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More "Shabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... occupied the lower seat, on the west side, on which was likewise placed a rather shabby blue satin sitting-rug, with a back-cushion; and upon perceiving Tai-yue come in she urged her at once to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... place was a bench, and on the bench sate a poorly drest woman, and by her, leaning against a tree, was a man whom I thought I'd sean befor. He was drest in a shabby blew coat, with white seems and copper buttons; a torn hat was on his head, and great quantaties of matted hair and whiskers disfiggared his countnints. He was not shaved, and as pale ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... vacation, and like to puzzle the country folks. They are the very same chaps, like as not, the visitors have seen in plays at the city theatres; but of course they don't know 'em in plain clothes. Kings and Emperors look pretty shabby off the stage sometimes, I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Peru, 6 m. inland from Callao, its port, a picturesque but somewhat shabby city, 700 ft. above the sea-level, regularly built, with many plazas; has a cathedral and 70 churches; trade is in the hands of foreigners, mostly Germans, and industries are unimportant; it was founded by Pizarro, and his bones lie buried in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... train of thought was interrupted by the vision of a barefooted, ragged little girl hurrying down the street. In spite of her shabby, mean attire, you could hardly help noticing how pretty she was, with her rough curly hair falling over her shoulders and her eyes dancing with laughter; in her hand she carried a brimming pail of water which dripped on to her little bare feet ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... this district was very striking; pavements, often in good condition, were general, the irrigating ditches were bridged by a single slab of the red sandstone of Szechuan, perhaps ten feet in length, while at every turn there were charming little stone shrines in place of the shabby wooden ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Middleton School who approached her in popularity. She was clever without being a scrap conceited, and was extremely good-natured, doing her work for the pleasure of doing it and not because she wanted to outstrip a schoolfellow. She was conscientious too, and would have scorned to do a mean or shabby thing; but she was hopelessly untidy, careless to a fault, late for school half her days, getting into countless scrapes and getting out of them as best she could—the butt of her class as well as the favorite, ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... trail. Doubtful as he was, West had neglected no precautions. The map assured him that they were invading a disorderly section of the city, where to be well-dressed would only invite suspicion, and might lead to trouble. To avoid this possibility, he had donned his most shabby suit, and wore a cap largely concealing his face. In one pocket of his jacket within easy reach lay hidden his service revolver loaded, and he had induced Sexton to accept a smaller weapon in ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... afternoon. Betty had gone to church, and he was alone with his grandmother, reading The Pilgrim's Progress to her, when, just as Christian knocked at the wicket-gate, a tap came to the street door, and he went to open it. There he saw a tall, somewhat haggard-looking man, in a shabby black coat (the vision gradually dawned upon him till it reached the minuteness of all these particulars), his hat pulled down on to his projecting eyebrows, and his shoes very dusty, as with a long journey on foot—it was a hot Sunday, he remembered that—who looked ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... laid her dead, there, to her mind, he would rest for ever, far from her. The lonely grave on the wild west coast was the shrine towards which her poor heart would yearn thereafter at all times, always. She had erected a handsome tombstone on the hallowed spot, and was going away in her shabby clothes, the more at ease for the self-denial she had had to exercise in order to beautify it. The radical difference between herself and Beth, which was to keep them apart for ever, was never more apparent than at this moment of farewell. The other children cried, but Beth remained an ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... at a village, and looking about for an inn, he found one that, although rather shabby, would, he thought, suit him. So he asked whether he could pass the night there, and the mistress said certainly. No one lived at the inn except the mistress, so that the traveller was ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... back to this transaction I am bitten by a kind of remorseful shame. It was such a shabby little lodging for my artist bride, and yet, at the moment, it seemed all that we could safely afford, and she cheerfully made the best of it. Never by word or sign did she hint that its tiny hall and its dingy and unfashionable furnishings were unworthy of us ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... course not!), names a referee, who shall hear the testimony in the case, and submit a copy thereof, together with his decision thereon, to the Court for confirmation. Then, before the referee—who is to be properly feed for his officiation—go the divorce-lawyer and two or three shabby-genteel-looking 'witnesses,' who from thenceforth shall never be findable by mortal man again. The 'witnesses' swear to any thing and every thing—that they have seen and recognized defendant in highly ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... base and capital. The white and yellow paint was faded and blistered. Below the broad flight of crazy front-steps the grass grew rank in the gravel walk, and died out in brown, withered patches on the lawn, where only plantain and sorrel throve. It was a sad and shabby old house enough, but even the patches of newspaper here and there on its broken window-panes could not take away a certain simple, old-fashioned dignity from its ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... (loose), of tie (shabby), she once more reached his face. She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips were shut. The eyes bent down, since he was reading. All was firm, yet youthful, indifferent, unconscious—as for knocking one down! No, no, no! She looked ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... described as eccentric in his general mode of conduct. He "strutted proudly barefoot along the streets of Athens; he was careless and shabby in his dress; in his manner he was affected and haughty and was subject to ecstatic trances and visions. During these trances he would maintain a standing posture for hours, buried in his thoughts, and was quite oblivious to the external world. There was a celebrated occasion in the camp ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... of the Lindsay folks by sight; but at the foot of the hill he met two people, a man and a boy, whom he did not know. They were sitting in a shabby, old-fashioned wagon, and were watering their horse at the brook, which gurgled limpidly under the little plank bridge ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... own services; though I cannot help suspecting that, as in the case of ultroneous offers of service upon most occasions, it was not likely to be acceptable. The motion miscarried, however—impoliticly rejected, as I think. The sound of five shillings sounds shabby, but the fact is that it does in some sort reconcile the party to whom it is offered to leave his own house and business at an exact hour; whereas, in the common case, one man comes too late—another does not come at all—the attendance is given by different individuals ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... immediately, and do see to it, that nothing is left behind. I can afford to lose nothing they have had placed in their hands. I am literally suffering for my black dress. Will you send it to me when you receive this? I am looking very shabby. I hope you have entirely recovered. ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... do not place you in relation with them, you had better get out of their way and keep as far as possible from having anything to do with them,—still, he will scarcely ever attain an adequate notion of their wretchedly mean and shabby nature: all his life long he will have to be extending and adding to the inferior estimate he forms of them; and in the meantime he will commit a great many mistakes ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... was a man short and powerfully built, dressed in a shabby-genteel sort of way, with a massive head covered with black hair, heavy side whiskers and moustache, and a clean shaved chin, which had that blue appearance common to very dark men who shave. His mouth—that is, as much as could be seen of it under the drooping ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... couple roaming aimlessly round that great bare enclosure at the end of the Camden Road, known as the Caledonian Market. It was just eleven by the clock tower, and wares were still pouring in; arriving in all manner of shabby carts and vans—mostly drawn by aged and decrepit horses. Every variety of goods had its own particular pitch. In one quarter were piles of books, brown, musty volumes of all shapes and sizes, also tattered magazines, and of theological works a great host. Farther ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... his voice, as every unfortunate individual will do who is bitten by the music mania. Then among the ladies there were a half-score of dubious pale governesses and professionals with turned frocks and lank damp bandeaux of hair under shabby little bonnets; luckless creatures these, who were parting with their poor little store of half-guineas to be enabled to say they were pupils of Signor Baroski, and so get pupils of their own among the British youths, or employment in the choruses ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Fortune han't come up to meet you! that's real shabby of her; and how to get you down there to-night, I am sure is more than I can tell." ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... 2: Excellence is twofold: one is in temporal, the other in spiritual things. Now it happens at times that a person, by outward words or signs, pretends to be lacking in external things, for instance by wearing shabby clothes, or by doing something of the kind, and that he intends by so doing to make a show of some spiritual excellence. Thus our Lord said of certain men (Matt. 6:16) that "they disfigure their faces that they may appear unto men to fast." Wherefore such persons are guilty of both vices, irony ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... took the foremost of our novelists, the greatest, we would say, since Scott, into this room, and could not but mark the solemnizing effect of sitting where the great magician sat so often and so long, and looking out upon that little shabby bit of sky, and that back green ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... in the hall," he said, and stepping back he lifted down a somewhat shabby gray raincoat and flung it toward her. She picked it up, and slipped it on. It was large, but still she could wear it, and while she stood in the middle of the room hesitating, she slipped her hands into the ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... my brother to do anything shabby," replied the girl; "but I shouldn't be sorry, of ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... shoes are items of dress not to be disregarded by the woman who wishes to look well dressed. Shabby gloves are ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... tent, at night-fall, reclined the three friends. They looked contented, and on good terms with the world; but, though prosperous, they certainly did not look it. In fact, they were all three exceedingly, almost disreputably, shabby. They looked more ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... a captain in the army. Sherman gets licked at Wicksburg, an' I gets took brisoner; an' purty quick me an' anoder feller runs away. Here he is;" and, as the Dutchman spoke, a man wearing a shabby Confederate uniform appeared. ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... meet; you must be, in fact, slovenly and dirty in your appearance, or you will be put down as an aristocrat. I recollect once an American candidate asked me if I would walk out with him? I agreed; but he requested leave to change his coat, which was a decent one, for one very shabby; "for," says he, "I intend to look in upon some of my constituents, and if they ever saw me in that other coat, I should lose my election." This cannot but remind the reader of the custom of candidates in former democracies—standing up in the ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Seating himself in his shabby old armchair, he tried to collect his scattered wits. He scarcely realised, even yet, what had happened; but, unless he had dreamed it all, he had been honoured by the marked attentions of a marble statue, instigated by a heathen goddess, ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... had me fondle her there in the golden castle on the mammoth's shabby back, before the city streets packed with curious people. She had little enough appetite for privacy at any time. But for the life of me I could not do it. The Gods know I was earnest enough about my task, and They know also how it repelled me. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... this occasion, which meant a good deal. An Overcombe man in those days would have a best coat, and keep it as a best coat half his life. The miller's had seen five and twenty summers chiefly through the chinks of a clothes-box, and was not at all shabby as yet, though getting singular. But that could not be helped; common coats and best coats were distinct species, and never interchangeable. Living so near the scene of the review he walked up the hill, accompanied by Mrs. Garland ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... unfortunate people who invariably fancy that the possessions of other people must be better than their own. Many a time her poor husband regretted the day that he had first seen her, and often her meanness and shabby ways put him to shame. But he had not the courage to rule her, and she only got worse ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... ragged night-gown for a shabby suit of clothes, he took Gay's one clean apron out of a rickety bureau drawer ("for I can never find a mother for her if she's too dirty," he thought), her Sunday hat from the same receptacle, and last of all a comb, and a faded Japanese parasol that stood in a corner. These he deposited under the ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... is simply absurd!—the story is always: The finances are at the lowest ebb—save and save again. To protect the plumes in his new cap from being injured by the rain, the sovereign of half the world ordered an old hat to be brought, and waited in the shower until the shabby felt came. And where are the millions which this excellent economist saves from his personal expenses? The dragon War devours them all. True, he has vanquished foes enough, but the demon of melancholy, that makes even Dr. Mathys anxious, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a stranger entered the village from the direction of the downs. He was a short, stout person in an extraordinarily shabby top hat, and he appeared to be very much out of breath. His cheeks were alternately limp and tightly puffed. His mottled face was apprehensive, and he moved with a sort of reluctant alacrity. He turned ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... that the time will come when people will find it difficult to believe that a rich community such as our's, having such command over external nature, could have submitted to live such a mean, shabby, dirty ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Mayor was walking in the square below in company with the Town Councillors. As they passed the column he looked up at the statue: "Dear me! how shabby the Happy Prince ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... answer he by turns must be, 230 Like that small wit in modern tragedy,[88] Who, to patch up his fame—or fill his purse— Still pilfers wretched plans, and makes them worse; Like gypsies, lest the stolen brat be known, Defacing first, then claiming for his own. In shabby state they strut, and tatter'd robe, The scene a blanket, and a barn the globe: No high conceits their moderate wishes raise, Content with humble profit, humble praise. Let dowdies simper, and let bumpkins stare, 240 The strolling pageant hero treads in air: Pleased, for his ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... in the family for her love of what was old; the more shabby a dress was, the more distinguished she seemed to think it; and the more faded a shawl, the more, according to her, it resembled a Cashmere. This affection for old things extended itself sometimes to cakes, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... can bear being set off against a background of sulphur yellow?" ... "Here's a gorgeous table centre, quite beautifully worked. Whom do we know who is old- fashioned enough to use table centres still?" ... "Here's a piece of Turkish embroidery, which would be the very thing to cover that shabby old sofa at the Vicarage; it was absolutely in holes the last ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... birthday, the twenty-first of June; and there was a party in honour of it, as usual. I received a message from the footman to say that a gentleman wanted to see me. Going up into the hall, there I found the Colonel, wasted, and worn, and old, and shabby, and as wild ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... she said, smiling faintly. Inwardly she was comparing him to Mr. Berry—Mr. Berry, whose highest ideal in life was to bring everything down to a nice, shabby, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... as to give every cluster as fair a chance as possible of a goodly allowance of sun.' There are some exceptions to this; but the low regular dwarfs are the great wine-givers. 'Walk and gaze, until you come to the most shabby, stunted, weazened, scrubby, dwarfish, expanse of snobbish bushes, ignominiously bound neck and crop to the espaliers like a man on the rack—these utterly poor, starved, and meagre-looking growths, allowing as they do the gravelly soil ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... his mother looked indifferently round the room, now exploring with her foot a shabby place in the carpet, now rising to hook a sagging length of curtain to its ring. She had come into his room to receive confidences and to help him; his moodiness did not invite ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... monks within, Who with jovial din Gave themselves up to all kinds of sin! Ha! that is a convent! that is an abbey! Over the doors, None of your death-heads carved in wood, None of your Saints looking pious and good, None of your Patriarchs old and shabby! But the heads and tusks of boars, And the cells Hung all round with the fells Of the fallow-deer. And then what cheer! What jolly, fat friars, Sitting round the great, roaring fires, Roaring louder ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... in his soutane, sitting down like one of the family, and making them all seem like a picture of some historical and aristocratic romance! And then they were actually "de Fontanges l'Hommadieu." How different he was from that shabby Methodist minister who used to come to see her father in a black cravat with a hideous bow! Really there was something to say for a religion that contained so much picturesque refinement; and for her part—but that will do. I beg to say that I am not writing of any particular ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the twentieth century, Asa, Waring still clung to the imposing, early Victorian mansion in Hamilton Street. It presented an uncompromising and rather scornful front to the sister mansions with which it had hitherto been on intimate terms, now fast degenerating into a shabby gentility, seeking covertly to catch the eye of boarders, but as yet refraining from open solicitation. Their lawns were growing a little ragged, their stone steps ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that hotel on the lake front built during the World's Fair days? A roomy, rambling, smoke-blackened, comfortable old structure, ringed with verandas, its shabby facade shabbier by contrast with the beds of tulips or geraniums or canna that jewel its lawn. There Hannah Winter went to live. It was within five minutes' walk of Marcia's apartment. Rather expensive, but as homelike as a hotel could ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... leather curtains, to be used in case of rain; and they are really pleasant and comfortable vehicles. The horses do not differ much from the style of cab-horses known all over the world, being thin, shabby and dismal-looking animals as a general thing, though exceptions to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... wickets had been pitched. When we arrived, they appeared to be an object of no little interest to sundry goats. These beasts evidently regarding the stumps as some strange new form of vegetation, sprang up in a single night from the arid soil, sauntered round them enquiringly, and a shabby he-goat, braver than ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... gas-bill or the butcher's account,—I shrink from such a miserable prospect! I love the elegant, the high-bred, the tasteful, in women; I am afraid even my love for you would alter, Juanita, to see you day by day in coarse or shabby clothing, performing such offices as are only suited to servants,—whom we could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... people of New York as a champion of their interests, and it was not long before they sought his aid. At that time, colored people were not permitted to ride in the street-cars in New York City, with the exception of a few old and shabby cars set aside for their occupation. The Fourth-avenue line permitted them to ride when no other passenger ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... to their marriage-ceremony in just such garbs as I had always seen them wear: the men in their loafers' coats, out at elbows, or their laborers' jackets, defaced with grimy toil; the women drawing their shabby shawls tighter about their shoulders, to hide the raggedness beneath; all of them unbrushed, unshaven, unwashed, uncombed, and wrinkled with penury and care; nothing virgin-like in the brides, nor hopeful or energetic in the bridegrooms;—they were, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... house from which the voice seemed to come. It was near at hand, a shabby little cottage with a thin slice of yard closed in by a dilapidated picket fence. He perceived no observers in the alley, and he stepped into the yard. The front windows were open, for the evening was warm, but no lights were visible ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... "My master, who is now in attendance upon the Imperial envoy, owes much thanks to my Lord Kotsuke no Suke, who has been at so great pains to teach him the proper ceremonies to be observed during the reception of the Imperial envoy. This is but a shabby present which he has sent by me, but he hopes that his lordship will condescend to accept it, and commends himself to his lordship's favour." And, with these words, he produced a thousand ounces of silver for Kotsuke no Suke, and a hundred ounces to ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that they do not lose. But for persons of a different stamp the statement must be reversed. The shabby Polynesian is anxious till he has received the return gift; the generous is uneasy until he has made it. The first is disappointed if you have not given more than he; the second is miserable if he thinks he has given less than you. This ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... church had noticed Sunday after Sunday a little old lady with a sad, patient face, dressed in very shabby mourning, ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... through the many worries and anxieties that they had