions do they reveal themselves as cardinal virtues, as things on which depend the comfort and dignity of life! It seems that these things were so impressed on the mind and heart of the young Victoria by her careful, methodical ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... and courting of a mate, that greatest of all adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her. ... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... there doesn't I shall be disappointed! We're all eager for adventures, and that's why I took this long, roundabout way to the ranch. We could have gone there in next to no time, by rail, but that's too humdrum a thing. Anyhow, I bow to Miss Milliken's prejudices for the time being. We shall be in sight of each other all the time, I expect, and meet at Roderick's for our suppers and beds! All off for San Leon that's going!" cried Mr. ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... drifted. Jennie continued her work with Mrs. Bracebridge. Sebastian fixed himself firmly in his clerkship in the cigar store. George was promoted to the noble sum of three dollars, and then three-fifty. It was a narrow, humdrum life the family led. Coal, groceries, shoes, and clothing were the uppermost topics of their conversation; every one felt the stress and strain of trying to make ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Yet beneath the humdrum, casual, almost indifferent manner in which the proceedings seemed to be conducted each side was watching every move made by the other with the tension of a tiger ready to spring upon its prey. Babson and O'Brien were engaged in forcing upon the defense a jury composed entirely of case-hardened ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... proposed that Alexander should come over from Hanover and join him at Bath, which was done. Next they wanted to rescue their sister Caroline from her humdrum existence, but this was a more difficult matter. Caroline's journal gives an account of her life at this time that is instructive. Here are a few ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... that my exterior was ugly, but I could derive no comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever, or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less, since, although I was not exactly small of stature, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... politicians, made up as it is of these details and personalities. And the more interested I am in the thing itself, the more angry I am with the nonsense they talk about it, and had rather listen to the most humdrum domestic twaddle. Mind, I mean the regular hardened lady politicians who talk of nothing else, of whom I could name several, but ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... about them. They seem impossible to me now, and almost as if it had all happened to some one else, so completely have I forgotten the man except as the source and cause of an immeasurable horror. Yet he was not bad himself; only ordinary and humdrum. Indeed, I believe he was very good in ways, or so his brother once assured me. We would not have been married in the way we were if he had not wanted to go to the Klondike for the purpose of making money and making it quickly, so that ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... with my mallet and see the pieces fly was more like play than work. Oh, then it was April and I felt the rising tide of spring in my blood, and a bit of free activity like this under the blue sky suited my humour. A boy likes almost any work that affords him an escape from routine and humdrum and has an element of play in it. Turning the grindstone or the fanning mill or carrying together sheaves or picking up potatoes or carrying in wood were duties that were a drag ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... cried Savinien, bitterly; "there's the sore point. Now look here; my friend, do you think that an organization like mine is made to bend to the trivialities of a copying clerk's work? To follow the humdrum of every-day routine? To blacken paper? To become a servant?—me! with what I have in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... and had not yet the direful knowledge of good and evil that comes with years; and he was so very handsome, and talked in a way that was so new to me, and was so much more charming than the well-bred converse of the humdrum county families with whom I had occasionally sojourned for ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... island, and at the same time congratulate himself on the self-restraint he shows in not going to a ball every night. Similarly our England may have a right to congratulate itself upon the fact that her politics are very quiet, amicable, and humdrum. But she must not congratulate herself upon that fact and also congratulate herself upon the self-restraint she shows in not tearing herself and her citizens into rags. Between two English Privy Councillors ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... was in much the same fix that you were in to-night, and it was my only way out. I never meant it for anything more; but I'd tasted blood, and it was all over with me. Why should I work when I could steal? Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger and a decent living were all going begging together? Of course it's very wrong, but we can't all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with. Besides, you're not at it all the time. ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... most are those who know how to alternate pity and terror. There is something of the same sort in these variations of the equable procession of Hooker's syllogisms, these flower-gardens scattered, if not in the wilderness, yet in the humdrum arable ground of his collections from fathers and philosophers, his marshallings of facts and theories against the counter-theories of Cartwright and Travers. Neither before him nor in his time, nor for generations after him—scarcely, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... T.O. murmured after a while, "that places like this would be humdrum-y and commonplace? But I guess there are 'stories' everywhere. I'm beginning to find out ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... she has only very humdrum stories to tell in return for these; but she ekes out her letters pretty well, after all, and what they lack in novelty is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... and then the thought that I've never seen more than a little corner of it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... I speak of people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... with Roger much as though it were a stout set of palings with "No Right of Way" written across them in large letters. Outside, the waves of emotion might surge in vain, while within, she and Roger would settle down to the humdrum placidity of married life. But the dull, ceaseless ache at her heart made her sometimes question whether anything in the world could keep at bay ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... from her; and he cannot afford, as we know, to cultivate her society, twice ruinous as it is for him. Sooner or later that woman will throw over this dear brother of ours, but not before she has spoiled him for hard work, and given him a taste for luxury and a contempt for our humdrum life. She will develop his love of enjoyment, his inclination for idleness, that debauches a poetic soul. Yes, it makes me tremble to think that this great lady may make a plaything of Lucien. If she ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... that papa gave us, I enjoyed the reception immensely. Oh, I'd love to be out in society," she said, with sparkling eyes, "and meet lots of people, and go to balls and receptions and all those affairs every day of my life. That's what I call living,—not this stupid, humdrum school life; and I 'll have them all, too, some day, see if I don't," she ended, with a toss of her head and a little conscious laugh. Nora knows she's pretty; that's one of the things ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... theatre is a phantasy world. With the rising of the curtain we forget our outside life; we live the part of the hero or the heroine. To this day I always leave a theatre with a vague depression of spirits; everyday humdrum life chills me when I come out to the street. Reality is always difficult to face. The great popularity of the cinema is due to this human desire for make-believe. Cinema-going is a regression to the infantile; we return to the childish phase where the wish was all powerful. In the cinema the villain ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... But I realize fully that having met him there could never be any other man for her but him. Her love for him is like a flame, transforming her. I could never have called forth such passion from her. I see clearly now how foolish it was in me to have hoped it. There was nothing in the humdrum, commonplace brotherly affection which she thought I gave her to arouse the romance which I know slumbers under that calm, cold exterior ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... eagerness. This was like a picnic in the humdrum life of the farm hand. Except when the circus came to town, or there was a Harvest Home day, poor Felix knew little beyond the eternal grind of getting up before dawn, and working until long ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... O'Brien, sly Jones, sturdy Mackay, and that guileless innocent, "Jim Fair," are toiling miners or "business men." Their peculiar talents are hidden by the obscurity of humdrum, honest labor. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and practise fishing ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... not at all an unsatisfactory study, in this case. And let me tell you, Miss Birdie, it is no bad thing to be shut in for a few months with a few good books and a couple of thoroughly simple-hearted people, who have thought a good deal in their quiet humdrum way.' ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... America, Turkey, the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travellers, governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life, were all laid under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum nursery corner. All Mr. Edgeworth's varied teaching and experience, all his daughter's genius of observation, came to interest and delight our play-time, and that of a thousand other little children in different parts of the world. People justly praise Miss Edgeworth's admirable stories ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... to me, and I was able to creep up close and kneel within two feet of the hole. The main nest was twenty feet away, and this was a special exit made for the occasion—a triumphal gateway erected far away from the humdrum leaf traffic. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... of his inability and ignorance of her own attitude fell upon him like a chill, for she had never written or said a word to him that might not have passed between any two college friends. Such thoughts occupied him, until finally, as often fortunately happens in our mental crises, a humdrum, domestic voice, the supper bell, called him, and leaving his garments strewn about the ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... disturbed by the growlings of the two young bulls, looked up half apathetic, half interested. They were sleepy, but they sensed a fight. It would break the monotony of the humdrum ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... saving Evie from moral disaster, he rises to the height of his chance and fulfils his ideals. But he is misunderstood by his wife, who sues him for a divorce but fails to bring conclusive evidence. The book ends happily, and throughout its course is a fine picture of a rather humdrum soul seeking—and reaching—the heights of opportunity ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... that it was bare, pure humanity. At times it is difficult not to believe that Carlyle, notwithstanding his piety, loves it all the more on that account. It is strange that an example so salutary and stimulating to the poorest and meanest of us should be set by an unbelieving king, and that my humdrum existence should be secretly supported by "Frederick II. ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... feelings he listened. He could not but acknowledge that such a life was better suited to one of Fulvia's gifts and ambitions than the humdrum existence of a Swiss town; yet his first sensation was one of obscure jealousy, of reluctance to think of her as having definitely broken with the past. He had pictured her as adrift, like himself, on a dark sea of uncertainties; and to learn that she had found a ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... to Rio Janeiro was without accident or any thing to vary the usual monotony. We soon settled down to the humdrum of a long voyage, reading some, not much; playing games, but never gambling; and chiefly engaged in eating our meals regularly. In crossing the equator we had the usual visit of Neptune and his wife, who, with a large razor and a bucket of soapsuds, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... what that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making humdrum and workaday over to his heart's desire. The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough. These grew with him, it might be said—and indeed in his lifetime was often said—into wonders without a foot upon earth. But if one took as figures and symbols ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... silent, is mightier than all lightnings. The Spirit, which is the 'Spirit of love,' is therefore 'the Spirit of power.' The true type of Christian character, which the gospel has brought into being, looks modest, inconspicuous and humdrum, by the side of the more brilliant and vulgar beauties of the world's ideals. Just as the iridescent hues on a dove's neck, and the quiet blue of its plumage, look modest and Quaker-like beside gaudy parroquets and other bedizened birds, so the Christian type of character, patient, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... few years morbid, harassed, depressed; sunk in all the graces and powers that make a woman's life beautiful and distinct from a man's. The circle in many cases is so narrow that there is no room for growth. The humdrum toils, the petty cares and rude contact with hired help, sink many a charming woman into a domestic ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... even he will prefer to hear the music and will always consider this the final test. Thus it is also with verse: it must be read aloud. Lyric verse is best read in privacy or in a small congenial group. When the humdrum noise and the humdrum cares of the world have vanished, then the moment has come when one may steep one's soul in lyric beauty. One never tires of a really great lyric: like a true friend, a longer ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... to occupy them. Instructions were issued to wagon lines that all surplus kit and stores were to be left behind, as a strenuous time was in store for us, and all ranks responded with a will to the hard work these preparations necessitated. Drivers were elated at the prospect of a change from their humdrum existence, and their enthusiasm knew no bounds. New reinforcing batteries appeared like mushrooms during the night, and lay safely ensconced in their appointed places in readiness for the coming fray, while the neighbourhood behind the lines ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... dream of running away and seeing the world and having great adventures," thought Archey, his frown forgotten. He didn't consciously put it into words, but deep from his mind arose a feeling of the coming true of great dreams—of running away from the humdrum of life, of seeing the world, of taking a part in the greatest adventure ever staged ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... part, to Hickman's whining, creeping, submissive courtship, that I now expect nothing but whine and cringe from him: and am so little moved with his nonsense, that I am frequently forced to go to my harpsichord, to keep me awake, and to silence his humdrum. Whereas Lovelace keeps up the ball with a witness, and all his address and conversation is one continual ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... have guessed that Mr. Jones's placid countenance and rotund frame concealed an imagination that was almost boyish in its unsatisfied craving for adventure? Humdrum year had succeeded humdrum year, yet he had never despaired. Some day would come that great moment when the limelight of the world's wonder would centre on him, and he would hold the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... Hartley at tea in the sitting-room, with its semi-official air of being used for serious work, and Hartley fulfilled his avocation by bringing Coryndon back from strange places into the heart of sane humdrum existence. Surely if some men are pillars, and others rockets, and more poets, professors and preachers, some are hand-rails, and only the man who has just been standing on a dizzy height looking sheer into the bottomless pit where nothing is safe and where life ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... orthodox toes Are seldom withdrawn from the stirrup. Dr. Humdrum, whose eloquence flows, Like droppings of sweet poppy syrup; Dr. Rosygill puffing and fanning, And wiping away perspiration; Dr. Humbug, who proved Mr. Canning The ...
— English Satires • Various
... meal then, this town and this people (which were all of a humdrum sort), and going out by the gate, the left side of which is made up of a church, I went a little way on the short road to San Lorenzo, but I had no intention of going far, for (as you know by this time) the night had become my day and ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... am asking you to say!" he answered. "My first and main object was to amuse you. Your life seemed so humdrum and lacking in the unexpected. Has ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... the copper and brass, are the hedges of beech and holly. Both are commonly planted and carefully tended as borders and shelters to the less important parts of gardens; as screens also to block out the humdrum but necessary portions of the curtilage, such as the forcing-pits for early plants, minor offices, timber yards, and the like; and to shelter vegetable gardens (for which the Dutch use screens of dried reeds). Holly makes the best and most impenetrable of all hedges ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... aristocratic classes in England did largely wish to see the success of the Southern armies. The Southerner, it was understood, was a gentleman, a man of mettle and spirit, and in many cases the direct descendant of an old English Cavalier family; while the Northerners were for the most part but humdrum and commercially minded people who inherited the necessarily somewhat bigoted, if excellent, characteristics of their Dutch, Puritan, or Quaker ancestors. The view had at least sufficient historical basis to serve ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... score of things he might have done. His Highness, however, was in much too agitated a frame of mind to turn his attention to such humdrum tasks. Furthermore, since he had pledged himself to bear a hand wherever it was needed, he felt he should be on the spot and within call. And if beneath this worthy motive lurked a certain desire to see whatever there was to be seen, who can say his curiosity was not pardonable? One does not ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... to work in. If it was, I've no business here. You must think up something spicy, and no make-believe. I want to go somewhere where I can laugh with my whole heart. I can't go on much longer at this old humdrum, monotonous jog, any more than your colts up at the farm could go around like the plow-horses, and I know it isn't right to expect it of me. And yet what has been the case? Off early in the morning to work, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... good, and gold, consequent instantaneously on this happy publication—after