|
|
|
More "Laundress" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of domestic servants from our family circle. Adam was head of the house, general provider, hired-man, stable-boy, head-gardener, coach-man, night-watchman and everything else of the male persuasion on the place; whilst I was cook, laundress, nurse, housekeeper, manicure, stenographer, and general housemaid, as well as the mother of the family—a situation that even though it involved us in no end of hard work, had its compensations. Living off in suburbs ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... hands and suddenly decided to make a bold dash for liberty. Laying a wager with his guards that he could run upstairs again faster than they, he reached his room first, bolted the door and seizing a cord, or rope, which had been brought to him by his laundress, he made it fast to the window, slipped out and dropped fifteen feet. With shots whistling all about him he flew around the tower to the Faubourg de la Riche, where he leaped upon the back of the first horse that he saw; the saddle turned and threw him ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... But Jarl seemed to go further. He must have taken me for one of the House of Hanover in disguise; or, haply, for bonneted Charles Edward the Pretender, who, like the Wandering Jew, may yet be a vagrant. At any rate, his loyalty was extreme. Unsolicited, he was my laundress and tailor; a most expert one, too; and when at meal-times my turn came round to look out at the mast-head, or stand at the wheel, he catered for me among the "kids" in the forecastle with unwearied assiduity. Many's the good lump of "duff" for which I was indebted to my good Viking's ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... this she approached the laundress and said to her: "Let me try, I pray you. I think I can wash ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... day last year our laundress sent her oldest boy, a lad fourteen years of age, on an errand. He was gone an hour or more longer than she expected him to be. Upon his return she asked him what he had been doing all that time. He told her ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... people thought of him. The third showed him the "shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us." He saw himself dead, uncared for, unwept, unwatched, his effects plundered by the charwoman, laundress, and undertaker's man and realized the end to which he must come unless he led an altered life. Holding up his hands he prayed to have his fate reversed and saw the Ghost shrink and ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... pocket-handkerchief as a sling for the projection of gravel, and its instant popularity had resulted in the denuding of the avenues of ammunition, and in arousing a great and just fury in the bosom of the laundress. "God knows it isn't me has all the hankershiffs holed this way!" she pointed out. "Thim children is the divil outlawed. Thim'd gallop the woods all the night, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... much heat as an equal weight of water; a lead weight only .031 as much heat as water. Flatirons are made of iron because of the relatively high specific heat of iron. The flatiron heats slowly and cools slowly, and, because of its high specific heat, not only supplies the laundress with considerable heat, but eliminates for her the frequent changing of ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... for the woods, take with you only those things which seem to be absolutely necessary; remember that you will carry your own pack and be your own laundress, so hesitate about including too many washable garments. Make out your list, then consider the matter carefully and realize that every one of the articles, even the very smallest, has a way of growing ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... man" was no other than the laundress's son, who respectfully took off his cap in passing. His cap was broken in the rim, and adapted to be put into the pocket on occasion; his clothes were poor, but clean, and very neatly mended, and he wore heavy wooden shoes. He stood ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... breakfast had not of itself been bad, for Mrs. Whereas had been a daughter of Themis all her life, waiting upon scions of the law since first she had been able to run for a penn'orth of milk. She had been laundress on a stairs for ten years, having married a law stationer's apprentice, and now she owned the dingy house over the covered way, and let her own lodgings with her own furniture; nor was she often without friends who would recommend her zeal and honesty, ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... United States, the southern white people found themselves without servants. Women who were accustomed to having a nurse, maid, cook and laundress found themselves without sufficient money to pay wages to all these. There was a great amount of work to be done and the great problem confronting married women who had not been taught to work and who thought it beneath their standing to soil their hands, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... down out of the interior to the sea, Pratt likewise bore a grudge, because it was in the river that a brown woman washed his clothes on the stones, returning them with the buttons pounded off; but for every missing button there was sure to be a bright yellow, semi-indelible stain, where the laundress had spread the garments to dry upon ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... headed to realize that those womanly attributes which so charm the sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery. One is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills. Take the great middle class of America (which is the social and moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the exhaustion of labor, and are robust as Jove's Phoenician bull, while ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... who are capable for the sake of an idea of bearing unconceivable privations and sufferings, equal to torture; but then, these people are lost before the haughtiness of a doorman; shrink from the yelling of a laundress; while into a police station they enter in an insufferable and timid distress. And precisely such a one was Lichonin. On the following day (yesterday it had been impossible on account of a holiday and the lateness), having gotten up very early and recollecting that to-day he had to ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... to be sure, in these respects; for every gentleman on board appeared to have had a difference with his laundress and to have left off washing himself in early youth. Every gentleman, too, was perfectly stopped up with tight plugging, and was dislocated in the greater part of his joints. But about this gentleman there was a peculiar air of sagacity and wisdom, which ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... other," answered Sister Anne. "Poor, poor Mr. Sly! He made a will leaving you all, except five pounds a year to his laundress: he made his will, locked his door, took heart-rending leave of his uncle at night, and this morning was found hanging at his bedpost when Sambo, the black servant, took him up his water to shave. 'Let me be buried,' he said, ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... in Amsterdam, had dealt largely in securities issued by the Emperor for the support of his wars. It happened, at the time, that Fortune had favored the Ottoman, who was then pressing the city of Belgrade, with some prospects of success. Well, Sirs, a headstrong and ill-advised laundress had taken possession of an elevated terrace in the centre of the town, in order to dry her clothes. This woman was in the act of commencing the distribution of her linens and muslins, with the break of day, when ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... and equipment, to Larry O'Toole, the son of my mother's laundress, to be preserved for him until he is old enough to ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... would be no scholars to take lessons. How could she support herself? She could remain in the house, for the mortgage was paid off, though the government and not poor Solomon Isaacs had the mortgage-money in its grip for the present. Old Ursula, who was cook, chambermaid, housekeeper, laundress, and everything else for Father Peter, and had been Marget's nurse in earlier years, said God would provide. But she said that from habit, for she was a good Christian. She meant to help in the providing, to make sure, if ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bile and his secretions, the efficacy of licorice in producing a certain effect, and the expediency of changing one's linen at least three times a day; though had he changed his six, I should have said that the purification of the last shirt would have been no sinecure to the laundress. His accent was decidedly Scotch: he spoke familiarly of Scott and one or two other Scotch worthies, and more than once insinuated that he was a member of Parliament. With respect to the rest of the company I say nothing, and for the very sufficient reason that, unlike the above described batch, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... A laundress was boiling clothing over a fire near by; Ailsa slipped off her gingham overdress, unbound the white turban, and tossed them on the grass near the fire. Then, rolling back her sleeves, she plunged her arms into a basin of hot water in which a little ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... king, simple, patriarchal and valorous, stern to his foes, and gentle to the weak. He makes him halt his army in Ireland, because the screams of a woman have been heard; it is a poor laundress in the pangs of child-birth; the march is interrupted; a tent is spread, under which the poor creature is ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... to give me money, but I would not take it, and they had been trying to find a laundress for their finer linen—their old serving-woman was ill. They could find one for the heavier things, but they are very particular, and I was sure I could manage, and so I begged them to let me have the work, ...
— The Yates Pride • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... my landlady and my laundress, two poor widows who never willingly distressed me, but who occasionally asked for 'that little amount' so piteously that my heart bled to lack it to give them. And as victuals and clean shirts were absolute necessaries of life, every week my debts increased. I could have faced ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... hunger, and my mind in a state of peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know, the wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My lodgings cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at night; I did my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce the laundress' bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in coal, if divided up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had three years' supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to some library or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... was looking this morning rather helplessly at his silk pajamas, and wondering where he could get them washed, when there entered the tent a handsome and stalwart regular. "Washing?" he inquired respectfully. "Oh," asked Lucy hopefully, "are you an agent for some laundress?" "No," said the man, "I wash them myself. I guarantee to return everything tomorrow, properly done." The boy was not merely surprised, but almost shocked. "You do the work?" he asked. Then his native kindness came to his aid, and he was about to bundle ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... drying-ground, the fine orchard, and that large field quartered into four different crops. How comfortable this cottage looks, and how well the owners earn their comforts! They are the most prosperous pair in the parish—she a laundress with twenty times more work than she can do, unrivalled in flounces and shirt-frills, and such delicacies of the craft; he, partly a farmer, partly a farmer's man, tilling his own ground, and then tilling other people's;—affording a proof, even in this declining age, when the circumstances of ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... and smile upon my Lord, thine Uncle, Take Mony of the men thou mean'st to Cousin, Drink Wine, and eat good meat, and live discreetly, Talk little, 'tis an antidote against a beating; Keep thy hand from thy sword, and from thy Laundress placket, And thou ...
— The Little French Lawyer - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont
... shopkeepers, and lay with their wives; they killed bailiffs, kicked fiddlers down-stairs, ate at Locket's, loitered at Will's; they talked of the drawing-room and never came there; dined with lords they never saw; whispered a duchess and spoke never a word; exposed the scrawls of their laundress for billet-doux of quality; came ever just from court and were never seen in it; attended the levee sub dio; got a list of peers by heart in one company, and with great familiarity retailed them in another. Above ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... know," answered Rorie quickly, for he knew that when the floodgates of Miss McCroke's eloquence were once loosened the tide ran strong, "when house and lands are gone and spent a man may turn usher in an academy, and earn fifty pounds a year and his laundress's bill by grinding Caesar's Commentaries into small boys. But I shouldn't lay in a stock of learning with that view. When my house and lands are gone I'll go after them—emigrate, and go into the lumber trade ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... April sun was shining on the brewery opposite, and touched the dark waters of the canal under the bridge to the left. The roofs of the squalid houses abutting on the brewery were wet with rain. Through a gap she could see a laundress's back-yard mainly filled with drying clothes, but boasting besides a couple of pink flowering currants just out, and holding their own for a few brief days against the smuts of Manchester. Here and there a man out of work lounged, pipe in mouth, at his open door, silently absorbing the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I have given you everything—that I am dressed in clothes fit for the rag-bag—that I have not bought a bonnet for three years—that Corentine washes my linen in the kitchen because I should blush to give such rubbish to the laundress; and you know also that my worst misery is to refuse what you ask. Then why do you ask?' And this mute address of his mother's was so eloquent that Paul ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... prospering or falling back. And rents and patches widen with time; No thread or needle can pace decay, And there are stains that baffle soap, And there are colors that run in spite of you, Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress. Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets— The laundress, Life, knows all about it. And I, who went to all the funerals Held in Spoon River, swear I never Saw a dead face without thinking it looked Like ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... by the hostess a full corps of servants is required. Each one should have certain, definite tasks to perform every day. In the luxurious American home, seven servants are usually employed. They are a butler, a chauffeur, a parlor maid, a cook, a laundress, a nurse-maid and a chambermaid. A lady's maid and a valet are sometimes added. A footman, laundry-maid and scullery-maid are also added, sometimes, to the corps of servants. But this list may be increased ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... calling on Madame. Nevertheless, that same morning she had run round to Mme Lerat's because matters were taking a new turn. The evening before creditors in the persons of the upholsterer, the charcoal merchant and the laundress had put in an appearance and had offered to give Madame an extension of time. Nay, they had even proposed to advance Madame a very considerable amount if only Madame would return to her flat and conduct herself like a sensible person. The aunt repeated Zoe's words. Without ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... uphill nearly all the way,—but time is no longer any object with me. Amelie has a donkey and a little cart to drive me to the station at Couilly when I take that line, or when I want to do an errand or go to the laundress, or merely ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... things to my Lady Albemarle, on my lord's not letting her come to Paris.(386) I should not repeat this to you, only to introduce George Selwyn's account of this woman who, he says, is mother to the Princess of Montauban, grandmother to Madame de Brionne, sister to General Oglethorpe, and was laundress to the Duchess ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... to the Baron. I think we should suit one another mainly. He Jives on the ground floor, for convenience of the gout; I prefer the attic story, for the air. He keeps three footmen and two maids; I have neither maid nor laundress, not caring to be troubled with them! His forte, I understand, is the higher mathematics; my turn, I confess, is more to poetry and the belles lettres. The very antithesis of our characters would make up a harmony. You must bring the Baron ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... footsteps, and, by some odd fancy, took frequent observations on the gardener and his wife. Failing to get any clew, I waited one day for Paul's absence, and made a call upon the wife, under pretence of hunting up a missing handkerchief,—for she had been my laundress. I found the handsome, swarthy creature, with her six bronzed children around her, training up the Madeira vine that made a bower of the whole side of her little, black, gambrel-roofed cottage. On learning my errand, she became full of sympathy, and was soon emptying ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... attempt to seem anything but a laboring man. But you cannot tell in a Manila street car whether the white-clad man at your side is a government clerk at sixty pesos a month or a day laborer at fifteen. I once lost a servant because I commanded him to carry some clothes to my laundress. "Go on the street with a bundle of clothes, and get into the street car with them! I would rather die!" he said; and he ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... vectigal Genevensibus mercatoribus praebet quotannis in Africam eam ferentibus, ubi lavandis fovendisque corporibus Lybes ea utuntur, nec nisi decocto ejus abluti, mane domo egrediuntur."—Stephani Libellus de re Hortensi, 1536, p. 54. The old form of our "laundress" was "a Lavendre." ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... white-haired man, meticulously dressed in black—black swallowtail coat, open waistcoat, and frilled shirt-front, on which his laundress must have spent hours of labour; closely fitting black knee-breeches, black silk stockings, black polished shoes. They silhouetted, too, in the moment before he swung round on me, an enormous nose, like a punchinello's, and the outline ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... of the land, sent a list of his very best importation, humbly soliciting an order. And as Mr. Secretary Bolt had not the least objection to being driven into dignity, he would order all sorts of things, from a diamond bracelet down to a tin tea-pot for Mrs. Loveleather the laundress. It was wonderful to see how credulous these tradesmen gentry were, and how they would chuckle over an order from one of the legation. But I must here say that Bolt found a clever diplomatist in Thomas, who was one ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... They arrived at the appointed spot. Eugenie ordered the porter to put down the portmanteau, gave him some pieces of money, and having rapped at the shutter sent him away. The shutter where Eugenie had rapped was that of a little laundress, who had been previously warned, and was not yet gone to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of the administration of Andros in Massachusetts," says Mr. Bancroft, "the daughter of John Goodwin, a child of thirteen years, charged a laundress with having stolen linen from the family. Glover, the mother of the laundress, a friendless immigrant, almost ignorant of English, like a true woman, with a mother's heart, rebuked the false accusation. Immediately, the girl, to secure revenge, became bewitched. The ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... so the next day Larry pottered about the studio, acting as maid-of-all-work, while the clothes in his trunk which had been stored with the Duchess were being sponged and pressed by the little tailor down the street, and while a laundress, driven by the Duchess, was preparing the rest of his outfit for his debut. In his capacity of maid, with a basket on his arm, he went out into the little street, where in his shabby clothes he was ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... a daily supply of food—plain, perhaps, but sufficient—and will look for as much in the homes of their husbands. A girl like Marion Beecher does not expect to secure a position which will enable her to send her own clothes to a laundress or hire a cook who can make pastry; but it is not fair to ask her to wash the family's blankets or to boil potatoes for a pig. Probably her friends would think her lucky in marrying a curate or a dispensary doctor ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... having desired her housekeeper to seek out a new laundress, a decent-looking woman was recommended to the situation. "But," said the housekeeper, "I am afraid she will not suit your royal highness, as she is a soldier's wife, and these people are generally loose characters!"—"What is it you say?" said the duke, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... loins; anon he gave it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window or wainscot, expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught at a proof sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead—made a dart at Blomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring him to one direct reply; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford's ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... entire print of the iron upon the bosom of one, to say nothing of the piles of starch upon another, and more than all, the tremendous scolding which he received from the owner of said shirt, warned him never to turn laundress again, and in disgust he gave up his new vocation, devoting his leisure moments to the cultivation of flowers, which he carried to his mistress, who smiled gratefully upon him, saying they were the sweetest ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... silly questions, Eveley, I am so nervous anyhow I hardly know what I am saying. You remember my laundress, don't you? She is so nice and motherly and a Methodist and respectable and all that,—only old and hard up. She is coming to live with us,—she will have the den for her room, and is closing her cottage. She is to keep ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... one has ever really reformed a washerwoman, and that is why the competition is so keen. You can rescue charwomen by fifties with a little tea and personal magnetism, but with washerwomen it's different; wages are too high. This particular laundress, who came from Bermondsey or some such place, was really rather a hopeful venture, and they thought at last that she might be safely put in the window as a specimen of successful work. So they had her paraded ...
— Reginald • Saki
... little Gervaise was eight years old, she went to a neighbouring dealer's to crack almonds; she there earned ten sous a day, which her father pocketed right royally, without even a question from Fine as to what became of the money. The young girl was next apprenticed to a laundress, and as soon as she received two francs a day for her work, the two francs strayed in a similar manner into Macquart's hands. Jean, who had learnt the trade of a carpenter, was likewise despoiled on pay-days, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own laundress; and I think, on the whole, this was the least harrowing possible solution. Fancy if he had not found that form of consolation, but had continued trying to be faithful to that dreadful material presence, more rigid, lifeless, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... being asked by Marforio, why he wore such foul linen, replied, he could get no other, for the Pope had made his washerwoman a princess,—meaning thereby the Pope's sister, Donna Camilla, who had formerly been a laundress, but was now established with a fortune and a palace. "This stinging piece of raillery was carried directly to his Holiness, who ordered a strict search to be made for the author, but to no purpose. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Harrison, had also been far from well. There had been a good deal of talk between the old women of dying, a subject to which their minds had been very prone to revert. Besides Mrs Love there were two other visitors, but they too failed to cheer the old couple up. One of the visitors, a laundress of the Temple called Mrs Oliphant, had done her best, poohpoohing such melancholy talk, and attributing the low spirits in which the old women found themselves to the bleakness of the February weather, and promising them that they would find ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... Gladys O'Donnel, stout and good-natured, an indifferent cook and rather untidy. She was twenty years old and the eldest of a large and impoverished family. Her mother was a laundress— "took in washin'"—and her earnings, with the wages of Jane Gladys, must suffice to feed many hungry mouths. That was why Mrs. Conant had hired Jane Gladys. Aunt Hannah knew the girl was not very competent, but she was ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... in," said Mr. Cord. He was standing in the middle of the room in his shirt sleeves and gloomily contemplating the shirt he wore. "What's this laundress, anyhow? A Bolshevist or a pastry-cook?" he said. "Did you ever see anything like ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... having cleared decks, Captain de Haldimar had prevailed on his unfortunate relatives to retire to the small cabin arranged for their reception; and here they were attended by an aged female, who had long followed the fortunes of the crew, and acted in the twofold character of laundress and sempstress. He himself, with Sir Everard, continued on deck watching the progress of the vessel with an anxiety that became more intense at each succeeding hour. Hitherto their course had been unimpeded, save by the obstacles already enumerated; and they had now, at about ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... bringing the queen and king was managed at her house, and the consultations held there; so that she might as well have thrown away a little money in raffling there, as well as at the other houses: but it seems that my lord Devonshire has got Mrs Potter to be laundress: she has not much countenance of the queen, her daughter still keeping the Indian house her mother had. The same day the queen went to one Mrs Wise's, a famous woman for telling fortunes, but could not prevail with ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Reeves. "I believe the laundress and chore boy come by the day, also cleaning women and such. But I know that Miss Van Allen has no resident servant ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... Bernice Bowden Person interviewed: Hannah Brooks Wright W. 17th, Highland Addition, Pine Bluff, Arkansas Age: 85 Occupation: Laundress ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... went up stairs again, and all over the rooms in the top of the house, opened all the cook's bundles, the waiter's boxes, the chambermaid's trunk, and the laundress's umbrella; but not a single steamboat ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... said, was engaged in unpacking the clothes just returned by the laundress. This was an occupation which she never intrusted to any of her attendants, but in which she could generally engage only secretly and at night, after she had dismissed them; for the emperor made it incumbent on his mother's ladies of ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... in politics and in the Church, was an excellent blacksmith, bell-founder and designer of ladies' robes. Chriemhild in the Nibelungenlied was an industrious and skillful milliner. In the corresponding period of Grecian and Roman history, we find Penelope and Lucretia at the loom, Nausicaa, a laundress, the daughter of the king of the Lestrigons, fetching water from the spring, Odysseus, a carpenter, a queen of Macedonia as a cook, and finally the distaff of Tanaquil.(348) In the highlands of Scotland, in 1797, there were a great many peasants ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... promenade, auditorium, dancing—anything, in fact, that a large company might require. It had been the intention all along of the two men to use these houses jointly. There was, to begin with, a combination use of the various servants, the butler, gardener, laundress, and maids. Frank Cowperwood employed a governess for his children. The butler was really not a butler in the best sense. He was Henry Cowperwood's private servitor. But he could carve and preside, and he could be used in either house as occasion warranted. There was also a hostler and a ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... life was "What's mine is my own, and what's yours is mine." He relied on Trudy to mend his clothes and make his neckties, keep house and manage with a laundress a half day a week, yet always be as well dressed and pretty as when she had slacked in the office and boarded without cares at Mary's house. She must always seem happy and proud of her husband and ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... look out -ist, and you find it expresses the person who does an action; look out -in, and you find it expresses the feminine; look out -o, and you find it denotes a noun. Put the whole together, and you get "female who does washing, laundress." ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... newspapers keeps more critical detachment than he is usually credited with. In any case neither the boisterous nor the shrinking multimillionaire has any representative standing. He is not what a poor person means by a rich person. Ask your laundress who is rich in your neighborhood, and she will name all who live gently and do not have to worry about next month's bills. True pragmatist, she sees that to be exempt from any threat of poverty is to all intents and purposes to be rich. Her classification ignores certain niceties, but ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327 curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband once invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... "You with your old sermons, and Mother with my old dresses! But it was a good sermon," she added. "I have hardly been civil to that German laundress since." ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... It never occurred to him that Dennis might be more than fourteen years old. And thus, to shorten this preface, when we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there entered Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... finger in its eye and weep. Ha! ha! ha! poor Risberg! how would he laugh to see these compassionate tears! It seem she has written in a very doleful strain to thee,—talked very pathetically about his debts to his laundress and his landlady. I have a good mind to leave thee in this amiable ignorance; but I'll prove for once a kind brother, by telling you that Risberg is a profligate and prodigal; that he neglects every study but that of dice; that this is the true reason ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... disenthralment. She wandered far and near, and soiled her white gowns, to the despair of the Otter servant who did up the master's shirts and managed the mistress's clear-starching, but who never dreamt, in those days of frills, robes, and flounces, of styling herself a laundress. Leslie filled her apron with mosses and lichens: she stole out after the reapers had left the patch of oats which was not within sight of the house, and gathered among the sheaves like a Ruth. She grew stout and hardy, and, in spite of her gipsy bonnet, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... difficult to fulfil as might at first appear. The Colonel was a man of simple habits. He had learned these when a soldier, and he brought up his sons to live like himself. He ate plain food, drank only water, and slept upon a camp-bed with a buffalo-robe and a blanket. A laundress in Point Coupee kept the linen clean; and Hugot was not near so busy with house affairs as you might suppose. He made daily journeys to the village—to the market, and the post-office, from which he often brought letters, many ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... thee! I tell thee, shameless girl, Thou shalt be laundress to my waiting-maid.— How lik'st thou her, Ebea? will ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed. She wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods expressed itself to him from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... down and held out her arms to Ailie, who incontinently rushed into them. Propriety fled for the nonce, discomfited. Miss Martha's curls were disarranged beyond repair, and Miss Martha's collar was crushed to such an extent that the very laundress who had washed and starched and ironed it would have utterly failed to recognise it. Miss Jane looked on at these improprieties in perfect indifference—nay, when, after her sister had had enough, the child was handed over to her, she submitted ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... forth, there seemed to be no need for any variation. It was not before the fifth day that I discovered that he had taken from the start a pint of whiskey every day. When he first arrived he had bribed a laundress of the hotel to bring to his room every day the whiskey hidden in the laundry and he drank it during the night. Then I declined ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... a vague memory of the old shiftless camp they had both abandoned. A certain instinct—he knew not why, or less still that it might be one of delicacy—made him alight before they reached the first house. Bidding the carriage wait, Uncle Billy entered, and was informed by a blowzy Irish laundress at a tub that Jim Foster, or "Arkansaw Jim," lived at the fourth shanty "beyant." He was at home, for "he'd shprained his fut." Uncle Billy hurried on, stopped before the door of a shanty scarcely less rude than ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... twittering more loudly; even the lawnmower which black Jeff was already rolling over the grass had assumed a peculiarly agreeable clatter. And though, at breakfast, father grumbled at his eggs being overdone, and though mother complained that the laundress hadn't come, and though Aunt Nettie's head was still aching, all these things, somehow, seemed trivial ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Annie E. Washington opened a select primary school in her mother's house, on K Street, between Seventeenth and Eighteenth streets, west. The mother, a widow woman, was a laundress, and by her own labor has given her children good advantages, though she had no such advantages herself. This daughter was educated chiefly under Rev. John E. Cook and Miss Miner, with whom she was a favorite scholar. Her older sister was ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... marry me for it! [ANNA opens the window and looks down] "Let me make a match between you and Martha," says he. Who is this Martha? It must be that Balabalkina—Babakalkina woman, the one that looks like a laundress. ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... was hurt and suspicious. It resented its lack of knowledge, and turned cynical where, had it been taken into confidence, it would have been solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been jilted, for it knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters came from Dick. And against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot flame ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the fifth day of January, a fire breaking out at Whitehall through the carelessness of a laundress, the whole body of the palace, together with the new gallery, council- chamber, and several adjoining apartments were entirely consumed; but the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... him. "I am going to be brutally frank, Jimmy," she said again. "You know that is a habit of mine, too. You are a very brilliant young man, but you are not omnipotent—you require stiffening, like a collar. And I would be a splendid laundress for you. Harriet is a long shot too lenient. I might not be so comfortable to live with, but I'd be bracing. I'd have you in that dirty little superintendent's box in ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... broad daylight. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to feel himself extraordinarily vigorous. He jumped up at once and dressed quickly; then dragged out his trunk and began packing immediately. His linen had come back from the laundress the previous morning. Ivan positively smiled at the thought that everything was helping his sudden departure. And his departure certainly was sudden. Though Ivan had said the day before (to Katerina Ivanovna, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... replied Phil, decisively. "The maid and the laundress are the only ones I remember at Christmas. Mrs. Barrington has sensibly forbidden the giving of tips, and since we don't pretend to be friends it would be ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... were mistresses of the common rules of arithmetic. After this age they were practised by a writing-master in drawing out bills neatly, keeping accounts, and applying to every-day use their knowledge of arithmetic. Some were taught by a laundress to wash and get up fine linen and lace; others were instructed by a neighbouring traiteur in those culinary mysteries with which Sister Frances was unacquainted. In sweetmeats and confectioneries she yielded to no one; and she made her pupils as expert as ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... do it all at once?" asked Etty Thoresby, slipping into the rocking-chair, as Mrs. Linceford, by whom she had come and placed herself within the last minute, rose and went in to follow her laundress, just then going up the stairs ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town laundress. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... and support the "Maison de Retraite" offers rooms, board, attendance, laundress and even a small plot of garden for the annual sum of L16 to L24 per inmate, the second sum procuring larger rooms and more liberal fare. Personal independence is absolutely unhampered except by the fact that the lodge gate is closed at 10 p.m. As most of the tenants of the ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the limit of our little bit of pleasure-ground. On the other side of it there is a cottage standing on the edge of the common. The most good-natured woman in the world lives here. She is our laundress—married to a stupid young fellow named Molly, and blessed with a plump baby as sweet-tempered at herself. Thinking it likely that the piteous voice which had disturbed me might be the voice of Mrs. Molly, I was astonished to hear her appealing to anybody (perhaps to me?) to "let her in." So ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... the laundress's assistant wait on the first table; but one day when, the maid of one of Miss Ponsonby's friends comin' down over late, she was served with instead o' by them, she gave Mrs. Maggs the 'orriblest settin' down, as not knowin' her business in puttin' a lady's lady with servants' servants, the ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... lady, my dear," said the woman, smiling,—"only a laundress as does for some of the gentlemen in the Temple. There now, you both go home; for I can see that you don't belong to this part of the town. I dare say, if the truth was known, ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... needle round over the whole twenty-four points, but none of them suited the case. She stopped it at "porter," moved it to "bootblack," carried it around to "ice water," and successively to "coupe," "laundress," and "messenger-boy," and then gave up in despair, and jerked open the door that led to the hall. Miss Wakefield had just come up to the next apartment to inquire after a little girl ill from a cold, and was returning toward the elevator when Mrs. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... A great deal of steam! The pudding was out 5 of the copper. A smell like a washing day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating house and a pastry cook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with 10 the pudding, like a speckled cannon ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half a quartern of ignited brandy and bedight with Christmas ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... "Well, Mary Flynn,—that's my laundress, you know,—has overworked lately, and to keep up her strength, I'm sorry to say, has indulged in her habit of toning up for her day's work with more of the 'crathur' than is good for—, By the way, when are you ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... yet in swaddling clothes, It speaketh not, if either hunger comes, Or passing thirst, or lower calls of need; And children's stomach works its own content. And I, though I foresaw this, call to mind, How I was cheated, washing swaddling clothes, And nurse and laundress did the selfsame work. I then with these my double handicrafts, Brought up Orestes for his father dear; And now, woe's me! I learn that he is dead, And go to fetch the man that mars this house; And gladly will he ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... in twenty-four occupations and 2,138 females in twenty-five occupations from 1906 to 1909. It will be noted that in some cases two occupations are given under one heading such as elevator and switchboard, or cook and laundress. In these cases, the individual is paid the same for the two branches of work; so far as the wage is concerned it is one occupation. It is significant that out of a total of 682 males, 513, or 75.2 per cent, received ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... reported a small part of the conversation I had with the Literary Celebrity. He was so much taken up with his pleasing self-contemplation, while I made him air his opinions and feelings and spread his characteristics as his laundress spreads and airs his linen on the clothes-line, that I don't believe it ever occurred to him that he had been in the hands of an interviewer until he found himself exposed to the wind and sunshine in full dimensions in the columns of The People's Perennial ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... bed I was surprised to hear a voice in the dining-room, where the laundress was lighting a fire. She had found the door unbolted, notwithstanding my design to fasten it, and must have passed the bed-chamber door while I was hanging on it, and yet never perceived me. She heard me fall, and presently came to ask me if I was well, adding, she feared I had ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... yesterday Mrs. Walkem, the laundress, told Aunt that your—er—peculiarities were a judgment on me for 'tryin' to find out them things in folkses minds which God has hid ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... no need of giving up either. I saw Madame Fauconnier, the laundress in La Rue Neuve. She will take me Monday. If you go in with your friend we shall be afloat again in six months. We must find some kind of a hole where we can live cheaply while we work. That is the thing to ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... you have an understanding with the laundress (to whom you say that you are all-powerful with me), threatening to take away my practice from her, unless she gets up gratis some of ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to the kitchen of Dr. W.'s house a foul-mouthed Irish laundress who used coarse language to me concerning urination. I loathed the woman, and yet one night I dreamed that I was embracing her naked form and rolling over and over with her on the bed; and in spite of my sight of female genitals a few months ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... wonderful pamphlet, and, more important still in the eyes of Mrs. Grundy, had money to spend and to give, was staying with her in Melrose, and wearing good and well made clothes. Old servants—the old laundress—old schoolfellows were visited. My father's old clerk, Allan Freer, had a good business in Melrose, though not equal to that of the Tory firm. I think the portioners were all sold out before he could enter the field, and the fate of these Melrose people has thoroughly emphasized for me ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... My grandmother was a 'daily gift' to old Mistress when they were both children. Grandmother was nurse to the children; she lived over a hundred years and nursed all the children and grandchildren. She died at the Bissell's home on Rutledge Avenue years and years after slavery. Mother Ellen was laundress; she died first part of the War. My father tended ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... something not very pleasant either. Granny looked grave and troubled, and at the same time annoyed. However, there was nothing for Audrey to do but to go on with her breakfast, for she knew that her grandmother did not like to be questioned, and, after all, it might only be that the laundress had torn a sheet, or that the boot-boy had been rude to the cook. Granny was always greatly upset if people did not ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... a jilting baggage, but why should Mr. D. belie her? Virgil talks nothing of her going to sea, and perhaps she had a mind to be only a camp laundress, which office she might be advanced to without going to sea: 'the forms of horrid war,' ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Friendship society which intended to accept Mis' Sykes's invitation hastened with relieved eagerness to follow with flowers its regrets to the "comen out recep." For every one was genuinely attached to the little laundress and interested in her welfare—up to the point of sacrificing social interests in the eyes of the Sykeses. Friendship gardens were rich with Autumn, cosmos and salvia and opulent asters, and on the morning of the two ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... medium, much to her disgust, and made to sit whole evenings at the table. 'I only did it,' she says, 'because it was a way of recompensing my hosts, whose desire to keep me with them prevented their placing me in a convent. Finally I took up laundress work, thinking I might render myself independent and live as I liked ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... embarrassment of seeing his mother reduced to this humble position, she assumed the name of Madame Charlotte; and persons requiring her services were requested to apply to M. Postel, M. Chardon's successor in the business. Lucien's sister worked for a laundress, a decent woman much respected in L'Houmeau, and earned fifteen daily sous. As Mme. Prieur's forewoman she had a certain position in the workroom, which raised her slightly above the class ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... and, to take his family into the country four times a year, he shall pay one dollar and twenty cents more for carriage-hire! A small bourgeois spends one hundred and twenty dollars for a housekeeper, laundress, linen-tender, and errand-boys; but if, by a wiser economy which works for the interest of all, he takes a domestic, the exchequer, in the interest of articles of subsistence, will punish this plan of economy! What an absurd thing is the philanthropy of the economists, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with the pudding like a speckled cannon-ball so hard and firm blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... support the "Maison de Retraite" offers rooms, board, attendance, laundress and even a small plot of garden for the annual sum of L16 to L24 per inmate, the second sum procuring larger rooms and more liberal fare. Personal independence is absolutely unhampered except by the fact that the lodge gate is closed at 10 p.m. ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Rorie quickly, for he knew that when the floodgates of Miss McCroke's eloquence were once loosened the tide ran strong, "when house and lands are gone and spent a man may turn usher in an academy, and earn fifty pounds a year and his laundress's bill by grinding Caesar's Commentaries into small boys. But I shouldn't lay in a stock of learning with that view. When my house and lands are gone I'll go after them—emigrate, and go into the lumber ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... cut paper, or work samplers?" "Dear aunt," said Isabel, "I am a brown bird of the mountains, as my mother called me. She taught me to sing, because she said it made work go on more merrily, but the longest day was short enough for what I had to do; I was laundress, and sempstress, and cook, and gardener; and if Cicely went to look for the sheep, I had to milk and bake, and at night I mended my father's fishing-nets, while I was learning Latin with Eustace. Yet I got through all very well, till my mother fell ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... and suspicious. It resented its lack of knowledge, and turned cynical where, had it been taken into confidence, it would have been solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been jilted, for it knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters came from Dick. And against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... four miles quicker than the horse does,—it is uphill nearly all the way,—but time is no longer any object with me. Amelie has a donkey and a little cart to drive me to the station at Couilly when I take that line, or when I want to do an errand or go to the laundress, ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... slang Grose has no touch of its extensive signification. The squeamish Fair One who takes it on the sly, merely to cure the vapours, politely names it to her friends as White Wine. The Swell chaffs it as Blue Ruin, to elevate his notions. The Laundress loves dearly a drain of Ould Tom, from its strength to comfort her inside. The drag Fiddler can toss off a quartern of Max without making a wry mug. The Costermonger illumines his ideas with a flash of lightning.' The hoarse Cyprian owes her existence to copious ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... has been my bad fortune to meet it. One trifling scamp I have in mind, painted. A house, a fence, a barn, even a sign-board? Not at all, but messes he called 'The Sea,' one doesn't know why, save that the things slightly resembled raw oysters. However, the women raved over him. His laundress and his landlady had good ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Galien Restored, a taker of moldwarps. The four sons of Aymon were all toothdrawers. Pope Calixtus was a barber of a woman's sine qua non. Pope Urban, a bacon-picker. Melusina was a kitchen drudge-wench. Matabrune, a laundress. Cleopatra, a crier of onions. Helen, a broker for chambermaids. Semiramis, the beggars' lice-killer. Dido did sell mushrooms. Penthesilea sold cresses. Lucretia was an alehouse-keeper. Hortensia, a spinstress. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... in the Chicago Defender have influenced me to write to you with no delay. For seven previous years I bore the reputation of a first class laundress in Selma. I have much experience with all of the machines in this laundry. This laundry is noted for its skillful work of neatness and ect. We do sample work for different laundries of neighboring cities, viz. Montgomery, Birmingham and Mobile once or twice ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... replenish the heaters. One is not obliged to remain in the room with a hot stove, and suffer the inconveniences. No heat is felt at all from the iron as it is all concentrated on the bottom surface. It is a regular blessing to the laundress especially in hot weather. There is a growing demand in all parts of the country for these ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... Maid Dancer Dressmaker Drummer Economist Electrician Farmer First Aide*** Flower Finder Gardener Handy Woman Health Guardian*** Health Winner Home Maker Home Nurse*** Horsewoman Hostess Interpreter Journalist**** Laundress Milliner Motorist**** Musician Needlewoman Pathfinder Photographer Pioneer*** Rock Tapper Sailor*** Scribe Signaller Star Gazer Swimmer ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... humor serve For while a child is yet in swaddling clothes, It speaketh not, if either hunger comes, Or passing thirst, or lower calls of need; And children's stomach works its own content. And I, though I foresaw this, call to mind, How I was cheated, washing swaddling clothes, And nurse and laundress did the selfsame work. I then with these my double handicrafts, Brought up Orestes for his father dear; And now, woe's me! I learn that he is dead, And go to fetch the man that mars this house; And gladly will he hear these words ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pleasure and proud of my success; I rose early, and looking at my shirt, found stains still visible, and that I had so mucked it in washing, that an infant could have guessed what I had been doing. I knew that my mother who now did household duties herself, selected the things for the laundress; and in despair hit on a plan: I filled the chamber-pot with piss and soap-suds, making it as dirty as I could, put it near a chair and my shirt hanging over it carelessly, so as to look as if it had dropped into the pot by accident; ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... with the present granny first. My good old creature, you can't of course remember, but that little gentleman for whom your mother was laundress in the Temple was the ingenious Mr. Goldsmith, author of a "History of England," the "Vicar of Wakefield," and many diverting pieces. You were brought almost an infant to his chambers in Brick Court, and he gave you some sugar-candy, for the doctor was always good to children. That gentleman who ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came walking back together, still demurely hand in hand, and settled themselves quietly in a corner to study their tasks for the next day. Babette's doll, once attired as a fashionable Parisienne, and now degenerated into a one- eyed laundress with a rather soiled cap and apron, stuck out its composite arms in vain from the bench where it sat all askew, drooping its head forlornly over a dustpan,—and Henri's drum, wherewith he was wont to wake alarming echoes out of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... on them, for those unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one cannot live them again here when one has lived them elsewhere; I felt that it was towards the week that would begin with the Monday on which the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat that I had stained with ink, that they were hastening to busy themselves with the duty of emerging from that ideal Time in which they did not, as yet, exist, those two Queen Cities of which ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... slaves, and they loved him and his children very dearly. And the little girls loved them, particularly "Mammy," who had nursed their mother, and now had entire charge of the children; and Aunt Milly, a lame yellow woman, who helped Mammy in the nursery; and Aunt Edy, the head laundress, who was never too busy to amuse them. Then there was Aunt Nancy, the "tender," who attended to the children for the field-hands, and old Uncle Snake-bit Bob, who could scarcely walk at all, because he had been bitten by a snake when he was a boy: so now he had ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... content to have any amount of trite philosophy passed off upon it as new goods by the author who has a gift for dialect and uses an American negro as mouthpiece. Miss DOROTHY DIX employs a black laundress of the name of Mirandy (SAMPSON LOW) for philosopher; and cheerfully persisting with the "yessum's," the "wid's," the "dat's" and the "becaze's," tells us with incessant humour many things we all knew before about husbands, their little idiosyncracies and weaknesses and the methods by which ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... for all its quiet, it was on Wednesday night that perhaps the boldest attempt was made to enter the house. On Thursday afternoon the laundress sent word she would like to speak to me, and I saw her in my private sitting-room, a ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Shammai said, "they must not give skins to a tanner, nor articles to a strange laundress; except they can be sufficiently done while it is yet day." But all of them the school of Hillel ...