undergone, they were quite changed in aspect, and had got a certain indescribable smack of the Tartar both in air and accent, having indeed all but forgotten their Venetian tongue. Their clothes too were coarse and shabby, and of a Tartar cut. They proceeded on their arrival to their house in this city in the confine of St. John Chrysostom, where you may see it to this day. The house, which was in those days a very lofty and handsome palazzo, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the group was one that stood a little detached and behind the others, as though shrinking from such prosperous company. It was made of unpainted wood, with leather hinges, and looked shabby in comparison with the jaunty red, green, and gray paint of some of the other boxes (with their cocky little metallic flags upraised). It bore the good American name of Clark—T. N. Clark—and it seemed ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... throne, the Hemerlingues, restored to favour, never ceased to work for my undoing with the new master. The Bey still keeps on good terms with me; but my credit is shaken. Well, in spite of that, in spite of all the shabby tricks that Hemerlingue has played me, that he plays me still, I was ready this evening to hold out my hand to him. Not only does the blackguard refuse it, but he causes me to be insulted by his wife, a savage and evil-disposed ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... at my last address,—you know it. I can do no more for them. If the shabby Abbotts refuse—as I dare say they will—it wouldn't hurt you to keep them from the workhouse. But it's a devilish hard world, and they must ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... at night that he talked openly, forgetting the exactions of his stage. In the daytime there were affairs to be discussed in state. There were at first between him and me his own splendour, my shabby suspicions, and the scenic landscape that intruded upon the reality of our lives by its motionless fantasy of outline and colour. His followers thronged round him; above his head the broad blades of ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... negro would hardly have accepted it as a gift; and his almost painful emaciation gave him generally the appearance of an animated framework of rags and bones, startlingly embodying the voice and the manners of a prince. Yet the shabby tie about his neck was bound by a ring, in which was set a turquoise of great size and beauty. Evidently he was a being of droll contrasts, and I prepared myself to be surprised ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... Although she has "seen" the bluff of the notorious Smith-Vanderbilt-Belmont female and "raised" her out of her bunion repositories, she has probably not yet reached the summit of her social ambition. Bred to shabby gentility , Miss Alva Smith proceeded to "splurge" when she captured a Vanderbilt. She had probably never seen a hundred dollar bill until permitted to finger the fortune of the profane old ferryman who founded her husband's aristocratic family. She was ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... single planet, and we live unconscious of the whole of it or even of any part of its extent. The gardens we have seen to-day are the old Japan unchanged since they were made a thousand years ago, when they took the ancient ideas of China and India for models. The temples of Tokyo seem like shabby relics of a worn-out era, but here the perfection of their art remains and is kept intact. The landscape of the first Buddhist monastery, where the tea ceremony originated, has the same rivers and islands and little piles of sand which were placed in the beginning, ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... certain bench on the outer boulevard, not far from the tomb of Napoleon—a bench shaded at that date by a shabby tree, and commanding a view of muddy roadway and blank wall—I sat down to wrestle with my misery. The weather was cheerless and dark; in three days I had eaten but once; I had no tobacco; my shoes were soaked, my trousers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Duncan has paid for his temporising; he's in his place appointed. I passed the knowe where he lay writhing to a terrible end, with a pike at his vitals, and he was moaning for the chief he had helped to a shabby flight." ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... have interpreted his change of colour as an involuntary protest at being initiated into such shabby details, for she went on with a laugh: "I suppose you can hardly understand what it means to have to stop and think whether one can afford a telegram? But I've always had to consider such things. And I mustn't stay here any longer now—I must try to ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... which they bowed, and the difference in it: his the simple formality of his class, Laura's a repressed hostility to such an epitome of the world as he looked, although any Bond Street tailor would have impeached his waistcoat, and one shabby glove had manifestly never been on. Yet Miss Filbert's first words seemed to show a slight unbending. "Won't you sit there?" she said, indicating the sofa corner she had been occupying. "You get the glare from the window ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... before, haven't you?" said Hatty, in her odious teasing way. "Yes, I thought I had better have it: mine is so shabby; and you are only a little Miss—it does not matter for you. Beside, you have Grandmamma to look after you. You shall have it again when I ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... entered. Sir Timothy made his way to the counter, his companion to a table near, where he took a seat and ordered a drink. Sir Timothy did the same. He was wedged in between a heterogeneous crowd of shabby, depressed but apparently not ill-natured men and women. A man in a flannel shirt and pair of shabby plaid trousers, which owed their precarious position to a pair of worn-out braces, turned a beery ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lie awake listening to the watchman's raucous voice, and praying God to send back my warrior rich and scatheless. So times grew more and more difficult. Jack would stay a whole night upon the heath, and come home with an empty pocket or a beggarly half crown. And there was nothing, after a shabby coat that he hated half so much as a sheriff's officer. "Learn a lesson in politeness," he said to one of the wretches who dragged him off to the Marshalsea. "When Sir John Fielding's people come after me they use ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... of some kind. I have no doubt that Marston, poor devil, is jealous. His situation is really pitiably comic—with an intriguing mistress, a saintly wife, and a devil of a jealous temper of his own. I shall meet Mary on reaching town. Has Clavering (shabby dog!) paid his I.O.U. yet? Tell the little opera woman she had better be quiet. She ought to know me by this time; I shall do what is right, but won't submit to be bullied. If she is troublesome, snap your fingers ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of Anne; for Anne might take her turn at some future period, if our school answered. I feel certain, while I am writing, that you will see the propriety of what I say. You always like to use your money to the best advantage. You are not fond of making shabby purchases; when you do confer a favour it is often done in style; and depend upon it L50 or L100, thus laid out, would be well employed. Of course, I know no other friend in the world to whom I could apply on this subject besides yourself. I feel an absolute conviction that ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... Anyhow it wasn't more than ten feet by twelve; and as I in a way expected to see the big shadowy cellar-like extent of the Shipping Office where I had been once or twice before, I was extremely startled. A gas bracket hung from the middle of the ceiling over a dark, shabby writing-desk covered with a litter of yellowish dusty documents. Under the flame of the single burner which made the place ablaze with light, a plump, little man was writing hard, his nose very