reasonably expecting that judges would quote it in their ermine, and sergeants consult it in their silk—that London would be startled by the event from the humdrum of its ordinary routine—and the wondering world applaud the name of Henry Clements—O, heart-sickening reality! what was the result of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... night that we received a frantic message from our Brigadier-General to expect an attack at 4 p.m. As a matter of fact, there was less fighting than usual, and I lost fewer men. My night's experiences were almost humdrum! Leaving my ruin at 9.15 p.m., accompanied by my bugler and clad in my old waterproof, I sallied out and ran the gauntlet of some snipers from the German lines, then dived into my ditch, floundered up it in mud for about a quarter ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... o'clock on the following afternoon Mr Beveridge and Moggridge were walking leisurely down the long drive leading from the mansion of Clankwood to the gate that opened on the humdrum outer world. Finding that an inelastic matter of yards was all the tether he could hope for, Mr Beveridge thought it best to take the bull by the horns, and make a companion of this necessity. So he kept his attendant ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... herring. Of our three survivors Rupert alone was to win the coveted distinction. He grew to be a fine boy and was eaten at Hammersmith, where his plump but delicate roe gave the greatest satisfaction. It was not eaten in the ordinary humdrum way, but was thickly spread on a piece of buttered toast, generously peppered, and devoured. And when his "wish" was placed on the kitchen-range, swelled rapidly and burst with a loud report, his cup ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... Seattle, as all along the line, the talk a year ago had been almost entirely on gold hunting. Every storekeeper advertised Klondike goods, but these signs were now rusty and faded. The fever was over, the reign of the humdrum was restored. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... that Anne soon showed a dislike for the humdrum life on a plantation, and meeting with a young sailor, who owned nothing in the world but the becoming clothes he wore, she married him. Thereupon her father, who seems to have been as hot-headed as his daughter, ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... "If Ruth Schuyler did live two lives it's easily understood why. Because that brute of a man allowed her no gayety, no pleasure, no fun of any sort compatible with her youth and tastes. He let her do nothing, have nothing, save in the old, humdrum ways that appealed to his notion of propriety. But he himself was no Puritan! He ran his own gait, and, unknown to his wife and sisters, he was a roue and a rounder! Whatever Ruth Schuyler may have ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... amazingly radiant thing in it was what had happened to her and Bob Dillon. She pitied everybody else in the universe. They were so blind! They looked, but they did not see what was so clear to eyes from which the veil had been stripped. They went about their humdrum way without emotion. Their hearts did not sing exultant paeans that throbbed out of them like joy-notes from a meadow-lark's throat. Only those who had come happily to love's fruition understood the meaning of life. June was not only happy; she was this morning wise, heiress of that sure wisdom ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... Superintendent, tired after the day's work, noticed her radiance with a wearily sympathetic smile—the Young Doctor, coming in briskly from his round of calls, was aware of her pink cheeks and her sparkling eyes. All at once he realized that Rose-Marie was a distinct addition to the humdrum life of the place; that she was like a sweet old-fashioned garden set down in the gardenless slums. He started to say something of the sort before he remembered that a ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... about, and teased the snappish old pug was destined to be a trial. On the other hand, the change from a free and easy home life, with a mother as merry-hearted as himself and a father who was more of a boy at forty than he had been at twelve, to that humdrum routine would have been trying to wiser ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... this story has now reached an end. With my departure from Aureataland, I re-entered the world of humdrum life, and since that memorable night in 1884, nothing has befallen me worthy of a polite reader's attention. I have endured the drudgery incident to earning a living; I have enjoyed the relaxations every wise man makes ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... as a sense of unity. One feels after reading their accounts that they are too abstract. For there are many kinds of unity, characteristic of widely varying moods and states. Any state of rapt attention is a state of unity, and this occurs in the most secular and humdrum moments of life. Nor does it help matters to say that in the case of religion this unity must have been preceded by a state of division; for we cannot properly characterize any state of mind in terms of another state unless the latter be retained in the former. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... this method Hannah, who could only have been developed by forces applied from without, was painstaking, humdrum, and limited; while Rebecca, who apparently needed nothing but space to develop in, and a knowledge of terms in which to express herself, grew and grew and grew, always from within outward. Her forces of one ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... be a governess. I wanted to stand alone in some place where my head wouldn't be pushed down every time I tried to raise it. I believed in America people wouldn't say so often, 'Why doesn't a nice girl like you get married?' so I came, and here I am. That's the whole story—a very humdrum one." ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... captivating. Not only a long-lost heir—an heir of the melodrama, strutting into your hitherto unsuspected kingdom at just the right moment, loaded up with the consciousness of unguessed merit and of rights so long feloniously withheld—but even to be a common humdrum domestic heir is a profession to which few would ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... infesting the same identical premises. Mr. Staff was not seeking mysteries and the last role in the world in which he could fancy himself was that of Romantic Adventurer. But in retrospect he can see quite clearly that it was there, in the humdrum and prosaic setting of a steamship booking-office, that he first stumbled (all unwittingly) into the toils of ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... and, once ordered there, he had so little to do and was so comparatively sure to be undisturbed that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number Five" leaped ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... long ago, I heard one of them preach in a field, before thousands and thousands of people. A different sort of dish he gave us from that of our humdrum preachers, who, from the pulpit, choke their hearers with scraps of Latin. He spoke from his heart; told us how we had till now been led by the nose, how we had been kept in darkness, and how we might procure more light;—ay, and he proved it ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... open, in the topmost chest, Of depth enough, and none to spare, Invited her to slumber there; Puss with delight beyond expression, Surveyed the scene and took possession. Recumbent at her ease, ere long, And lulled by her own humdrum song, She left the cares of life behind, And slept as she would sleep her last, When in came, housewifely inclined, The chambermaid, and shut it fast, By no malignity impelled, But ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... glamour and romance which encircled the knight-errant of old. He breathes the very atmosphere of dangerous adventure. Life for him is a series of thrills, any one of which would be sufficient to last the ordinary humdrum citizen for a lifetime. Small wonder that the flying man has captured the interest and affection of the people, and all eyes follow these trim, smart, desperadoes of the air in their passage ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... suddenly paused, and then in a different voice, exclaimed, to the astonishment of all:—"Have courage, good Stephanus! Strike! strike! Kill the tyrant!" On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this "miracle" is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt upon the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... of the prospectus, and began to work hard at its revision. They had stopped at the house ere he thrust pencil and paper into his pocket. He stepped out of El Dorado let himself down, not without a jar, on to more humdrum earth. ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... dream, imagining herself with a maid—ordering her about deliciously—saying to the handsome footman, 'My maid has my wraps'—and then with the next jolt of the carriage waking up to the humdrum and unwelcome reality. And David might be as rich as anybody! Familiar resentments and cravings stirred in her, and her drive became even less of a pleasure than before. As for David, he spent the whole of it in lively conversation ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... preferable to Bartenstein again, to the narrow humdrum life there. No poles, no flags, no illuminations, no cheers, no dignity! Diamonds even scarce and rare! I tried to take heart. It was something to be better ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... defects of his qualities, my dear. The same people can often rise to great heights and sink to great depths. They can do worse things—and better things—than we humdrum folk, who jog along the middle of the road. We must forgive such people for doing things we wouldn't do, and remember their power to do things ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... there is something precarious in such a business as mine;—but I am endeavouring to make it less so from day to day, and hope very shortly to bring it into that humdrum groove which best befits a married man. Should I ask further assistance from you in doing this, perhaps you will not refuse it if I can succeed in making the matter clear to you. As it is I thank you ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... however, his life was comparatively uneventful. After irregular studies with private tutors and at school, Grillparzer studied law from 1807 to 1811 at the University of Vienna, gave instruction from 1810 to 1813 to the sons of various noblemen, and in 1813 began in the Austrian civil service the humdrum career which, full of disappointments and undeserved setbacks, culminated in his appointment in 1832 to the directorship of the Hofkammerarchiv, and lasted until his honorable retirement in 1856. He was a conscientious official; but throughout this time he was regarded, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... aware that Rochester is on Lake Ontario, and a considerable distance from New York; but I must nevertheless beg you to transport yourself to the latter place, without going through the humdrum travelling routine of—stopped here, stopped there, ate here, ate there, which constituted the main features of my hasty journey thither, undertaken for the purpose of seeing my brother off, on his return to Europe, which duty bringing me within the yachting waters of New York, I think this ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... the very gates of heaven—books that will raise our natures forevermore to a higher power, as if from two-dimensional Flatland creatures we had suddenly been advanced to three dimensions, or, in our own humdrum world of length, breadth, and thickness, we had received the liberty ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... such an exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church—for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?—put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... in Switzerland. Aunt Margaret was determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as she read them—the unreasoning jealousy that these children should ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... the conduct of the different parts of the service, however, there was nothing humdrum, or that savoured of routine. Mr. Beecher was a remarkable reader. Delicate shades of meaning came out in the very tones of his voice, and his power of intense sympathy made it easy for him to impersonate for the time being almost any character. ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags. Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A country doctor's horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and at long intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse was lame walked toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the lights of the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... that the ordinary person has any need to see what he can do in the way of detection. He gets along very comfortably in the humdrum round of life without having to measure footprints and smile quiet, tight-lipped smiles. But if ever the emergency does arise, he thinks naturally of Sherlock Holmes, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... interested me—living the most commonplace, humdrum, unromantic existence imaginable. Teas and dances, dances and teas, clubs and theatres, theatres and clubs, motors and yachts, yachts and motors. It was horrible, and I can't help thinking it was all my dear old governor's fault. He ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... she is at home, she wants to be doing twenty thousand things on the farm, just as she always has done, and the time goes so quickly, she has not begun to think yet about the indoor things; so I am going to be the Humdrum-major, Uncle, and give her some lessons; if you ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... and women bent on business, with engagements to keep, the returned men found themselves with dazed, listless mind waiting for orders from someone, somewhere, or for the next movie show to open. But they were unwilling to take on the humdrum of making a living, and were in most cases incapable of initiating a congenial method of employing their powers, their new-found, splendid, glorious powers, by means of which they had saved an empire and ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... I was once again in my laboratory with the humdrum life of a matter-of-fact world surging about me, evincing itself by the continual roar of traffic which reached me through the open window, my remarkable adventure of the night before seemed like a strange dream. As there was no tangible ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... into the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.' 'The families of the two lightkeepers here agree very ill. I have effected a reconciliation for the present.' 'Things are in a very HUMDRUM state here. There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste or tidiness displayed. Robert's wife GREETS and M'Gregor's scolds; and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty. I told him that if he was to mind wives' quarrels, ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lovers, and sometimes one catches sight of it. Either frank ridicule, or else great reverence, is the mood for witnessing so delicate and strong, so racial a thing. Yet this love-light, seen in the eyes of a man and wife who have been married ten years, and have settled down long ago to the humdrum of married life, seems to me a far finer manifestation of the hither mysteries, a far greater triumph. What freshness, what perpetual rejuvenation they must possess! The more one regards such a thing, the more magnificent and far-reaching it appears. No philosophical bulwark ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... She'd work harder than ever on jam advertisements and when she had saved a lot of money she'd go to New York and get a big position and some people would have to admit that it would have been a waste to tie her down to a humdrum—what was it Mary Rose had said?—"home for a family." Her lip curled with scorn. Mary Rose was only a child. She didn't know that homes and families were not the most important things in the world. Someone else had told her what was the most important, ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... in Berne has always been the most isolated, humdrum spot on earth. People stationed here nearly died of ennui; nothing ever happened, until all Europe suddenly was plunged into the conflagration of war, and then Berne became, of necessity, the clearing house for the continent for dispatches, mail, telegrams, ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... scorned profession gives me for knowing the human heart. This woman who comes to me cries: 'If I had only married I should have known the joy of companionship, of motherhood, and children growing up around me,' And this one wails: 'I have made a mistake. If I had not married and been condemned to a humdrum life what a noise I might have made in the world with my gifts and my beauty,' There is only one good, you know, the good we haven't got. They want a life of romance, of charm, and they never seem to think that it must be within them." ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... sex as to have attempted murder. That she was young and pretty made matters worse. Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the hollow ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... the contrast of her friend's safe and sheltered life. No care for her; no anxiety about ways and means; no need to work for money; and no need to fear for anybody dear to her. Christina's father was her guardian, not she his; he might be a very humdrum man, and no doubt was, but his daughter had no cause to be ashamed for him; had not the burden of his life and character on her own shoulders to take care of. A swift, keen feeling of this contrast would come over Dolly; but she put it away as instantly, and would not see or hear anything ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... tasted the delights of travel, he could not endure the thought of a quiet humdrum life in the little cave at Kyllene, and he besought the King to send him on some ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... from a day's fishing. There was the rude stone bridge over the burn, on the low parapet of which he and the family were wont to sit on fine evenings, and commune of fishing, and boating, and climbing, and wonder whether it would be possible ever again to return to the humdrum life of London. There was the pool in the same burn over which one day he, reckless man, had essayed to leap, and into which he had tumbled, when in eager pursuit of Jacky. A little below this was the pool into which ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... of health is violated, foresight in providing for the physical comforts of the home is wanting; little attention is given to the education of the children; no sacrifices to-day enrich to-morrow; life is a humdrum, a routine, a dread, with no exuberance, joy, or hope. In time, such a life leads to failure and gloom, to secret, then to open vice, and to a final shipwreck of the home and of the individual. In a similar yet in a less marked way, the career of ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... long kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale beatitude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It swept away hesitation, a sick man's nicety and doubts, all the prejudices ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... I described my first contact with and impressions of slavery, when a lad; then the hopelessness of abject servitude and consciousness of unrequited toil had its impress on the brow of the laborer. Now cheerfulness, a spirit of industry, enterprise, and fraternal feeling replaced the stagnant humdrum of slavery. Nor was progress observable only among the freedmen. Many evidences of kindness