— Hebrew Literature
... took chambers in Lincoln's Inn. His father on his second marriage had settled some property upon him, which brought in some L90 a year. He had to live like a gentleman upon this, and to give four guineas a year to the laundress, four to his barber, and two to his shoeblack. In spite of Jeremy's deviation from the path of preferment, the two were on friendly terms, and when the hopes of the son's professional success grew faint, the father ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... There would be no scholars to take lessons. How could she support herself? She could remain in the house, for the mortgage was paid off, though the government and not poor Solomon Isaacs had the mortgage-money in its grip for the present. Old Ursula, who was cook, chambermaid, housekeeper, laundress, and everything else for Father Peter, and had been Marget's nurse in earlier years, said God would provide. But she said that from habit, for she was a good Christian. She meant to help in the providing, to make sure, if ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... laundress, deposes that she has known both the deceased for three years, having washed for them during that period. The old lady and her daughter seemed on good terms—very affectionate towards each other. They were excellent pay. Could not speak in regard to their mode or means of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Jane Gladys O'Donnel, stout and good-natured, an indifferent cook and rather untidy. She was twenty years old and the eldest of a large and impoverished family. Her mother was a laundress— "took in washin'"—and her earnings, with the wages of Jane Gladys, must suffice to feed many hungry mouths. That was why Mrs. Conant had hired Jane Gladys. Aunt Hannah knew the girl was not ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... city, he had committed a forgery, drawn some four or five thousand dollars, had the greater part of the notes exchanged—and, with the exception of the five large bills hurriedly thrust into the vest pocket, and which he had sent to the poor laundress, there was little available evidence of the forgery in his possession. The widow's son had scarcely left the traveller's room with the clothes, when in came two policemen. The forger was not arrested as a principal, but certain barely suspicious circumstances had ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the most handsome women of the people. After inspecting many women of equal merit as regards beauty, youth and health, the princess's choice lighted on Philippa, a young Catanese woman, the wife of a fisherman of Trapani, and by condition a laundress. This young woman, as she washed her linen on the bank of a stream, had dreamed strange dreams: she had fancied herself summoned to court, wedded to a great personage, and receiving the honours of a great lady. Thus when she was called ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... beginning of his new career in his shapeless prison shoddy; so the next day Larry pottered about the studio, acting as maid-of-all-work, while the clothes in his trunk which had been stored with the Duchess were being sponged and pressed by the little tailor down the street, and while a laundress, driven by the Duchess, was preparing the rest of his outfit for his debut. In his capacity of maid, with a basket on his arm, he went out into the little street, where in his shabby clothes he was recognized by none and leaned ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... be well-meaning and beautiful-souled people who will try to get you to confide in them, and then use their knowledge of your domestic unhappiness to blackmail you; there will be threats of law-suits from people who will claim that they have contracted a disease from you or your child—your laundress, perhaps, or your maid, or one of these ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... pruner of trees in various localities, notably at Faverolles. There all trace of him was lost. A long time afterwards he was seen again in Auvergne; then in Paris, where he is said to have been a wheelwright, and to have had a daughter, who was a laundress; but that has not been proved. Now, before going to the galleys for theft, what was Jean Valjean? A pruner of trees. Where? At Faverolles. Another fact. This Valjean's Christian name was Jean, and his mother's surname was Mathieu. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... been a depressing sight, viewed with the eyes of a careful mother. Blood and mould mingled on my face, my dress needed a laundress as badly as a dress could, and my shoes were scratched ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... a funny thing that my laundress," he shouted back, "can't bring in breakfast things for more than one on that particular tray. She's always complaining it's too small, and says I ought to ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... yon lines her hands have laden, A laundress with white hair appears, Alert as many a youthful maiden, Spite of her five-and-seventy years. Bravely she won those white hairs, still Eating the bread hard toil obtain'd her, And laboring truly to fulfil The duties ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... discourse, and he is as curious in their newness as the fashion. His other talk is ladies and such pretty things, or some jest at a play. His pick-tooth bears a great part in his discourse, so does his body, the upper parts whereof are as starched as his linnen, and perchance use the same laundress. He has learned to ruffle his face from his boot, and takes great delight in his walk to hear his spurs gingle. Though his life pass somewhat slidingly, yet he seems very careful of the time, for he is still drawing ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... is the other," answered Sister Anne. "Poor, poor Mr. Sly! He made a will leaving you all, except five pounds a year to his laundress: he made his will, locked his door, took heart-rending leave of his uncle at night, and this morning was found hanging at his bedpost when Sambo, the black servant, took him up his water to shave. 'Let ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... yet, no allusion to their marriage, except that Evelina had once told her sister that Mr. Ramy wished them to invite Mrs. Hochmuller and Linda to the wedding. The mention of the laundress raised a half-forgotten fear in Ann Eliza, and she said in a tone of tentative appeal: "I guess if I was you I wouldn't want to be very great friends with ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... room, and work by her light. When he went into the street, he must walk as lightly as he could, and as cautiously, upon the stones, almost upon tiptoe, in order not to wear his heels down in too short a time; he must give the laundress as little to wash as possible; and, in order not to wear out his clothes, he must take them off, as soon as he got home, and wear only his cotton dressing-gown, which had been ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... a suburb of Prague, there lived about twenty years ago, two poor but honest people, who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow; he worked in a large printing establishment, and his wife employed her spare time as a laundress. Their pride, and their only pleasure, was their daughter Viteska, who was a vigorous, voluptuous-looking, handsome girl of eighteen, whom they brought up very well and carefully. She worked for a dress-maker, and was thus able to help her parents a little, and she made use of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... a servant-girl, a laundress or a dressmaker. The manicure and the beauty-doctor were still in the matrix of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... have not heard a word of Cap since I left her to try to find out her friends. But any one interested in her might inquire for her at Mrs. Simmons', laundress, No. ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the Baron; "as Dufresny said, when he married his laundress, because he could not pay her bill. Hewas the author, as you know, of the opera of Lot; at whose representation the great pun was made;—I say the great pun, as we say the great ton of Heidelberg. As one of the performers was singing the line, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... it please your Lordship, we, the boys of Mr. Cuper's school, are desirous to bring to the notice of the bravest officer England possesses now living, a Deed of Heroism by a little boy and girl, children of our school laundress, aged respectively eight and six, who, seeing a little fellow in the water out of depth, and sinking twice, before the third time jumped in to save him, though unable to swim themselves; the girl aged six first, we are sorry to say; but the brother, Robert Coop, followed her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... part of the population of our French watering-place, and are deservedly addressed and respected in many ways. Some of the surface-addresses to them are odd enough, as when a laundress puts a placard outside her house announcing her possession of that curious British instrument, a 'Mingle;' or when a tavern-keeper provides accommodation for the celebrated English game of 'Nokemdon.' But, to us, it is not the least pleasant feature of our ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... This, at least, was sufficient explanation until late in the afternoon. Then, restored to partial composure, the girl was sitting up and being fanned in the shade of her father's roof-tree, when roused by the voice of the next-door neighbor before mentioned—Mrs. Quinn, long time laundress of Captain Sanders's troop and jealous as to Wren's, was telling what she had heard of Shannon's discoveries, opining that both Captain Wren and the captain's daughter deserved investigation. "No wan need tell me there was others prowling ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... boys,—particularly obnoxious to married men. We'll be having dress-making establishments in full blast before you know it, and model gowns till you can't rest. I almost hate to spread the news among the women. We won't have a cook, or a laundress, or a school-teacher on the Island if this dressmaking craze gets started. Every hut along this row will have a sign beside the door: 'Dressmaking Done Here.' On the other hand, I doubt very much if we'll be able to get a single tailor-shop ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... equipment, to Larry O'Toole, the son of my mother's laundress, to be preserved for him until he is old enough ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... formally, but perfunctorily announced by the butler, and each one flushing painfully in return for the attention. There was Delia, the cook, and Christine, her assistant; Swanson, the furnace man; Lockhart, the chauffeur, and Boyles, the washer; Cora, the laundress; Georgia, the scullery-maid; Edgecomb, the gardener, and his four helpers; Beulah and Emma, the upstairs-maids; Bliss, the lodge-keeper, and Jane, his daughter; Frank, the pony-cart driver, and Joe, the ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... possibilities. No doubt you hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the married woman in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress, needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in knowing ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Englebourn labourers rose above smock-frocks and fustian trousers. He wore a blue bird's-eye handkerchief round his neck, and his shirt, though coarse in texture, was as white as the sun and the best laundress in Englebourn could manage to bleach it. There was nothing to find fault with in his dress, therefore, but still his mother did not feel quite comfortable as she took stealthy glances at him. Harry was naturally a reserved fellow, and did not make much conversation himself, and his mother felt ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... fancies, she has taken a violent affection for a most hideous stray dog, who made his appearance here about six months ago, and contrived to pick up a living in the village, one can hardly tell how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachael Strong, the laundress—a dog-lover by profession; now winning a meal from the light-footed and open-hearted lasses at the Rose; now standing on his hind-legs to extort, by sheer beggary, a scanty morsel from some pair of "drowthy cronies," or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the alehouse-bench; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... Even the most friendly advice, conveyed in the blandest possible tone, is often declined with freezing dignity or repelled with tart resentment. The cook who makes a cinder of your joint, or sends you up disgusting slops for coffee, or the laundress between whose clean and soiled linen you are puzzled to choose, has almost invariably the reply, uttered with a majestic sternness that never fails to crush any but a veteran and plucky housekeeper: 'This is the first time any mistress ever found ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that the monkey, Chee-Chee, was to do the cooking and mending; the dog was to sweep the floors; the duck was to dust and make the beds; the owl, Too-Too, was to keep the accounts, and the pig was to do the gardening. They made Polynesia, the parrot, housekeeper and laundress, because ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... purification, defecation &c. v.; purgation, lustration[obs3]; detersion[obs3], abstersion[obs3]; epuration[obs3], mundation|; ablution, lavation[obs3], colature|; disinfection &c. v.; drainage, sewerage. lavatory, laundry, washhouse[obs3]; washerwoman, laundress, dhobi[obs3], laundryman, washerman[obs3]; scavenger, dustman[obs3], sweep; white wings brush[Local U. S.]; broom, besom[obs3], mop, rake, shovel, sieve, riddle, screen, filter; blotter. napkin, cloth, maukin|, malkin|, handkerchief, towel, sudary[obs3]; doyley[obs3], doily, duster, sponge, mop, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... questions she was as open as he could wish. From her earliest childhood, he learned, she had known servitude, and been familiar with scorn and reproach. She had been swineherd, goose-girl, scare-crow, laundress, scullery-wench, and what not, as her mother could win for her. She could never better herself, because of the taint of witchcraft and all the unholiness it brought upon her. As laundress and scullery-maid ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... it into the cold water that was already in his bath, refilled the kettle and put it back on the fire. After dressing, he came into his sitting-room, made tea and cooked, in his Dutch oven, something he had bought the day before. His laundress was an elderly woman, and he could not trouble her to come to his rooms so early in the morning; on the other hand, he could not stay in bed until he thought it right for her to go out; so it ended in his doing a great ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... was young, her modesty was so extreme that it became ridiculous. The ears of the Senorita de los Oscos were so chaste that the conversation of an English "Miss" would seem like a serjeant's in her presence. She could not tolerate her brother's under-linen being put with hers when the laundress took it away or brought it home. If she was asked to sew a button on his underclothes, she ran to her room when the task was over, and washed her hands, when, it was said, she sprinkled them with holy water. She compressed ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... Paris.