near the desk. His head was perfectly bald and about the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... touching one another, and the way dark—were the haunts of masters and scholars and all those depending on them. Students, old and young, of high station and low, are crowded in lodging-houses, many of which are shabby, dirty, and disreputable. Hence they come forth to play their games or carry on their feuds. Some haunt taverns and worse places. Others eke out their means by begging at street corners. All get their teaching by gathering ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... uniform at once, sir," observed Mr Selby; "most young gentlemen do." Jack thought it would be very nice, as his best clothes were already shabby; so in an incredibly short space of time he found himself exactly fitted in his naval habiliments with a dirk by his side, and a gold-lace cap. He did not like to wear them in the street, "lest he should appear conspicuous," he ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... "don't imagine I am going to put you off in that shabby manner. To-morrow morning I start for Paris; four days to go, and the same to return, with one day to discharge the commission intrusted to me, is all the time I shall be absent. I shall be back here by the first of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... preserved a provoking reticence, declining to enlighten me any further. "No, Frank," she said in her cheery way, "it is of no use your trying to coax me with your 'dear Miss Pimpernell,' or think to flatter me into divulging my news by false compliments paid to my shabby old bonnet! No, you shall hear it all in good time, so don't be impatient. I won't tell you another word now, my boy, there!" she added finally, trotting off on her parochial rounds and leaving me in suspense until the evening, to exercise my ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... individuality, he remained to the end an imitator of Leech. Perhaps that was the reason that he drew so small a salary from Punch; at any rate, he always resented what he considered to be the contumelious and shabby treatment meted out to him by Mark Lemon. But for such money as he did receive, it must be admitted that he gave full value in the fierceness of his cartoons on Louis Napoleon. He did much book illustration, besides drawing for the Press, serious and comic—his ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... The tele-columnist was a tall, dour and bushy-browed man who took a perverse sort of pride in the impression he gave of shabbiness. He slouched wordlessly into the room, hands thrust deep in the pockets of a makeshift jacket. But there was nothing shabby about the man's perceptive and analytic mind, Beardsley remembered; true, Pederson had fallen from the heights since the ECAIAC debacle, but his retirement from the limelight was more studied than sullen and could only have been his own choosing. Lately he had emerged again, and with all ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... his way through the maze of traffic, instinct and vague stirrings of memory guiding him to a quiet shabby street where he found a dingy little room for a small price. The dangers that might have beset a strange young man in the great city were materially lessened for him on account of his wide reading. He had read up New York always wherever ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... once, when Whistler and his chum ran out of the cabin to look about, they saw a number of familiar figures approaching along the rock-strewn shore. These newcomers were as shabby and bedraggled as themselves, and it ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... Psalm li. l2, l3. He referred very properly to the occasion on which the Psalm was composed, and drew from the text a large mass of sound practical instruction. The chapel (capable of containing about 150 people) was only half-full. Before the sermon, I had observed a very old negro, in a large shabby camlet cloak and a black cap, ascending the pulpit-stairs. I supposed that, being dull of hearing, he had taken that position that he might better listen to the service. However, when the sermon was over, this patriarchal-looking black man rose to pray; and he prayed ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... position that was offered to him—one of those positions which never change, in which men die still unpromoted, save when a miracle intervenes. It was not so good a position for a family of six as it had been for a family of two, but he did not complain. He and Nettie went shabby, but the children were clothed in the best, as ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... habitually careless. He would rush to the printer's office, after twelve hours of hard work, with his hat drawn over his eyes, his hands thrust into shabby gloves, and his feet in shoes with high sides, worn over loose trousers, which were pleated at the waist and held down with straps. Even in society he took no trouble about his appearance, and Lamartine describes him as looking, in the salon of Madame ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... his boots, thought they certainly were a shabby pair to be worn by such a rich gentleman, for he had not yet bought any new ones. The next day, however, he procured some good clothes and proper boots, so that our soldier soon became known as a fine gentleman, and the people ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... was so bare and shabby that this gastronomic outlay seemed an unwarrantable expense, yet what could one do but accept their hospitality in the same generous spirit in which it was offered? So at ten o'clock of a steaming hot morning we cheerfully stuffed ourselves ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... her mental and physical agony. After she had eaten, all would be well with her. She could control Jude and her own fate. She would never let any one think—Gaston above all—that she was not mistress of her own shabby ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... xxix of 'The Citizen of the World', 1762, i. 119-22, which first appeared in 'The Public Ledger' for May 2, 1760, they have a different setting. They are read at a club of authors by a 'poet, in shabby finery,' who asserts that he has composed them the day before. After some preliminary difficulties, arising from the fact that the laws of the club do not permit any author to inflict his own works upon the assembly without a money payment, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... inhabitants dared I speak heart to heart. Judith had gone out of my life. My aunts and cousins regarded me as beyond the moral pale. Mrs. McMurray was still unaware of my return to England. I confess to shabby treatment of my kind friend. I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta? Reasoning now I am convinced that she would: in those days I did not reason. I shrank like a snail into its shell. The simile is commonplace; ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... entered, and a ladies' race, in which six fair pedestrians took part. The spectacle of nine burly, bearded Boers urging their asinine steeds to top speed by shout and spur provoked quite as much honest laughter as any theatrical farce ever excited. We on the grand stand were but a shaggy and shabby audience, but we were in excellent spirits and cheered with tremendous gusto the enterprising jockey who won this remarkable "Derby." Shabby as we were, we subscribed L115 in prizes. After the sports I have just described the company retired to ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... Madeira and port wine. But the same books show that the planter was chronically in debt and that bankruptcy was common, while accounts left by travelers reveal the fact that many of the mansion houses were shabby and run down, with rotting roofs, ramshackle doors, broken windows into which old hats or other garments had been thrust to keep the wind away. In a word, a traveler could find to-day more elegance in a back county of Arkansas than ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... the dock a moment, to watch the boys beating back out over the bay, and then turned to go up the beach. They had never been on this part of the coast before. It was lonesome and deserted, save for one rather shabby hut just above high-water mark. Over beyond some distant sand dunes, the boys had been told, was the establishment of the boat-builder, where they had taken their craft to have a ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... are a score or two of suggestions for essays, sketches, and poems, which I have not written, and never shall write. The instant I jot down an idea the desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to do something unpremeditated. The shabby volume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I bury my literary intentions, good and bad, without any belief ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the rejoinder. Talking and laughing merrily over old times on the Tropic Queen, the boys walked on, not noticing much where they were going till they found themselves on an ill-lighted street of rather shabby-looking dwellings. ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... ways, for it portrays so strongly human lowliness and degradation. The writer is well acquainted with the life and habits and dialect of the West Tennessee bottoms, and her story is written from the heart and with rare sympathy. The lonely dyke roads, the cheerless homes, the shabby "store," the emotional Methodist meeting, which lasts a week, having two sessions daily—all these are vividly sketched. Mag, the heroine, is a well-drawn character. Camden, the hero, is forceful and earnest. The ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... behind the desk of his shabby little office over Lemark's Liquors in downtown Los Angeles and waited for his first customer. He had been in business for a week and as yet had had no callers. Therefore, it was with a mingled sense of ...
— The Perfectionists • Arnold Castle
... concerning that scheming hypocrite. He should have known, however, that the men of the South, all effusiveness on the surface, are never so utterly blind, so deluded as to resist the wise results of reflection. That evening the Nabob opened a shabby little portfolio, badly worn at the corners, in which for ten years past he had manoeuvred his millions, minuting his profits and his expenses in hieroglyphics comprehensible to himself alone. He calculated for a moment, then turned to ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... entrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with a servant seated behind. It was doubtful whether the recognition had been mutual, for Mr. Casaubon was looking absently before him; but the lady was quick-eyed, and threw a nod and a "How do you do?" in the nick of time. In spite of her shabby bonnet and very old Indian shawl, it was plain that the lodge-keeper regarded her as an important personage, from the low curtsy which was dropped on the entrance ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... see you at Bloomingdale? You are quite too cruel, to disappoint us so often; we really do not deserve such shabby treatment. Here is the month of June, with its roses, and strawberries, and ten thousand other sweets, and among them you must positively allow us to hope for a visit from our very dear friends at Wyllys-Roof. ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... evening a wagon loaded with immigrant goods and a shabby car loaded with children passed our place. The drivers stopped on a nearby claim, threw their bedding on the ground, and slept there. Their deadline for establishing residence was up that night. All over the plains that intensive race went on, the hurried arrival ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... the angels? And then there was that other man, able, well-bred, intellectual, her superior, who had treated her as an equal, and so tacitly demanded that she should conform to his code of honour. And there was Johnny Gillat, poor, old round-faced Johnny, who, under his silly, shabby exterior, had somewhere, quite understood, the same code, and standard of a gentleman, and never doubted but that she had it too—surely these two, also, were on the side ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... that the quarter allotted to his people was near this entrance. He inquired the direction of the sentinel, who did not condescend to answer him. An old man, in shabby robes, who ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... he had pretty shabby clothes and a peaked cap and I guess he was startled to hear us coming. In just a few seconds he was gone in the woods and we all stood gaping there while the boat bobbed up and down, on account of him jumping from it. But I got a squint at his face all right, and ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... met a girl coming down, with light springing steps, buttoning a pair of shabby dogskin gloves. Her dress was shabby too, and the little black straw hat had seen long service; but Miss Merivale only noticed her bonnie face. It brightened the dreary staircase like a ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... she thought to herself as she gazed at the roughly clad group about her, the shabby tent, the mining implements cast about carelessly here and there and the smoldering fire with the blackened cooking pots ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... to Oxford; and when the month of May had again come round, he went in for his Degree examination. He passed with flying colours, and was duly presented with that much-prized shabby piece of paper, on which was printed and written the following ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... had a silk coat and long girdle, and most of the Arabians were in tawny silk ornamented with white roses and wreaths of foliage. Some bindings are noticed as being in fine condition, and others as being shabby or faded. The clasps are minutely described. They would catch a visitor's eye as the books lay flat on the shelves: and we suppose that the librarian intended to show the best way of knowing the books ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... an eager scholar, and a great favorite in school, because she took the part of all the poor children. If a little boy or girl was a cripple, or wore shabby clothes, or had scanty dinners, or was ridiculed, he or she found an earnest friend and defender in ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... why you take a cruise without me?" said Mesty; "dat very shabby—by de power, but I wish I was there; you ab too much danger, Massa ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Peter, raising the spear he held; and poising it after the fashion he had learned from the Malays, he seemed about to hurl it at the little mahout, whose head and shoulders he could see plainly now just beyond Rajah's shabby little tail. "You dare to say another word, and I will pin you where you sit, like the miserable little beetle you are! Now then.—Here, steady, Rajah!