and sympathy were shown and expressed by former owners for the moral and mental advancement of their former bondsmen, which, to a great ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... heard; saw and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies of a world of which I knew so little, it is not to be doubted that I constructed ideals far beyond the humdrum reality of home life, impracticable ideals that tended only to separate me more from other men. Their world was not my world; this I knew full well, and I sometimes thought they knew it; for while no rude treatment marked their intercourse with me, yet ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... classes in England did largely wish to see the success of the Southern armies. The Southerner, it was understood, was a gentleman, a man of mettle and spirit, and in many cases the direct descendant of an old English Cavalier family; while the Northerners were for the most part but humdrum and commercially minded people who inherited the necessarily somewhat bigoted, if excellent, characteristics of their Dutch, Puritan, or Quaker ancestors. The view had at least sufficient historical basis to serve as an excuse if not as a justification. So it came about that those classes ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... am not in a talking humour," she answered. "My head aches, and I shall be glad to get to bed. It was a stupid, humdrum evening" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... business thus to mix sentiment with one's humdrum daily affairs; but—well, and so it is. After mature reflection, I can think of but one extenuating plea: I was only ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... except for bringing heavy goods and taking off hides; and though we were always in the water, the surf hardly leaving us a dry thread from morning till night, yet we were young, and the climate was good, and we thought it much better than the quiet, humdrum drag and pull on board ship. We made the acquaintance of nearly half California; for, besides carrying everybody in our boat,— men, women, and children,— all the messages, letters, and light packages went ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... quivering with eagerness. This was like a picnic in the humdrum life of the farm hand. Except when the circus came to town, or there was a Harvest Home day, poor Felix knew little beyond the eternal grind of getting up before dawn, and working ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... means to a boy of twenty-five who's doing clerk work at seventy-five a month. Why, it would take him maybe ten years to save a thousand, and here he's made it in a single morning. Think you can keep him out of speculation then? First thing you know he's thrown up his honest, humdrum position—oh, I've seen it hundreds of times—and takes to hanging round the customers' rooms down there on La Salle Street, and he makes a little, and makes a little more, and finally he is so far in that he can't pull out, and then some billionaire fellow, who has the market in the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... which I felt when, four years ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... not understand her. Was it possible that a young girl, not much beyond twenty, was happy in the care of orphan children, in the quiet humdrum duties of housekeeping, and in reading stupid articles through the long, quiet evenings, with few excitements beyond church-going, rural tea-drinkings, and country walks and rides? With a grim smile he thought how soon the belles he had ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... shelter the activities of the three became localized. They ranged less widely, for there was always the necessity of returning to their own tree at nightfall. A river flowed near by. Game and fruit were plentiful, as were fish also. Existence had settled down to the daily humdrum of the wild—the search for food and the sleeping upon full bellies. They looked no further ahead than today. If the youth thought of his past and of those who longed for him in the distant metropolis it was in a ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... through my schooling till I was sixteen, when I was sent off to my father's office on the Quay at Yarmouth to take charge of the books, which were an everlasting humdrum record of herrings and the various trawl fish which came in so ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... softly; for though I am convinced my little Lydia would elope with me as Ensign Beverley, yet am I by no means certain that she would take me with the impediment of our friends' consent, a regular humdrum wedding, and the reversion of a good fortune on my side: no, no; I must prepare her gradually for the discovery, and make myself necessary to her, before I risk it.—Well, but Faulkland, you'll dine with ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... steady their thoughts for the big thing before, "lean for the hunt," they sprang up to be in for the fray with the burst of the last shells from their guns. They knew what to do. It had been drilled into them; they had talked it and dreamed it in billets when routine became humdrum, these men with practical minds who understood the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... like this, you will say, but tell me rather how you made your escape from the convent where you were to take your vows. Well, dear, I don't know about the Carmelites, but the miracle of my own deliverance was, I can assure you, most humdrum. The cries of an alarmed conscience triumphed over the dictates of a stern policy—there's the whole mystery. The sombre melancholy which seized me after you left hastened the happy climax, my aunt did not want to see me die of a decline, and my mother, whose one unfailing cure for ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... in the way of scholarships and fellowships, he is compelled, by the laws of his caste, to renounce some of the most sensible and healthful amusements which a university life offers. He must lead a very humdrum sort of life indeed. It is not enough that he should be free from the stains of vice and immorality; that his principles and habits should be those of a gentleman; that he should avoid excesses, and be observant of discipline; this the university would have a right to expect from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... bitterly; "there's the sore point. Now look here; my friend, do you think that an organization like mine is made to bend to the trivialities of a copying clerk's work? To follow the humdrum of every-day routine? To blacken paper? To become a servant?—me! with what I have in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... next week, but much depends on the doctor's verdict. My love too to the dear Francie; she will be a great lady, quite beyond our sphere. Perhaps she may be able to give Emily some amusements, though I fear they will only make her more discontented with our humdrum ways. I never thought hospital work would suit her. Gerald says there is nothing like trying one's theories, and that having to exaggerate his own has made him sick of a good deal of them, though not of all. Poor dear boy, I hope he will live to ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... performances might be worked up or secured from the outside. It is a fact that life in some country communities is not sufficiently cheered through the agency of the imagination. The tendency is for farmers and farmers' families to live a rather humdrum existence involving a good deal of toil. On the secluded farms during the long winter months, there is not much social intercourse. It has been asserted that the isolation and solitariness in sparsely settled districts are causes of the high percentage of insanity ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... rather seriously. "I'm not altogether satisfied. I can't settle down to the idea of a dull, humdrum sort of life—and of Percy's being ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... the consistent and unswerving irony of life as he had known it. Every conventionality violated—every rule of morality, each set aside, had brought him nothing but good—had brought nothing but good to him and his. Had he grovelled on in humdrum poverty-stricken respectability, what would have befallen him—and them? For him the stereotyped "temporary insanity" verdict of a coroner's jury—for them, well, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... heaps of humdrum ways of living, where the husband is quite fond, but it does not make his heart beat, and Lady Ver says she couldn't stay on with a man whose heart she couldn't make ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... is a phantasy world. With the rising of the curtain we forget our outside life; we live the part of the hero or the heroine. To this day I always leave a theatre with a vague depression of spirits; everyday humdrum life chills me when I come out to the street. Reality is always difficult to face. The great popularity of the cinema is due to this human desire for make-believe. Cinema-going is a regression to the infantile; ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... an exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church—for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?—put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the happy ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in the same old way, precisely as though there had been ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... I would!" declared the farmer energetically. "I tell you I believe circus is born in you, and you can't help it. You don't have much of a life at home. You're not built for humdrum village life. Get out; grow into something you fancy. No need being a scamp because you're a rover. My brother was built your sort. They pinned him down trying to make a doctor of him, and he ran away. He turned up with a ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... beauty; and then the thought that I've never seen more than a little corner of it makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all the while I should be hugging my wonderful ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... we return home on Thursday, and I shall be able to go on with my humdrum work, and that makes me forget my ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... me, and I was able to creep up close and kneel within two feet of the hole. The main nest was twenty feet away, and this was a special exit made for the occasion—a triumphal gateway erected far away from the humdrum leaf traffic. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... great in argument. He infinitely enjoys a long humdrum, drowsy interchange of words of dispute about nothing. He considers that it strengthens the mind, consequently, he 'don't see that,' very often. Or, he would be glad to know what you mean by that. Or, he doubts that. Or, he has always understood exactly the reverse of that. Or, he can't admit ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... again; for Di fell into literature, and Laura into love. Thus engrossed, these two forgot many duties which even blue-stockings and innamoratas are expected to perform, and slowly all the homely humdrum cares that housewives know became Nan's daily life, and she accepted it without a thought of discontent. Noiseless and cheerful as the sunshine, she went to and fro, doing the tasks that mothers do, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... taking his nap, left his things lying about, and teased the snappish old pug was destined to be a trial. On the other hand, the change from a free and easy home life, with a mother as merry-hearted as himself and a father who was more of a boy at forty than he had been at twelve, to that humdrum routine would have been trying to ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... the golden age of maturity itself, what humdrum people and poets have despised as middle age, the margin of reserve of the ruling hormone is a quantity almost malleable in our hands, but still to be regarded with respect as a hard cold proposition by the physiologist. In general, the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... one huge hot-bed of unblushing vice. The very interest in individuality, the spectator-attitude towards life, made men ready to treat life as one large experiment, and for such purposes vice is as important as right living even though it ultimately turns out to be as humdrum as virtue. The Italian nobles treated life in this experimental way and the novels of Bandello and others give us the results of their experiments. The Novellieri were thus the "realists" of their day and of them all Bandello was the most realistic. He claims to give only incidents that really ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... Ephesus, suddenly paused, and then in a different voice, exclaimed, to the astonishment of all:—"Have courage, good Stephanus! Strike! strike! Kill the tyrant!" On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this "miracle" is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt upon the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... says Heine, "are prosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the Channel those bourgeoisie novels arise, wherein the petty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted." But Scott appeared, and effected a restoration of the balance in fiction. As Cervantes had introduced the democratic element into romances, so Scott replaced the aristocratic element, when it had disappeared, and only a prosaic, bourgeoisie ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "that I have already wearied your friend. My life must seem so humdrum to him, and to you, who have travelled so far and seen so much. For I, monsieur, as I have told your friend, have lived all my days in one quiet country place, and this journey is a great ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... without any premonition that such a punishment will lead to perfect happiness. To pass away in a flame of fire after one has enjoyed the highest earthly joys, and is yet surrounded by them in death. Ah! that is to die like a god—far better such a death than a long, stupid, humdrum existence. Eternal, undying love rises like a flaming brand to the heavens above, in defiance of mankind's sentence—do you not think such an ending ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... 't is a low, newspaper, humdrum, lawsuit Country, where a young couple of the same ages Can't form a friendship, but the world o'erawes it. A verdict—grievous foe to those who cause it!- Forms a sad climax to romantic homages; Besides ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... of England the express tore on—through town and country, underneath the earth and across high bridges. All the while the man and the woman talked. To him she was a revelation. Every moment of his life had been spent in a humdrum seclusion—every moment of hers seemed to have been lived out to its limit in those worlds of which he had barely even dreamed. She was older than he had thought her—thirty, perhaps, or thirty-one—and ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... when I was a boy, that I used to dream of running away and seeing the world and having great adventures," thought Archey, his frown forgotten. He didn't consciously put it into words, but deep from his mind arose a feeling of the coming true of great dreams—of running away from the humdrum of life, of seeing the world, of taking a part in the greatest adventure ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... charge brought against me by certain ignoramuses—that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... know I don't mean that! I was thinking of your adventures. Father told me he found you living with some old friends on a big fruit-growing estate near a small town, and I supposed it had been all rather lonely and humdrum, until that quiet little game a few weeks ago made me realize that you must have seen a bit of the strenuous side down there. That would be ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... to England to continue his comparatively humdrum order of advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct topographical ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... had never written or said a word to him that might not have passed between any two college friends. Such thoughts occupied him, until finally, as often fortunately happens in our mental crises, a humdrum, domestic voice, the supper bell, called him, and leaving his garments strewn about the room, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... purity of his own life, seems to have thrown himself with special gusto into the character of a heartless reprobate. He must have felt a certain piquancy in writing down the most atrocious sentiments in his own respectable parlour. He would show that the quiet humdrum old tradesman could be on paper as sprightly and audacious as the most profligate man about town. As quiet people are apt to do, he probably exaggerated the enormities which such men would openly avow; he fancied that the world beyond his little circle was a wilderness ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... criticism:[7] Amid such influences and surroundings, occupied with fads and studies of this sort, lacking all incentive from without to any important activity and confronted by the sole prospect of having to drag out a humdrum existence, men began to reflect with a sort of sullen exultation upon the possibility of departing this life at will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... had been leading, and invited me to remain outside. It was already dark. An early touch of frost in the November air rendered it exhilarating. I walked along the decorous, residential roads of St. John's Wood feeling less remote from my kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in progress behind the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate opened and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen treetops and among the loose stones. At rare intervals it beamed upon us from some still reach or dark cover, and won from us our ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... became law in 1849, has proved to be of the greatest practical value; it has won the approval of competent critics; and it has served as a model for the organization of other provinces. Commonplace and humdrum as this measure may seem to Canadians in the actual domestic working of it, there are other parts of the Empire—Ireland, for example—which were to lag long behind. The lack of such privileges is a grievance elsewhere. Even to-day, the rural districts of England have not as extensive powers ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... of the lamp. "All round. North, east, south and west. Land or sea. Adventures, Perry, are for the adventurous. Now, here we are, three able-bodied fellows fairly capable of looking after ourselves in most situations, tired of the humdrum life of Summer resorts. What's to prevent our spending a couple of months together and finding some adventures? Of course, we can't go to Africa and shoot lions and wart-hogs—whatever they may be,—and we can't fit out an Arctic exploration party ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... agriculture, which every good farmer should read and study, and prove, will cost him perhaps ten dollars. By them his farm shall become his pride, his support, his wealth. But this dull man cannot, or will not, learn that in the dreaminess of his humdrum life, passed for thirty years or more upon his farm, capital, industry, science, thought, and study have been at work, and everything has been done, thus far, which can be done to make the earth more gladsome, and the hearts of the children of men more thankful to the Giver and Bestower ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the pump. Pleasure softens pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day that shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left with me, I should have made the clever people rich and handsome, and left poverty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... could you expect?' he replied. 