(386) I should not repeat this to you, only to introduce George Selwyn's account of this woman who, he says, is mother to the Princess of Montauban, grandmother to Madame de Brionne, sister to General Oglethorpe, and was laundress to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... worked about the station had a pierced nose, and often wore a mouyerh, or bone, through it. A white laundress wore earrings. She said one day to the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... the condition is very shaky indeed—crimpled, pierced with pinholes, corner creases torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will indeed take an infinity of trouble to put together the ashes of a burned note, and will give the owner a new note or the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... "I have dragged it from Florence that they foregathered purposely some time ago with the laundress's little boy who has the same complaint, but since it did not seem to have communicated itself to them they made another trial to-day. Well, Edith will have to leave the hotel now and take ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... circumstances, who are too fat- headed to realize that those womanly attributes which so charm the sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery. One is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills. Take the great middle class of America (which is the social and moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the exhaustion of labor, and are robust as Jove's Phoenician bull, while their ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... clothes, saying, that they smelt of grease?" Sophy, touched to the quick, forgot her natural timidity and defended herself eagerly. Her papa knew very well all the smaller things would have had no other laundress if she had been allowed to wash them, and she would gladly have done more had she been set to do it. [Footnote: I own I feel grateful to Sophy's mother for not letting her spoil such pretty hands with soap, hands which Emile will kiss so often.] Meanwhile she ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... bank-clerk complained in extreme displeasure of the way the laundress had of late dressed his collars—these were so high that, as Laura was not slow to notice, he had to look straight down the two sides of his nose to see his plate—and announced that he would not be ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... Opening his eyes, he was surprised to feel himself extraordinarily vigorous. He jumped up at once and dressed quickly; then dragged out his trunk and began packing immediately. His linen had come back from the laundress the previous morning. Ivan positively smiled at the thought that everything was helping his sudden departure. And his departure certainly was sudden. Though Ivan had said the day before (to Katerina Ivanovna, Alyosha, and Smerdyakov) ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... your honours and reverences would know whether I writ clean and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full as well by looking into my Laundress's bill, as my book: there is one single month in which I can make it appear, that I dirtied one and thirty shirts with clean writing; and after all, was more abus'd, cursed, criticis'd, and confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, for what I had wrote in that one month, than ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the efficacy of licorice in producing a certain effect, and the expediency of changing one's linen at least three times a day; though had he changed his six, I should have said that the purification of the last shirt would have been no sinecure to the laundress. His accent was decidedly Scotch: he spoke familiarly of Scott and one or two other Scotch worthies, and more than once insinuated that he was a member of Parliament. With respect to the rest of the company ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... easy for an employer to manage her household industry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress. The difficulties really begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... would receive all three of us as passengers, that he would furnish a room simply but comfortably, that papa would share this room with us, that Mario would supply our table, and that his wife would serve as maid and laundress. It remained to be seen now whether our other fellow-travelers were married, and, if so, what sort of creatures their ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... much of that type of work is to be done at home. There are two points of view here. Some households prefer to scoop the family linen into a bag, make a list, and hand it over to a commercial laundry. Others find a dependable laundress nearby or provide facilities for doing the work at home. The clear air of the country and easy drying conditions influence ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... lived at Upperton, a suburb of Eastbourne, and had accommodation for seventy boys, but during the whole time I remained there we never had more than fifty. His advertisements in local and London papers offering "Commercial training for thirty guineas including laundress and books. Bracing air, gravel soil, diet best and unlimited. Reduction for brothers," were glowing enough, but they never whipped up business sufficiently to attract the required number of boarders. Nevertheless, I must admit that old Trigger, with all his faults ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... UGSOME to hear them in the daytime! The poorer their fare, the more pains Grizzie took to make it palatable. The gruel the laird now had always for his supper, was cooked with love rather than fuel. With what a tender hand she washed his feet! What miracles of the laundress-art were the old shirts he wore! Now that he had no other woman to look after him, she was to him like a mother to a delicate child, in all but the mother's familiarity. But the cloud was cold to her also; she seldom rimed now; ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... vastly pleased. His scheme for evading the tedious responsibilities of sovereignty had been executed without a hitch; he was officially dead; and, on the whole, standing bareheaded between a miller and laundress, he had found his funeral ceremonies to be unimpeachably conducted. He assumed the name of Paul Vanderhoffen, selected at random from the novel he was reading when his postchaise conveyed him past the frontier of Saxe-Kesselberg. Freed, penniless, and thoroughly content, he set about ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... stood there looking out. A pale April sun was shining on the brewery opposite, and touched the dark waters of the canal under the bridge to the left. The roofs of the squalid houses abutting on the brewery were wet with rain. Through a gap she could see a laundress's back-yard mainly filled with drying clothes, but boasting besides a couple of pink flowering currants just out, and holding their own for a few brief days against the smuts of Manchester. Here and there a man out of work lounged, pipe in mouth, at his open door, silently absorbing the sunshine ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Wife.—The late Duchess of York having desired her housekeeper to seek out for a new laundress, a decent-looking woman was recommended to the situation. "But, (said the housekeeper) I am afraid that she will not suit your royal highness, as she is a soldier's wife, and these people are generally loose characters." ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... that was the way things stood and for him to get some one else. He said, "Pretty slim chances, but we will pray about it." He and I went up to Sixty-seventh Street, where Mrs. Ranney was working as laundress, and after a little talk we came to the point. I was a go-ahead man, and tried every way to get her to promise to come down, but she wouldn't say yes. I'll never forget that night in the laundry if I live a hundred years; she took no stock in me at all. I was giving it up as a bad job; ...
— Dave Ranney • Dave Ranney
... to have the honor of serving Mr. Brummell—to be chamberlain to His Majesty, the King of Calais! But he is a wonderful man! People almost thank him for condescending to be in their debt; still, much as I esteem the honor, I can't afford it any longer, nor can the laundress, nor can the hairdresser. Eight hundred francs a year for washing! Three clean shirts a day, three cravats! Boots blacked, soles and all, and with such varnish! But then he has such exquisite taste! why, he blackballed ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... Flynn,—that's my laundress, you know,—has overworked lately, and to keep up her strength, I'm sorry to say, has indulged in her habit of toning up for her day's work with more of the 'crathur' than is good for—, By the way, when are you going to tackle the saloons, Gertie?" She did not wait for an answer, but ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... tell her (the courtesan, not the laundress) how she may organize the various forces latent in her and culminate in a power which shall contain in essence the united responsibilities of church, music-hall, and picture gallery." Mike turned over on his back and roared with laughter. "Frank will be delighted. ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... snuff-box, one handsome sword, and gaming only when the presence of the ladies keeps down high stakes; but no tavern-suppers—no low company which costs so much more than dissipations among one's equals. There is no need for a young man of any address to make love to his laundress,[372] as long as ladies of his own class ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327 curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband once invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... full as intellectual as their descendants. "I have had," observes the philosophic statesman, "several servants far gone in divinity, others in poetry; have known, in the families of some friends; a keeper deep in the Rosicrucian mysteries and a laundress firm ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... never heard, and the greatest ambition mother now had was to see her child Nancy. So, we earnestly set ourselves to work to reach the desired end, which was to visit Canada and seek the long-lost girl. My mother being a first-class laundress, and myself an expert seamstress, it was easy to procure all the work we could do, and command our own prices. We found, as well as the whites, a great difference between slave and free labor, for while the first was compulsory, and, therefore, ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... rather stout, almost what one might call sleek, freshly shaven, without vestige of whisker or moustache. He was invariably dressed in a suit of the most spotless black, as if going to a dinner party; his white neckcloth was fresh from the laundress's hands, and his hat shining like a racer's coat. He advanced to the arm-chair prepared for him in the centre of the writing-table, laid his hat on the left-hand corner; his snuff-box was deposited on the same side beside the quire of paper placed in readiness ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... Wife! buz! titivilitium! There's no such thing in nature. I confess, gentlemen, I have a cook, a laundress, a house-drudge, that serves my necessary turns, and goes under that title: but he's an ass that will be so uxorious to tie his affections to one circle. Come, the name dulls appetite. Here, replenish again: another bout. ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... having, in respect to the last garment, was probably like Poins'] and if the reader [Footnote: "one for superfluity and one other for use." The cap was probably that which he wore when he laid aside his wig. His hose, of colored silk, probably made only "semi-occasional" visits to the laundress.] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... English exclusives; Senator Hanway had learned that much from his sister, Mrs. Hanway-Harley. It was to be expected then that he would have someone about him to furnish brains for his deliberations, and to make up his mind as a laundress makes up shirts. Senator Hanway, knowing these things of Mr. Gwynn, was in no wise surprised that he possessed in his service one who was hearer, talker, and decider, just as ancient kings kept folk about whose business was to make witty retorts for them and conduct sparkling conversations ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... season of her disenthralment. She wandered far and near, and soiled her white gowns, to the despair of the Otter servant who did up the master's shirts and managed the mistress's clear-starching, but who never dreamt, in those days of frills, robes, and flounces, of styling herself a laundress. Leslie filled her apron with mosses and lichens: she stole out after the reapers had left the patch of oats which was not within sight of the house, and gathered among the sheaves like a Ruth. She grew stout and hardy, and, in spite of her gipsy bonnet, as brown as a ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... husband in a railroad accident and went to Denver to seek support for herself and her two-year-old daughter, Jerrine. Turning her hand to the nearest work, she went out by the day as house-cleaner and laundress. Later, seeking to better herself, she accepted employment as a housekeeper for a well-to-do Scotch cattle-man, Mr. Stewart, who had taken up a quarter-section in Wyoming. The letters, written through several years to a former employer in Denver, tell the story of her new life in the new country. ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... bore a grudge, because it was in the river that a brown woman washed his clothes on the stones, returning them with the buttons pounded off; but for every missing button there was sure to be a bright yellow, semi-indelible stain, where the laundress had spread the garments to dry upon ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... a favourite combination. I grant you these can be removed by a penknife, but imperfectly and with damage to the fabric. When what I may call the main portion of the collar is affected, the speckled area may occasionally be concealed by a careful disposition of one's tie. But not often. The laundress, with diabolical cunning, takes care to place her trade-mark as near the top rim as possible. I have not by any means exhausted the subject," he concluded, "but I think I have said enough to clear myself of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... departure. Under Dale, death was the penalty for slaughtering cattle, even one's own, except with the Governor's leave, also of exporting goods without permission. A baker giving short weight was to lose his ears, and on second repetition to suffer death. A laundress purloining linen was to be flogged. Martial law alone prevailed; even capital punishment was ordained without jury. Such arbitrary rule was perhaps necessary, so lawless were the mass of the population. It at any rate had the excellent effect of rousing the Virginians to ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... singing in the pretty little room in which George had slept, but the apartment was in the same prim order in which the laundress had arranged it after the departure of the two young men—not a chair displaced, or so much as the lid of a cigar-box lifted, to bespeak the presence of George Talboys. With a last, lingering hope, he searched upon the mantelpieces ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... thrilled with a vague memory of the old shiftless camp they had both abandoned. A certain instinct—he knew not why, or less still that it might be one of delicacy—made him alight before they reached the first house. Bidding the carriage wait, Uncle Billy entered, and was informed by a blowzy Irish laundress at a tub that Jim Foster, or "Arkansaw Jim," lived at the fourth shanty "beyant." He was at home, for "he'd shprained his fut." Uncle Billy hurried on, stopped before the door of a shanty scarcely less rude than their old cabin, and half ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... hours, and, so long as they are paid, will go on with a dogged steady persistence in toil for sixteen hours a day such as no European can rival. No English ship-carpenter will work like a Chinese, no laundress will wash as many clothes, and a Chinese compositor would be very soon expelled for over-toil by an English ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 06, June, 1884 • Various