—Hold tight, Mister Archie! I am coming to you; but just you make a ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... the Evening to this Morning at 8 a Clock I have been in continual Dread by reason of some Shabby Gent'n who staid on Board at Night and frequently seem'd to hint Concerning Money, of which I had indeed a large quantity but pleaded Poverty to them, but to my great Surprize at One in the Morning I found ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... clean; they are much better than the blue enamelled ware, as they do not burn so readily or chip so soon. Frying pans are nice, too, of the same ware. A set each of wire and metal dish-covers must not be forgotten; the latter should be of plain blocked tin, and as the fluted ones soon get shabby, these should be well washed inside and out with scouring soap and polished with Goddard's plate powder. A French fryer is invaluable; it will cost 7s. 6d. Three or four pounds of dripping clarified ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... down a side walk, and came face to face with Sibyl herself. Now, at that instant the little girl certainly did not look at her best. The holland frock, short and shabby, had a great rent above the knee, her soft cheek was scratched and bleeding slightly, and there was a smudge across ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... the shabby room, and found a poor old woman, lying on a miserable bed. The room was bare and cheerless except for the bright fire burning in the small stove, beside which lay a neat pile of wood. The doctor did what he could to ease the poor woman s sufferings, and then ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... girl must, a man may if he chooses." She surveyed him critically. "Your coat's a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn't keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... paying; yes; but I maintain that he was induced to do so by fraud. Well-informed in all things, the Devil must have known that my friend would gain nothing by his visit to futurity. The whole thing was a very shabby trick. The more I think of it, the more detestable the Devil seems ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... see, they was pullin' even them days and runnin' neck and neck. Even when Fred Farrell, her old beau, married a girl she knew and built a fine house all piazzas and bow-winders right in sight of their shabby little rented cottage, I don't think she minded it; even if Mis' Farrell didn't have anythin' to do from mornin' till night only set in a white dress on her piazza, and rock, and give parties, Betty didn't seem to mind. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... soon for Lennox, who had sat in his shabby quarters thinking how wondrously quiet everything was, and whether after what the colonel had hinted it was the calm preceding ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... wanted. He kept his disguise wherever he went and no one knew that he had come. He heard of the festivities that were going on at the Thing and was curious to see them, so he put on some old clothes that were rather shabby and arrived just as they were going from the Logretta home to their booths. Some of the young men were talking about the weather, said it was good and fair, and that it would be a good thing to ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... Frenchwomen were not coquettes, he noted as he kept pace with his companion. She uttered a word now and then for politeness' sake, but she never looked at him and seemed not in the least to care that he was a well-favoured and well-dressed young man. She cared for nothing but the young artist in the shabby coat and the slouched hat, and for discovering where he had set ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... this it would be needless to report, and not only needless, but a vast deal worse—shabby, interloping, meddlesome and mean, undignified, unmanly, and disreputably low; for even the tanner and his wife (who must have had right to come forward, if anybody had) felt that their right was a shadow, and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... certain indescribable resemblance to David Elginbrod that had so attracted him. The man was very tall. Six-foot. Hugh felt dwarfed beside him; for he had to look right up, as he passed, to see his face. He was dressed in loose, shabby black. He had high and otherwise very marked features, and a dark complexion. A general carelessness of demeanour was strangely combined with an expression of reposeful strength and quiet concentration of will. At how much of this conclusion ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... wore greatly upon her husband. Apprehension lurked in the back of his mind. In the mill, or out on the farm, or when he sat down among his shabby, old, calf-skin books, he was assailed by the memory of all her various fancies during their married life. Some of them were no more remarkable or unexpected than this interest in Shakerism. He began to be slowly frightened. Suppose she should ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... savage delight was exhibited in destroying the unborn fruit of the womb. Nor was any rank respected. Madame d'Yverny, the niece of Cardinal Briconnet, was recognized, as she fled, by the costly underclothing that appeared from beneath the shabby habit of a nun which she had assumed; and, after suffering every indignity, upon her refusal to go to mass, was thrown from a bridge into the Seine and drowned.[1019] Occasionally the women rivalled ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... anticipate the wits of Massachusetts by describing this trick as "henrymandering;" and that he thus narrowly escaped the ugly immortality of having his name handed down from age to age in the coinage of a base word which should designate a base thing,—one of the favorite, shabby manoeuvres of less scrupulous ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... the atmosphere the moment she entered. There were carelessly gowned women and men smart and shabby, but none of them were thinking of clothes nor even of one another. They had great deeds in mind; they were scanning the earth; they were toiling for men. The same grim excitement that sends smaller souls ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to Hawk-Eye, "I believe I will stay in the cave to-day, it is such a lot of work to start a new fire every day, and I can keep this one burning. Besides, the Twins must have new skins pretty soon. Those fox-furs they are now wearing are getting shabby. I will cure the deer-skin we brought home last night ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... Lawson for inspection. It was passed round the table until it reached Gillott, who carefully inspected it and said, "It's a very good one; but I think I have one that'll 'lick' it." Putting his hand into the breast pocket of his coat, he brought out two or three shabby-looking screwed-up bits of paper. Selecting one of these, he opened it, and produced therefrom an unmounted diamond, far surpassing in size and purity the one in the ring. Precious stones generally became at once the topic of ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... their shabby carriage and the dusty unfamiliar road were all dream-stuff—an illusion from which she was to wake directly and find herself once more in her room at Marinata, looking out on ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he would not see the women. Those in the bazaar were shabby people for the most part, whose black masks nobody would feel a curiosity to remove. You could see no more of their figures than if they had been stuffed in bolsters; and even their feet were brought to a general splay uniformity by the double ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of freedom we spent at the theater. We bought the best seats in the house, and we dressed for the occasion—being in the position of having nothing to wear between shabby ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... tribe," answered the Devil; "besides shapes are optional with me, and in England men go by appearances more than they do abroad; one is forced to look respectable and portly; the Devil himself could not cheat your countrymen with a shabby exterior. Doubtless you observe that all the swindlers, whose adventures enliven your journals, are dressed 'in the height of fashion,' and enjoy 'a mild prepossessing demeanour.' Even the Cholera does not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... is the peculiar hardship of our weddings to break us up by pairs, and carry off two instead of one. Did you ever see me with so shabby a row of tea-cups? When shall I have them come ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scene, though appearing only on its outskirts. A canal ran along at the rear of the dust-heap, and on the banks of its opposite side slowly wandered by—with hands clasped and hanging down in front of him, and eyes bent vacantly upon his hands—the forlorn figure of a man in a very shabby great-coat, which had evidently once belonged to one in the position of a gentleman. And to a gentleman it still belonged—but in what a position! A scholar, a man of wit, of high sentiment, of refinement, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... when she saw him appear on the shelf, For she thought of her shabby old