'My ambition could not endure such a humdrum existence as yours; with these gay-coloured wings of mine I shall soar to higher realms, and be courted ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... desert island, and at the same time congratulate himself on the self-restraint he shows in not going to a ball every night. Similarly our England may have a right to congratulate itself upon the fact that her politics are very quiet, amicable, and humdrum. But she must not congratulate herself upon that fact and also congratulate herself upon the self-restraint she shows in not tearing herself and her citizens into rags. Between two English Privy Councillors polite language is a mark of civilisation, but really not a mark ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... person of a child, in defiance and contempt of the statutes of all known nations. And the place where this lawless deed was to be done was not Ruritania or the hazy dominions of Prince Otto, but a commonplace, humdrum American town, not an hour and a half from his office chair by ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... selection and courting of a mate, that greatest of all adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her. ... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation that galled ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... for the time to arrive when he might embark upon his career. As it is with most lads, so it was with him, the prospect of a complete change in his mode of life was full of pleasurable excitement; and perhaps it was only natural that, now he had decided to forsake it, the monotonous humdrum fisher's life became almost unbearably irksome to him. Old Bill Maskell was not slow to observe this, and with the unselfishness which was so eminently characteristic of him, though he loved the lad as his own soul, he decided to shorten ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... told he must not do this and must not do that, and he was not told what he might or should do; in the end both he and Mueller grew disgusted and the lessons were abandoned. I dare say Mueller was in a humdrum way a good coach; he could have prepared candidates for our absurd academic examinations; but for an artistic genius, bursting with inarticulate ideas and inchoate purposes he was worse than useless. So Richard had to muddle along as he best might, while his ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... after her. She doesn't expect to marry either of these gentlemen; she does not particularly require their flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other girls.... All of which is so clearly a pretty ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... surface. From Somerset House we pursued our way through Temple Bar, but missed it, and therefore entered by the passage from what was formerly Alsatia, but which now seems to be a very respectable and humdrum part of London. We came immediately to the Temple Gardens, which we walked quite round. The grass is still green, but the trees are leafless, and had an aspect of not being very robust, even at more genial seasons of the year. There were, however, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mary Rabbit, and always used to sleep side by side. But after a few weeks they must have felt tired of their humdrum life; for one bright morning they ran away. I hope they are living happily together in the fragrant woods ...
— The Nursery, July 1877, XXII. No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... I am concerned, this story has now reached an end. With my departure from Aureataland, I re-entered the world of humdrum life, and since that memorable night in 1884, nothing has befallen me worthy of a polite reader's attention. I have endured the drudgery incident to earning a living; I have enjoyed the relaxations every wise man makes for himself. ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... grand old hedges; occasionally a peacock strutted proudly along its length, trailing its tail over the gravel, and then the final touch of picturesqueness was given to the scene, but even the approach of an ordinary humdrum human had an effect of dignity, of importance, in such old-world surroundings. It gratified Pixie's keen sense of what it dramatically termed "a situation" to place herself in this point of vantage and act the part of audience; and to-day, though no one more interesting than ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... family. The proceeding, considering the nature of it,—that a young lady, acknowledged to be of great beauty and known to be of good birth, had on the occasion been asked and given in marriage,—was carried on after a somewhat humdrum fashion, and in a manner that must be called commonplace. How different had it been when Crosbie had made his offer! Lily for the time had been raised to a pinnacle,—a pinnacle which might be dangerous, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making humdrum and workaday over to his heart's desire. The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough. These grew with him, it might be said—and indeed in his lifetime was often said—into wonders without a foot upon earth. ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... not those who come to me grow indignant as they listen, saying: "This rascal tells us but a humdrum story, where nothing is as it should be;" for I warn all beforehand that I tell but of things that I have seen. My villains, I fear, are but poor sinners, not altogether bad; and my good men but sorry ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... readers on a grand tour of the world, there will be a terrible scramble for excursion tickets—that is, the opening volume of the 'Globe Trotting Series.' Of one thing the boys may be dead sure: it will be no tame, humdrum journey; for Oliver Optic does not believe that fun and excitement are injurious to boys, but, on the contrary, if of the right kind, he thinks it ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... catalogue contains no "oil magnates" or "steel kings" or "railroad manipulators"; nearly all the industrial giants of ante-bellum times—as distinguished from the socially prominent whose wealth was inherited—had heaped together their accumulations in humdrum trade. Perhaps Peter Cooper, who had made a million dollars in the manufacture of isinglass and glue, and George Law, whose gains, equally large, represented fortunate speculations in street railroads, faintly suggest the approaching ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... that I must leave England within a few hours, which forced this story from me. Tomorrow Wingrave will be free! Listen, Aynesworth," he continued, turning towards him, "and the rest of you who fancy that it is I who am leaving a humdrum city for the world of tragedies! I leave you the legacy of a greater one than all Asia will yield to me! Lady Ruth is married to Lumley, and they hold today in London a very distinguished social position. Tomorrow Wingrave takes a hand in the game. He was once my friend; ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of fact, Vera Nevill was an incongruous element in the Daintree household. In that quiet humdrum country clergyman's life she was as much out of her proper place as a bird of paradise in a chicken yard, or a Gloire de Dijon rose ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... combativeness did him no immediate harm, for, in December 1561, he was elected Professor of Theology at Salamanca.[28] He was obviously not disposed to hide his light under a bushel, nor to perform his academic duties in a spirit of humdrum routine. Whatever he did, he did with all his might, and his strenuous versatility made him conspicuous in University life. In 1565 he was transferred from the theological chair to the chair of Scholastic Theology and ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... to take her seriously. He sketched his humdrum labors, the prizes in his way of life. "And it isn't so stupid," he ended with a laugh, "to play the game that way when once you have begun it." He added carelessly, as if to himself, "the body will give you only a few sensations, such a very ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... especially cattle, stimulated unwholesome competition. The temptation to "rustle" stock, to hold up outfits carrying pay to the soldiers, to live well merely as a gunman for one of the big interests on the river, made the honest business of every-day life a humdrum affair. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... ants that I find here are the finest flavored in the world," declared the yellow hen, "and there are plenty of them. So here I shall end my days; and I must say, Dorothy, my dear, that you are very foolish to go back into that stupid, humdrum world again." ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... isolated he is, mainly by reason of the poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." But he does not run away; he ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... last became the wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like 'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when it shovelled its way through the water with a ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... Grandmother seemed to be expected, for no time was lost in procuring her former place beside the croupier. It is my opinion that though croupiers seem such ordinary, humdrum officials—men who care nothing whether the bank wins or loses—they are, in reality, anything but indifferent to the bank's losing, and are given instructions to attract players, and to keep a watch over the bank's interests; as also, that for such services, these officials are awarded ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... into a dream, imagining herself with a maid—ordering her about deliciously—saying to the handsome footman, 'My maid has my wraps'—and then with the next jolt of the carriage waking up to the humdrum and unwelcome reality. And David might be as rich as anybody! Familiar resentments and cravings stirred in her, and her drive became even less of a pleasure than before. As for David, he spent the whole of it in lively conversation with ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... little likelihood of his getting through to their assistance. Prideaux, in the Far West, as it then was, had captured Niagara. It was a great success, but it in no way helped Wolfe. It must not be supposed, however, that August had passed away in humdrum fashion. The guns had roared with tireless throats, and the lower town was a heap of ruins. Far away down both banks of the St. Lawrence the dogs of war had raged through seigniories and hamlets. Between the upper and the nether millstone of Wolfe's proclamations and Montcalm's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... the most ordinary way in the world—or perhaps that is too strongly put. The beginning was ordinary indeed, and tame, compared with the sequel. Yet even the beginning had a flavor of the unusual about it, strong enough to startle a man so used to a humdrum life and so unversed in anything out of the common as I. ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... much-written-about Barbary Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general metropolitan average—that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the avowedly wicked section of any ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... France, even winter sporting in Switzerland. Aunt Margaret was determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as she read them—the unreasoning jealousy that these children should have opportunities so ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... could forbid their laughter, ghastly though it was. M. G. Saphir, one of the best exponents of Jewish wit, justly said: "The Jews seized the weapon of wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other sort of weapon." Whatever humdrum life during the middle ages offered them, had to submit to the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... cool place between the brows, like the imprint of a flower. Love filled his soul, that love of boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the down off for the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory—a searing passion—a humdrum mateship—or, once in many times, vintage full and sweet with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... of a more serious cast than it really was. The oral circulation of romance literature must have been enormous. The spun-out, dreary poems which now make such difficult reading are infinitely more entertaining when read aloud: the voice gives life and character to a humdrum narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... which he extended Africa.[8] The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one side to the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west, though there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it was not yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a melange of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work of imaginary astronomical ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... A busy, anxious, humdrum winter, for, as Harry said, "it was hard times for every one." Mr. Dean grew gray with the weight of business cares about which he never spoke; Mrs. Dean, laboring under the delusion that an invalid ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... out of a too curious musing over what is gone and what remains, of life. In his subtle capacity for enjoying the more refined points of earth, of human relationship, he could throw the gleam of poetry or humour on what seemed common or threadbare; has a care for the sighs, and the weary, humdrum preoccupations of very weak people, down to their little pathetic "gentilities," even; while, in the purely human temper, he can write of death, almost ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... happening. All very quiet and humdrum on the surface. Only the aeroplanes are busy, and if the sun is between you and them there are always the little black high Archie clouds following them, like vultures appearing ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... creation widened to our view. England, Ireland, America, Turkey, the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travellers, governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life, were all laid under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum nursery corner. All Mr. Edgeworth's varied teaching and experience, all his daughter's genius of observation, came to interest and delight our play-time, and that of a thousand other little children in different parts of the world. People justly praise Miss Edgeworth's admirable stories ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... Cedric that you seem quite an old friend. I am afraid you will find us very quiet, homely people; but I daresay Cedric will have prepared you for that. He grumbles dreadfully, poor boy, at our old-fashioned, humdrum ways." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... am not acting, the best part of my time is taken up by the most humdrum occupations. Dealing with my correspondence, even with the help of a secretary, is no insignificant work. The letters, chiefly consisting of requests for my autograph, or appeals to my charity, have to be answered. I have ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... perhaps, abroad by vulgar tradesmen and Philistine bishops, and snubbed at home by a stupid wife, who is quite unable to appreciate his magnificent projects for regenerating all heaven and earth; and only, humdrum, practical creature that she is, tries to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with her God? Fly to his help, all pious maidens, and pour into the wounded heart of the holy man the healing balm of self-conceit; cover his table with confidential letters, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... were! What visionaries, to imagine that in such an hour of emergency a man might discover himself to be fitted for some work of national utility without that preliminary wire-pulling which was essential in humdrum times of peace! How we lingered in long queues, and stamped up and down, and sat about crowded, stuffy halls, waiting, only waiting, to be asked to do something for our country by any little guttersnipe who happened to ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... masterful personalities, making their several marks on the circumstances that revolved around them; they did well or ill, or in most cases indifferently, and were criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way to. In any case, humdrum or outstanding, they had their spheres of importance, little or big. They dominated a breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had irritating mannerisms. At any rate it seemed highly probable ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... how intense if the woman should take a little handkerchief edged with black and thrust it into her dancer's cuff with some little murmur implying that she wishes him to keep it. To whomsoever these things happen life becomes a song. A little event of this kind lifts one out of the humdrum of material existence. I suppose the cause of our extraordinary happiness is that one is again, as it were, marching in step; one has dropped into the Great Procession and is actively doing the great Work. There ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Dwight was the boy of the V, a strong, hearty, happy young woman of fourteen, who succeeded in getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this humdrum, work-a-day world. Her rosy cheeks glowed and her brown eyes shone with health; for Jean was as full of life as a young colt, and vented her superfluous energy in climbing trees, walking fences, ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... as we know, to cultivate her society, twice ruinous as it is for him. Sooner or later that woman will throw over this dear brother of ours, but not before she has spoiled him for hard work, and given him a taste for luxury and a contempt for our humdrum life. She will develop his love of enjoyment, his inclination for idleness, that debauches a poetic soul. Yes, it makes me tremble to think that this great lady may make a plaything of Lucien. If she cares for him sincerely, he will ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... yellow, waxy mask. And those eyes seemed to fix themselves despairingly on the past, on all that which soon would be no more: the little clockmaker's shop hidden away in a populous neighbourhood; the gentle humdrum existence, with a toiling husband who was ever bending over his watches; the great pleasures of Sunday, such as watching children fly their kites upon the fortifications. And at last these staring eyes gazed vainly into the frightful ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... raillery in Stafford's reply. "Now, the collie—were you sufficiently a fatalist to let him live, or did you prepare another needle, or do it in the humdrum way?" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... square, cleft chin, the lines smoothed away miraculously, a touch of red crept into his lean cheeks, an eager, boyish gleam of expectation flashed into the clear gray eyes that rested caressingly on the humdrum, sleepy ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... of preparation for this event I had been happy and content, but a few days later, after the clubs had fallen back to their normal humdrum level I acknowledged with a sense of hopeless weariness that our huge city had a long way to go before it could equal the small Boston of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Howells. My desire to rejoin my fellows in New York was intensified. "As there is only one London for England ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... but, as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred other ways. Otherwise the tale runs on, with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze, just ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
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