... purification, defecation &c v.; purgation, lustration^; detersion^, abstersion^; epuration^, mundation^; ablution, lavation^, colature^; disinfection &c v.; drainage, sewerage. lavatory, laundry, washhouse^; washerwoman, laundress, dhobi^, laundryman, washerman^; scavenger, dustman^, sweep; white wings brush [U.S.]; broom, besom^, mop, rake, shovel, sieve, riddle, screen, filter; blotter. napkin, cloth, maukin^, malkin^, handkerchief, towel, sudary^; doyley^, doily, duster, sponge, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... miserable-looking object, lame of one leg, and with a large false curl hanging down over one of her eyes, which was blind. This curl was intended to conceal the blind eye, but it made the defect only more visible. She was a friend of the laundress, and was called, among the neighbors, "Lame Martha, with the curl." "Oh, you poor thing; how you do work, standing there in the water!" she exclaimed. "You really do need something to give you a little warmth, and yet spiteful people cry out about the few drops you ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... without much interest, supposing that she might be a seamstress, or laundress, or some applicant for charity. So many years had passed since he had met with this woman, that she had passed ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... about her laundress and her cleaning woman and how to handle the balky faucet that controlled the shower. She had said good-bye to Ken entirely surrounded by his books, magazines, fruit, and flowers. She was occupying a ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... his poetic loins; anon he gave it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window, or wainscot, expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught at a proof-sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead; made a dart at Bloomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring him to one direct reply; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford's Inn clock. He must ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... not come into the question. The lady is rather strong-willed. So, Ricky," he laughed, "we'll leave you two to fight it out. But Lucy may be able to find us a laundress." ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... time you set out on a search expedition," continued my informant, after a cup of tea and a cigarette to subdue his emotions, "you insist on having the number of the house. Do you get it? Oh yes! and with a safeguard added, 'Inquire of the laundress.' [This was a parody on, "Inquire of the Swiss," or "of the yard-porter."] You start off in high feather; number and guide are provided, only a fool could fail to find it, and you know that you are a person who is considered rather above the average ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... to suggest that she was perhaps not supposed to be a lady in the part. Aunt Anna said, "Perhaps not, but that does not matter; Maud would be a lady under any circumstances, whatever character she impersonated, laundress or lady. Claud says she will never act till she learns to forget herself I trust one of my daughters will ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... handsomely furnished, and through the influence of Emily's mother, Experience Breck, a girl thirty-five years old, who well understood domestic, labour, undertook to perform the duties of chambermaid, laundress, and cook, for what all concerned ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... second boat was then seen coming off to us, which contained a fine dish of delicious honey and some flowers. The order to go ahead again was scarcely given, before a third boat, in, if possible, hotter haste than the two previous ones, put off after us, bringing some things the laundress had forgotten. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... inhabitants may live in town or country, as they please, for both are within the domain. They may occupy an attic, a first floor, a parlour, an area, just as they like. The Templar seems in constant sanctuary, where no one dares intrude upon him but his laundress and his clerk. Both these, as figured by our author, are admirable specimens of the natural history of the Temple; but we have no room to give them entire, and must not spoil them by abridgment. Besides, the aspirant waits: he is ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... so long as Mrs. Staines and her sloppy-headed maids counted the linen, and then forgot it, was brought up with a run, by triplicate forms, and by Staines counting the things before two witnesses, and compelling the washerwoman to count them as well, and verify or dispute on the spot. The laundress gave warning—a plain confession that stealing had ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... cried, indignantly. "When there's such a good, good woman, Jane's sister Meg-Laundress, what washes for us just 'cause I mend her things. An' tailor-Jake who showed me to do a buttonhole an' him all doubled up with coughin'; an' Billy Buttons who gives us a paper sometimes, only neither of us can read it; an' Nick, the parson, who helps me sort ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... weeping whiskers of 1853, with the corresponding inability to pronounce the "r" otherwise than as a "w," or to converse but with a languid, used-up drawl; the smaller ties and growing collars, when a wasting youth complains that "She is lost to him for ever" (she, the laundress!); the schoolboy's Spanish hat of 1860, that was soon developed into the "pork-pie," and was to be adopted generally for country wear with baggy knickerbockers; the full-blown Dundreary of 1861, with long weeping whiskers, long coat, long drawl, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... as the unrivaled mental suppleness was illustrated early in the war by the highly typical case of a laundress whose business was in one of the best districts ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... occupations and 2,138 females in twenty-five occupations from 1906 to 1909. It will be noted that in some cases two occupations are given under one heading such as elevator and switchboard, or cook and laundress. In these cases, the individual is paid the same for the two branches of work; so far as the wage is concerned it is one occupation. It is significant that out of a total of 682 males, 513, or 75.2 per cent, received ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... stuck, unstuck herself and dragged herself to her mistress; she told her that her outraged lord knew nothing, and that before giving up the ghost she would comfort her dear mistress by assuring her that she could have perfect confidence in her sister, who was laundress in the hotel, and was willing to let herself be chopped up as small as sausage-meat to please Madame. That she was the most adroit and roguish woman in the neighbourhood, and renowned from the council chamber to the Trahoir ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... opinions: Ratke, a German cook, good—and Germanly bad, he don't make my kitchen; Paul, now working out his debts outdoor; Emma, a strange weird creature—I suspect (from her colour) a quarter white—widow of a white man, ugly, capable, a really good laundress; Java—yes, that is the name—they spell it Siava, but pronounce it, and explain it Java—her assistant, a creature I adore from her plain, wholesome, bread-and-butter beauty. An honest, almost ugly, bright, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... memoranda enclosed, and a quarter of an hour afterwards fleet-footed Sancho was flying over the sixty miles to Fort Whipple as fast as Private Tom Clary could ride him. Three days later a pack-train arrived, with a laundress from the infantry company, Frank Burton, and Mary Arnold, and with stores and supplies necessary for setting up a sick-camp. The wounded girl mended ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... had gotten for him. And the breakfast had not of itself been bad, for Mrs. Whereas had been a daughter of Themis all her life, waiting upon scions of the law since first she had been able to run for a penn'orth of milk. She had been laundress on a stairs for ten years, having married a law stationer's apprentice, and now she owned the dingy house over the covered way, and let her own lodgings with her own furniture; nor was she often without friends who would recommend her zeal and honesty, and make excuse for ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... sausages at home, and living on something like two shillings a day," he remarked in meditation; and then it struck him that Mrs. Lovell's parcel of returned jewels lay in one of his drawers at home—that is, if the laundress ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... much extra washing, you may have to use much diplomacy as regards the laundress; and if it is very disgusting washing, it is well to have a large pail, with a cover, upstairs. Thoroughly disinfect the clothes before you send them to the washing, as the odors are often sickening, and the laundress, like other servants, is very much afraid, usually, ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... forge close to them, they had not heard a commotion in the court outside. Dennet had been standing on the steps cleaning her tame starling's cage, when Mistress Headley had suddenly come out on the gallery behind her, hotly scolding her laundress, and waving her cap to ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for an employer to manage her household industry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress. The difficulties really begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... woman came towards them. She was poor enough to behold, lame of one leg, and with a large false curl hanging down over one of her eyes, which was a blind one. The curl was intended to cover the eye, but it only made the defect more striking. This was a friend of the laundress. She was called among the neighbours, "Lame ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... spirits, we sat down to dinner. In the ward-room, the lieutenants were passing round their oldest port, and pledging their friends; in the steerage, the middies were busy raising loans to liquidate the demands of their laundress, or else—in the navy phrase—preparing to pay their creditors with a flying fore-topsail. On the poop, the captain was looking to windward; and in his grand, inaccessible cabin, the high and mighty commodore sat silent and stately, as the statue ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... zephyrs which plentifully insinuate their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window, or wainscot, expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught at a proof-sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead; made a dart at Bloomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring him to one direct reply; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford's Inn clock. He must go ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... I got into bed I was surprised to hear a voice in the dining-room, where the laundress was lighting a fire. She had found the door unbolted, notwithstanding my design to fasten it, and must have passed the bed-chamber door while I was hanging on it, and yet never perceived me. She heard me fall, and presently came to ask me if I was well, adding, she ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... questions, Eveley, I am so nervous anyhow I hardly know what I am saying. You remember my laundress, don't you? She is so nice and motherly and a Methodist and respectable and all that,—only old and hard up. She is coming to live with us,—she will have the den for her room, and is closing her cottage. She is to keep house and look ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... that Amelia had to wash her dirty frocks. Let any little girl try to wash one of her dresses; not to half wash it, not to leave it stained with dirty water, but to wash it quite clean. Let her then try to starch and iron it—in short, to make it look as if it had come from the laundress—and she will have some idea of what poor Amelia had to learn to do. There was no help for it. When she was working she very seldom saw the dwarfs; but if she were idle or stubborn, or had any hopes of getting away, one was sure to start up ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... at the Place de la Bastille. I sang the refrain with him, and after that I called, 'Here's all the new songs, ten centimes, two sous!' He was always drunk, and used to beat me. That is why the police picked me up the other night. Before that I was with the man who sells brushes. My mother was a laundress; her name was Adele. At one time she lived with a man on the ground-floor at Montmartre. She was a good work-woman and liked me. She made money because she had for customers waiters in the cafes, and they use a good deal of linen. On Sundays she used to put me to bed early ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... easy circumstances, who are too fat- headed to realize that those womanly attributes which so charm the sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery. One is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills. Take the great middle class of America (which is the social and moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that the keeper of the restaurant dedicated to the 'Guardian Angel,' who had no customers except hack-drivers and bricklayers, was caught by our innocent intrigues. On this same second of November we paid an immense sum of money to the laundress,—one whole dollar. I crossed the Pont des Arts, proud as a member of the Institute, and entered with a stiff upper-lip the Cafe Momus. You remember this beneficent establishment, which we discovered, gave half a cup of coffee for five cents, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... the nor'-east, the sea runs high, we ship a deal of water, the night is dark and cold, and the shapeless passengers lie about in melancholy bundles, as if they were sorted out for the laundress; but, for my own uncommercial part, I cannot pretend that I am much inconvenienced by any of these things. A general howling, whistling, flopping, gurgling, and scooping, I am aware of, and a general knocking ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... occurred to him that Dennis might be more than fourteen years old. And thus, to shorten this preface, when we returned at night to my parsonage at Naguadavick, there entered Mrs. Ingham, her new dumb laundress, myself, who am Mr. Frederic Ingham, and my double, who was Mr. Frederic Ingham by as good ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... in providing for the wants of the family, in food as well as clothing. Besides the father's small earnings as a tailor of the lowest standing, the mother occasionally earned a little money as a laundress. A grandfather, Boe, formed one of the family group. He had been a soldier, but was now too old to serve in the ranks, though France was waging war in Italy and Austria under her new Emperor. Boe, however, helped to earn the family living, by begging ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... gowns, to the despair of the Otter servant who did up the master's shirts and managed the mistress's clear-starching, but who never dreamt, in those days of frills, robes, and flounces, of styling herself a laundress. Leslie filled her apron with mosses and lichens: she stole out after the reapers had left the patch of oats which was not within sight of the house, and gathered among the sheaves like a Ruth. She grew stout and hardy, and, in ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... she told her that her outraged lord knew nothing, and that before giving up the ghost she would comfort her dear mistress by assuring her that she could have perfect confidence in her sister, who was laundress in the hotel, and was willing to let herself be chopped up as small as sausage-meat to please Madame. That she was the most adroit and roguish woman in the neighbourhood, and renowned from the council chamber to the Trahoir cross among the common people, and fertile in ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... cabins nearly all showed some external signs of the embellishing hand of woman. Entering one of these houses, we found the men and young women out gathering the harvest. An elderly woman acted as our hostess. She was maid of all-work, a chamber-maid, cook, dairy-woman, laundress, and children's nurse; and yet she found time to make us a cordial welcome. The house was only one year old, and rather open to the weather, but bore the marks of womanly thrift and even ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... during this time of visitation be permitted to use any public work or employment, or keep any shop or stall, or be employed as a laundress, or in any ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... had worn from Sherrill's lay conspicuously upon the bed, washed and ironed and beautifully mended up the slashed sleeve and along the shoulder. As a laundress of parts, Johnny was a jewel, but ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... that you have an understanding with the laundress (to whom you say that you are all-powerful with me), threatening to take away my practice from her, unless she gets up gratis some ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... would have scorned to touch the dirty clothes, saying, that they smelt of grease?" Sophy, touched to the quick, forgot her natural timidity and defended herself eagerly. Her papa knew very well all the smaller things would have had no other laundress if she had been allowed to wash them, and she would gladly have done more had she been set to do it. [Footnote: I own I feel grateful to Sophy's mother for not letting her spoil such pretty hands with soap, hands which Emile will kiss so often.] Meanwhile she ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating house and a pastry cook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with the pudding like a speckled cannon ball, so hard and firm, smoking hot, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... returned to New York, to make arrangements for spending the remainder of the summer at Rockaway. While the laundress was putting the clothes in order, I took an opportunity to go over to Brooklyn to see Ellen. I met her going to a grocery store, and the first words she said, were, "O, mother, don't go to Mrs. Hobbs's. Her ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... artist in the next block expects me to pose for him, and his laundress comes at 3. ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... on the porch, exchanging a few gay remarks with the garbage man before shutting the side door after him. The big stove was roaring hot, a thick odor of boiling clothes showed that Marthe was ready for her cousin Nancy, the laundress, who came once a week. A saucepan deeply gummed with cereal was soaking beside the hissing and smoking frying pan Mrs. Salisbury moved the frying pan, and the quick heat of the coal fire ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... slaughtering cattle, even one's own, except with the Governor's leave, also of exporting goods without permission. A baker giving short weight was to lose his ears, and on second repetition to suffer death. A laundress purloining linen was to be flogged. Martial law alone prevailed; even capital punishment was ordained without jury. Such arbitrary rule was perhaps necessary, so lawless were the mass of the population. It at any rate had the excellent effect of rousing the Virginians to political thought and ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... which is a suburb of Prague, there lived about twenty years ago, two poor but honest people, who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow; he worked in a large printing establishment, and his wife employed her spare time as a laundress. Their pride, and their only pleasure, was their daughter Viteska, who was a vigorous, voluptuous-looking, handsome girl of eighteen, whom they brought up very well and carefully. She worked for a dress-maker, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... lines her hands have laden, A laundress with white hair appears, Alert as many a youthful maiden, Spite of her five-and-seventy years. Bravely she won those white hairs, still Eating the bread hard toil obtain'd her, And laboring truly to fulfil The duties to which God ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... A second boat was then seen coming off to us, which contained a fine dish of delicious honey and some flowers. The order to go ahead again was scarcely given, before a third boat, in, if possible, hotter haste than the two previous ones, put off after us, bringing some things the laundress had forgotten. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... and does not terminate until the condition is very shaky indeed—crimpled, pierced with pinholes, corner creases torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will indeed take an infinity of trouble to put together the ashes of a burned note, and will give the owner a new note or the value in coin, if satisfied of the integrity of the old one. The bank authorities preserve specimens ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... present granny first. My good old creature, you can't of course remember, but that little gentleman for whom your mother was laundress in the Temple was the ingenious Mr. Goldsmith, author of a "History of England," the "Vicar of Wakefield," and many diverting pieces. You were brought almost an infant to his chambers in Brick Court, and he gave you some sugar-candy, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pleasure, and everything yielded there to the great business of amusement. Mrs. Elmore had found it impossible to get a pair of fine shoes finished until after the ball; a dress which Lily had ordered could not be made; their laundress had given notice that for the present all fluting and quilling was out of the question; one already heard that the chief Venetian perruquier and his assistants were engaged for every moment of the ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... said the laundress, "my young master will stick nothing to call an honest woman slut and quean, if there be but a speck of ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... "I had forgotten him and was thinking of that villain Scioppius and his tract against Joseph Justus. Do you know," he continued with a snort of indignation, "that in his Hyperbolimaeus, not content with the statement that Joseph Justus left his laundress's bill at Louvain unpaid, he alleges that I—I, Caesar Basterga of Padua—was broken on the wheel at Munster a year ago for the murder of ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... titivilitium! There's no such thing in nature. I confess, gentlemen, I have a cook, a laundress, a house-drudge, that serves my necessary turns, and goes under that title: but he's an ass that will be so uxorious to tie his affections to one circle. Come, the name dulls appetite. Here, replenish again: another bout. [FILLS THE CUPS AGAIN.] ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... her without much interest, supposing that she might be a seamstress, or laundress, or some applicant for charity. So many years had passed since he had met with this woman, that she had ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... paper which starts on a comic basis alone meets with rivals in all its sober-minded contemporaries, and comes to grief. The difficulty it has to contend with is, in short, very like that which the professional laundress or baker has to contend with, owing to the fact that families are accustomed to do their own washing and bake their own bread. And, indeed, it is not unlike that with which professional writers of all kinds have to contend, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... the "Maison de Retraite" offers rooms, board, attendance, laundress and even a small plot of garden for the annual sum of L16 to L24 per inmate, the second sum procuring larger rooms and more liberal fare. Personal independence is absolutely unhampered except by the fact that the lodge gate is closed at 10 p.m. As most of the tenants ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... print, and the London press animadverted on our conduct. It became a positive scandal. We were advised, I remember, to wash our dirty linen at home, and though I have often wondered why the press should act as a voluntary laundress on such occasions, I suppose the remark is ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... devised this way to assist her to escape. There was a plan devised before this, by his brother. His name was George Douglass. The one who came in the boat was William. George's plan was for Mary to go on shore in the disguise of a laundress. The laundress came over to the island from the shore in a boat, to bring the linen; and while she was in Mary's room Mary exchanged clothes with her, and attempted to go on shore in the boat with the empty basket. But the ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... grant you these can be removed by a penknife, but imperfectly and with damage to the fabric. When what I may call the main portion of the collar is affected, the speckled area may occasionally be concealed by a careful disposition of one's tie. But not often. The laundress, with diabolical cunning, takes care to place her trade-mark as near the top rim as possible. I have not by any means exhausted the subject," he concluded, "but I think I have said enough to clear myself of this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... thing: showing trim ankles, the turn of a plump calf, such as Ben Cohen had never even thought of before, the realisation of which was like wine: freshly tasted, red, fruity, running through his veins, mounting to his head. He had known that women had legs; his mother, the laundress, suffered from hers—complainingly, devoted woman as she was—swollen with much standing, and "them there dratted veins": stocky legs, with loose folds ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... weather—wet or fine—I could at will discourse, Or bargain for a bonnet, or a boot-jack, or a horse; Tell dentists, in three languages, which tooth it is that hurts; Or chide a laundress for the lack of starch upon ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various
... sufficient explanation until late in the afternoon. Then, restored to partial composure, the girl was sitting up and being fanned in the shade of her father's roof-tree, when roused by the voice of the next-door neighbor before mentioned—Mrs. Quinn, long time laundress of Captain Sanders's troop and jealous as to Wren's, was telling what she had heard of Shannon's discoveries, opining that both Captain Wren and the captain's daughter deserved investigation. "No wan need tell me there was ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... Eastbourne, and had accommodation for seventy boys, but during the whole time I remained there we never had more than fifty. His advertisements in local and London papers offering "Commercial training for thirty guineas including laundress and books. Bracing air, gravel soil, diet best and unlimited. Reduction for brothers," were glowing enough, but they never whipped up business sufficiently to attract the required number of boarders. Nevertheless, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... "Once or twice it has been my bad fortune to meet it. One trifling scamp I have in mind, painted. A house, a fence, a barn, even a sign-board? Not at all, but messes he called 'The Sea,' one doesn't know why, save that the things slightly resembled raw oysters. However, the women raved over him. His laundress and his landlady had good ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... marks the limit of our little bit of pleasure-ground. On the other side of it there is a cottage standing on the edge of the common. The most good-natured woman in the world lives here. She is our laundress—married to a stupid young fellow named Molly, and blessed with a plump baby as sweet-tempered at herself. Thinking it likely that the piteous voice which had disturbed me might be the voice of Mrs. Molly, I was astonished to hear her appealing to anybody (perhaps to me?) to "let her in." ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... did not want him to buy at auctions—not much at least at present. Private dealing, she said, was best. If I, for example, had any cast-off clothes, he was to buy them from my laundress, and get a connection with other laundresses, to whom he might give a trifle more than they got at present for whatever clothes their masters might give them, and yet make a good profit. If gentlemen sold their ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... innings. There is great fairness and impartiality in the game. Something was always going up from the foot of this Jacob's ladder called "the Master" to the higher regions called the Court of Appeal. The simplest possible matter, which any old laundress of the Temple ought to have been competent to decide by giving both the parties a box on the ear, was taken before the Master, from the Master to the Judge, from the Judge to the Divisional Court, and from the Divisional Court to the Court of Appeal, at the expense ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... snarls at beggars. He who is quick to make room for a doctor of divinity, will, of course, see to it that he never runs against a porter; and he who clears the way for a lady, will be sure never to rub against a market woman, or jostle an apple-seller's board. If accused of beating down his laundress to the lowest fraction, of making his boot-black call a dozen times for his pay, of higgling and screwing a fish boy till he takes off two cents, or of threatening to discharge his seamstress unless she will work for a shilling ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... persuaded them to accompany us to Sault Ste. Marie. The man was a carpenter by trade, and helped us in many ways, but the following year he fell ill and died. We then took the widow into our employment as laundress, and she is with us still. Our two younger children who had been with their nurse at London, Ontario, during our absence, now rejoined us, and we were soon once more settled and ready for a second ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... you like these new ways of going on?" asked Mary, the serious, stiff, time-dried, and smoke-dyed head-laundress—a personage of unknown antiquity, and who had been in the family ever since it was a family—addressing the fine powdered gentleman in silk stockings, and pink, white, and silver livery, who ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... that if one were sufficiently earnest one could go through closed doors and see into solids. In the former ambition she was unsuccessful, obtaining only bruises and disappointment; but she did develop the latter to a certain extent, for she met the laundress going out one day and, without a conscious effort, she knew that she had the best table napkins pinned to her petticoat. She accused the woman sternly—and she ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... leaving excellent space for promenade, auditorium, dancing—anything, in fact, that a large company might require. It had been the intention all along of the two men to use these houses jointly. There was, to begin with, a combination use of the various servants, the butler, gardener, laundress, and maids. Frank Cowperwood employed a governess for his children. The butler was really not a butler in the best sense. He was Henry Cowperwood's private servitor. But he could carve and preside, and he could be used ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... WOMAN'S FINE FEELING.—One day last year our laundress sent her oldest boy, a lad fourteen years of age, on an errand. He was gone an hour or more longer than she expected him to be. Upon his return she asked him what he had been doing all that time. He told her that an expressman had been run away with, ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know, the wonderful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My lodgings cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil at night; I did my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so as to reduce the laundress' bill to two sous per day. The money I spent yearly in coal, if divided up, never cost more than two sous for each day. I had three years' supply of clothing, and I only dressed when going out to some library or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only amounted to eighteen sous, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Mrs. Jennings, "I have called on you this morning in relation to your servant Mark. I hope you will not think it impertinent in me to interfere in this matter, but I am very much interested in him. His wife has been my laundress for several years, and is exceedingly distressed at the idea of being separated from him. She came to me yesterday, and told me that he had been impertinent, and that Mr. Nelson intended selling him down South. I promised to use ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... present granny first. My good old creature, you can't of course remember, but that little gentleman for whom you mother was laundress in the Temple was the ingenious Mr Goldsmith, author of a "History of England," the "Vicar of Wakefield," and many diverting pieces. You were brought almost an infant to his chambers in Brick Court, and ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... curious feature of those chambers; that, consisted in the profound conviction entertained by my esteemed friend Parkle (their tenant) that they were clean. Whether it was an inborn hallucination, or whether it was imparted to him by Mrs. Miggot the laundress, I never could ascertain. But, I believe he would have gone to the stake upon the question. Now, they were so dirty that I could take off the distinctest impression of my figure on any article of furniture by merely lounging upon it for a few moments; and it used to be a private amusement of mine ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... "Tell the laundress to be sure and bring her children around to-morrow, and be sure you make them have a good time," he said to James, as he rose from ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... from the vulgar circumstance that the Hilliard washing went to line on Tuesday (Monday having dawned lowering and ended stormy), thereby exposing more family linen than could possibly have been foreseen, since the day laundress and Mrs. Hilliard's housemaid were bound in friendship by a common appetite for gossip and for tea. Monday's unfinished labors despatched, these familiars laid their heads together over a pannikin of their favorite brew, and the laundress, poising her saucer with the elegance ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... then use their knowledge of your domestic unhappiness to blackmail you; there will be threats of law-suits from people who will claim that they have contracted a disease from you or your child—your laundress, perhaps, or your maid, or one of ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... best blacked boots in all London, with a checked morning cravat that never was rumpled until dinner time, a buff waistcoat which bore the crown of his sovereign on the buttons, and linen so spotless that Mr. Brummel himself asked the name of his laundress, and would probably have employed her had not misfortunes compelled that great man to fly the country. Pendennis's coat, his white gloves, his whiskers, his very cane, were perfect of their kind as ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... well as the unrivaled mental suppleness was illustrated early in the war by the highly typical case of a laundress whose business was in one of the best districts ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... twenty-thousandth part communicates a perceptible azure tint. In common with cobalt blue, the name Azure has sometimes been given to it. Varying exceedingly in quality and colour, the rougher kinds have been employed by the laundress, and in the making of porcelain, pottery, stained glass, encaustic tiles, &c.; as well as to cover the yellow tinge of paper. For this last purpose, however, smalt is not perfectly adapted, the colour being difficult ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... nose too," said another girl. "And he has not a morsel of starch in his shirt ruffles, I declare," said a third, who officiated as laundress to the Mayor ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... laundry is part of the service wing depends, of course, on how much of that type of work is to be done at home. There are two points of view here. Some households prefer to scoop the family linen into a bag, make a list, and hand it over to a commercial laundry. Others find a dependable laundress nearby or provide facilities for doing the work at home. The clear air of the country and easy drying conditions influence many towards the ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... for liberty. Laying a wager with his guards that he could run upstairs again faster than they, he reached his room first, bolted the door and seizing a cord, or rope, which had been brought to him by his laundress, he made it fast to the window, slipped out and dropped fifteen feet. With shots whistling all about him he flew around the tower to the Faubourg de la Riche, where he leaped upon the back of the first horse that he saw; the saddle turned and threw him and a soldier came up suddenly ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... off for the woods, take with you only those things which seem to be absolutely necessary; remember that you will carry your own pack and be your own laundress, so hesitate about including too many washable garments. Make out your list, then consider the matter carefully and realize that every one of the articles, even the very smallest, has a way of growing heavier and heavier and adding to the ever-increasing ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... hostess a full corps of servants is required. Each one should have certain, definite tasks to perform every day. In the luxurious American home, seven servants are usually employed. They are a butler, a chauffeur, a parlor maid, a cook, a laundress, a nurse-maid and a chambermaid. A lady's maid and a valet are sometimes added. A footman, laundry-maid and scullery-maid are also added, sometimes, to the corps of servants. But this list may be increased or diminished according to the requirements of the individual family. ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... here a sad experience she had soon after our arrival in Boston. She was covered with dirt—the remains of mud pies I had compelled her to eat, although she had never shown any special liking for them. The laundress at the Perkins Institution secretly carried her off to give her a bath. This was too much for poor Nancy. When I next saw her she was a formless heap of cotton, which I should not have recognized at all except for the two bead eyes which ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... submission to island laziness, shiftlessness, slovenliness, dirt, and active assertion of Ohio vim. Sick of vermin and slime, I would take pail, scrubbing brush and lye, and fall to; sick of it all, I would get a Summit county breakfast, old fashioned pan cakes for old times' sake; sick of the native laundress who cleansed nothing, I would give an Akron rub myself to my own clothes and have something fit to wear. These attacks of energy depended somewhat on the temperature, somewhat on exhausted patience, somewhat ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... on the block. The watchman remembered. He knows everything that goes on in the Bowery. Maggie was the wayward daughter of a decent laundress, and killed herself by drinking carbolic acid less than a month before. She had wearied of the Bowery. Nigger Martha was her one friend. And now she had followed ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... indicated. He saw the lady, and, on delivering the ring, received from her a sealed cabinet. It was a box of diamonds and other jewels, chiefly broken Georges and Garters, which had been deposited with the lady, who was the King's laundress and wife of Sir William Wheeler. Returning with it to St. James's, Herbert found Juxon just gone to his lodging near, and the King alone. Herbert slept that night in the King's chamber, as he had done since the beginning of the trial, a pallet-bed having been brought in for the purpose ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... to 'hold out'," exclaims the laundress of the rue de Jouy; "as if we'd ever done anything else ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... funny thing that my laundress," he shouted back, "can't bring in breakfast things for more than one on that particular tray. She's always complaining it's too small, and says I ought to ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... that M. Joyeuse were walking through Faubourg Saint-Honore, on the right hand sidewalk—he always chose that side—and espied a heavy laundress's cart going along at a smart trot, driven by a countrywoman whose child, perched on a bundle of linen, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... need of giving up either. I saw Madame Fauconnier, the laundress in La Rue Neuve. She will take me Monday. If you go in with your friend we shall be afloat again in six months. We must find some kind of a hole where we can live cheaply while we work. That is the thing ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... white frock, which, under Aunt Alice's instruction, she had neatly mended, and Mrs. Elliott's skilful laundress had ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... some four or five thousand dollars, had the greater part of the notes exchanged—and, with the exception of the five large bills hurriedly thrust into the vest pocket, and which he had sent to the poor laundress, there was little available evidence of the forgery in his possession. The widow's son had scarcely left the traveller's room with the clothes, when in came two policemen. The forger was not arrested as a principal, but certain barely suspicious circumstances ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... came occasionally to the kitchen of Dr. W.'s house a foul-mouthed Irish laundress who used coarse language to me concerning urination. I loathed the woman, and yet one night I dreamed that I was embracing her naked form and rolling over and over with her on the bed; and in spite of my sight of female genitals a few months before, I thought of her as having organs ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even who ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... and necessitate a double thickness of cloth at that part. There is another kind of safety skirt which is a combination of breeches and skirt in one; but I consider this a very unsanitary arrangement, for it is obvious that the undergarment must be kept clean, and handed over when necessary to the laundress to be carefully washed, before sending it to a tailor to be pressed and repaired as may be required. It is part of a groom's duty in small households to attend to the cleaning of his mistress's hunting boots and skirt, ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... washerwoman who lived outside Coleby on the common, and gained her income by acting as laundress generally for all who would intrust her with their family linen; but she called herself in yellow letters on a brilliant scarlet ground a ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... bailiffs, kicked fiddlers down-stairs, ate at Locket's, loitered at Will's; they talked of the drawing-room and never came there; dined with lords they never saw; whispered a duchess and spoke never a word; exposed the scrawls of their laundress for billet-doux of quality; came ever just from court and were never seen in it; attended the levee sub dio; got a list of peers by heart in one company, and with great familiarity retailed them in another. Above all, they constantly attended those committees of Senators ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... money does not come into the question. The lady is rather strong-willed. So, Ricky," he laughed, "we'll leave you two to fight it out. But Lucy may be able to find us a laundress." ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... secretions, the efficacy of licorice in producing a certain effect, and the expediency of changing one's linen at least three times a day; though had he changed his six, I should have said that the purification of the last shirt would have been no sinecure to the laundress. His accent was decidedly Scotch: he spoke familiarly of Scott and one or two other Scotch worthies, and more than once insinuated that he was a member of Parliament. With respect to the rest of the company I say nothing, and for the very sufficient reason that, unlike ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... course, for he was a student by nature; but other things that he learned were, upon the whole, more noteworthy in the development of his character. He became fastidious as to the fit of his coat and as to the work of the laundress upon his shirt-fronts. He learned to sit in easy attitude by gauzily-dressed damsels under sparkling gaslight, and to curl his fair moustache between his now white fingers as he talked to them, and yet to moderate the extent of the attention that he paid to each, not wishing ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;—there may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting. It is an insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house for her to deal with. I don't like the Bloomers any too well,—in fact, I never saw but one, and she—or he, or it—had a mob of boys after her, or whatever you call the creature, as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... are many scholarships open to the girls for further training, (a)for a home course, (b) for domestic service, (c) for the trades of laundress, needlewoman, dressmaker, and cook. These scholarships are held at Technical Institutes, or Trade Schools, and the training ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... beautiful girl, and her gray hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed. She wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods expressed itself to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... went down to the kitchen, where she found the half-frozen oarsman-now rigged out in the dress-coat and white vest of the colored waiter—and the brave coachman who had put his old sea-craft to such good use. They were being royally cared for by the cook and laundress. The poor fellow who out in the boat had thought that the hearts of even his neighbors were as cold and hard as the ice that was destroying them had now forgotten his misanthropy, and was making a supper that, considering the hour, would ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... she was perhaps not supposed to be a lady in the part. Aunt Anna said, "Perhaps not, but that does not matter; Maud would be a lady under any circumstances, whatever character she impersonated, laundress or lady. Claud says she will never act till she learns to forget herself I trust one of my ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... old Mistress when they were both children. Grandmother was nurse to the children; she lived over a hundred years and nursed all the children and grandchildren. She died at the Bissell's home on Rutledge Avenue years and years after slavery. Mother Ellen was laundress; she died first part of the War. My father tended the yard and ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... hour he got up again, fetched the kettle of hot water, emptied it into the cold water that was already in his bath, refilled the kettle and put it back on the fire. After dressing, he came into his sitting-room, made tea and cooked, in his Dutch oven, something he had bought the day before. His laundress was an elderly woman, and he could not trouble her to come to his rooms so early in the morning; on the other hand, he could not stay in bed until he thought it right for her to go out; so it ended in his doing a great deal for himself. He then got his breakfast and read ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... support herself? She could remain in the house, for the mortgage was paid off, though the government and not poor Solomon Isaacs had the mortgage-money in its grip for the present. Old Ursula, who was cook, chambermaid, housekeeper, laundress, and everything else for Father Peter, and had been Marget's nurse in earlier years, said God would provide. But she said that from habit, for she was a good Christian. She meant to help in the providing, to make sure, if she could ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were my landlady and my laundress, two poor widows who never willingly distressed me, but who occasionally asked for 'that little amount' so piteously that my heart bled to lack it to give them. And as victuals and clean shirts were ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... infant among the most handsome women of the people. After inspecting many women of equal merit as regards beauty, youth and health, the princess's choice lighted on Philippa, a young Catanese woman, the wife of a fisherman of Trapani, and by condition a laundress. This young woman, as she washed her linen on the bank of a stream, had dreamed strange dreams: she had fancied herself summoned to court, wedded to a great personage, and receiving the honours of a great lady. Thus when she was called to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... repetition of the treatment of the first day and as every morning the same assurance came forth, there seemed to be no need for any variation. It was not before the fifth day that I discovered that he had taken from the start a pint of whiskey every day. When he first arrived he had bribed a laundress of the hotel to bring to his room every day the whiskey hidden in the laundry and he drank it during the night. Then I declined ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... is that your chambermaid, bellboy, hotel clerk, taxi driver, dressmaker, saleslady, cook and laundress, hairdresser, waiter and bootblack may all and each be a so-called divorcee. (For convenience sake, I speak of them all as "divorcees," although Webster defines a "divorcee" as a man or woman who has already obtained a divorce.) What is more, a great ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... you talking about, Mrs. Griffen?" demanded Mrs. Alexander, turning in vexed bewilderment to her laundress, "what does ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... come back frayed, Receives my protests undismayed, And merely wishes to be paid? My Laundress! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various
... able to see John Saltram; a slip of paper pasted on the outer door of that gentleman's chamber informed the public that he was "out of town," and that was all. Gilbert took the trouble to penetrate the domicile of the laundress who officiated in Mr. Saltram's chambers, in order to obtain some more particular information as to her employer's movements, and after infinite difficulty succeeded in finding that industrious matron in the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... ivory set in gold. The young lady holds a small mirror, probably of polished steel, in her hand. Specimens of these curious combs and mirrors yet exist in collections. A century later we see a pretty laundress, holding in her hands a number of delicately woven napkins, which look as if they might have come out of the elaborately carved napkin press of the same period in the collection of Sir Samuel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... thought, and passed instantly to the consideration of where it would be more convenient to put Katavasov, to sleep alone or to share Sergey Ivanovitch's room. And then an idea suddenly struck her, which made her shudder and even disturb Mitya, who glanced severely at her. "I do believe the laundress hasn't sent the washing yet, and all the best sheets are in use. If I don't see to it, Agafea Mihalovna will give Sergey Ivanovitch the wrong sheets," and at the very idea of this the blood ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... said Isabel, "I am a brown bird of the mountains, as my mother called me. She taught me to sing, because she said it made work go on more merrily, but the longest day was short enough for what I had to do; I was laundress, and sempstress, and cook, and gardener; and if Cicely went to look for the sheep, I had to milk and bake, and at night I mended my father's fishing-nets, while I was learning Latin with Eustace. Yet I got through all very well, till my mother fell sick, and then ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... of black, deep water, but dull and still, almost deserted. On elevated ground ahead rose Algiers, the White City, with its little houses of a dead cream-colour huddling against one another lest they slid into the sea. It was like Meudon slope with a laundress's washing hung out to dry. Over it a vast blue satin ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