frock. She said "Oh! I know he will scorn an old fan, As he comes of a very ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... as to the whole matter, which had left me rather bewildered, when I reached my shabby room I took out the envelope which Ballard had handed me and read the curious paper ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... she said. One of the children took the sickle, another the hat, the third a small shabby bundle of clothes, and all went toward ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... of the statement he takes out a shabby pocket-book, fat with official documents, and, unstrapping it, selects three, and hands them to Bingo. They are flimsy sheets of tissue-paper covered with spidery characters in violet ink, and Bingo, taking them, recognises the handwriting, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the sense of his own meanness, and somewhat alarmed at the idea of fighting three duels, to retrieve his credit, thought it best to submit, without struggle, in the first instance, to that public disgrace which he had merited. He wrote a shabby apology to Major O'Shannon and Sir Philip, concluding with saying, that rather than lose a friend he so much valued as Sir Philip Gosling, he was willing to forget all that had passed, and even to take back ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... they called her in those days, Paulette—wore unbecoming hats and shabby gowns, and shoes that were full of holes. None the less, she was sought out by several men of note, among them Freron, a commissioner of the Convention. He visited Pauline so often as to cause unfavorable comment; but he was in love with ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... days after this Keith, senior, came into the store. He was not arrayed in the white flannels but was wearing a rather shabby but very comfortable tweed jacket and trousers and a white canvas hat of the kind which Hamilton and Company sold for fifty cents. His shirt was of the soft-collared variety and his shoes were what ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... are so shabby, my appearance is against me. No one wants to employ a girl whose dress ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... Valmai, although she had received no serious harm from her watery adventure, still felt a little languor and indisposition, which kept her a prisoner in the house. As she lay on the old shabby sofa, her time was fully occupied by reading to her uncle, books of Welsh history or the effusions of the old bards, which interested him so much. Ever and anon, while he searched for a reference or took notes of some ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... tell him that I INVITE HIM SPECIALLY to stay with me on his return journey, and that I should think it very shabby of him if he played me the trick of flying past me under my ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... portion of his life, save the forty sketches, or thereabouts, included in these volumes. Much more, indeed, he wrote; and some very small part of it might yet be rummaged out (but it would not be worth the trouble) among the dingy pages of fifteen or twenty year old periodicals, or within the shabby morocco covers of faded Souvenirs. The remainder of the works alluded to had a very brief existence, but, on the score of brilliancy, enjoyed a fate vastly superior to that of their brotherhood, which succeeded in getting through the press. In a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... avenues and streets the taxicabs now turned. Then a distinctly shabby looking part of Paris was unfolded to the gaze ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... Chippewas camped in your dooryard, and came in to help themselves to coffee, which you made of roasted corn. The Old Doctor bucked northwest blizzards, read Dickens and Byron, pulled people through typhoid, and left to Milt his shabby old medicine case and thousands of dollars—in uncollectible accounts. Mrs. Daggett had long since folded her crinkly ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... sight of the shabby figure at the gate, but before she could finish her sentence, Peace, following the direction of her eyes, wheeled about on her perch, surveyed the man with big, almost somber, brown eyes, and poured forth an ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... strives to keep his attention fixed on his proofs. The same row of big, strong, healthy, good-natured policemen trying not to grin at times; and the police-court solicitors ("the place stinks with 'em," a sergeant told me) wrangling over some miserable case for a crust, and the "reporters," shabby some of them, eager to get a brutal joke for their papers out of the accumulated mass of misery before them, whether it be at the expense of the deaf, blind, or crippled ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... looked first at me, but my first sensation was of his keen eye swiftly falling on the shabby travelling-bag in my left hand, my right kept disengaged for any friendly overture ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... think of me, he will say to himself: 'There is the man who came very near making me lose my crown. Fortunately I was generous, great, full of presence of mind.' That will be said by the young gentleman in a shabby black doublet, who came to the chateau of Blois, hat in hand, to ask me if I would give him access to the king ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss, suggestive of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... dependence on each day's labor for each day's bread, that stood in the way. One by one—sick, disabled, discouraged, dead-beaten—they drifted into the poor-house, which, as the years went on, grew into a shabby, double pile of buildings, between which ran ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... stockings, and linen. He always had the luck of his carelessness; for, the first day he put on a new coat, he unfailingly matched it with the rest of his costume by staining it with incredible promptitude. The good man waited till his housekeeper told him that his hat was too shabby before buying a new one. His necktie was always crumpled and starchless, and he never set his dog-eared shirt collar straight after his judge's bands had disordered it. He took no care of his gray hair, and shaved but twice a week. He never wore gloves, and generally kept his hands ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... enquiry. But the next instant he relaxed again with impulsive confidence. "Well, it is more or less settled," he said. "But I'm wondering—you know, Charlie, she's rather young to be married, isn't she? She hasn't seen much of the world so far. You don't think it's shabby, do you, to marry her before she's had the same sort of chances as ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... proceedings. These are the persons who resort to the arts of the lowest tradesmen, such as under-working, touting for employment, sneaking, cringing, lying, and the like. These are the persons who, in such shabby or fraudulent cases as may succeed, share the fees with low attorneys, and who sign habitually, for the same pettifogging practitioners, half-guinea motions in the batch, for half-a-crown or eighteenpence apiece; and, in short, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... sped into the farm-lands. On either side was a wide stretch of harvest fields, heaving into gentle billows, with here and there a shabby cluster of buildings. If Kalora had only known, Morovenia was very much like the far-away America, except that Morovenia had not learned to decorate the ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... more to see her play. In his small, shabby room in a musty house on one of the old side streets he set to work on his new plan. He wrote now without fervor, without elation, plodding along hour after hour, erasing, interlining, destroying, ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... woman answered: "You have been very kind, ma'am, in giving me a house, and now, if you please, ma'am, I would like some new furniture. For the furniture I had in the vinegar-bottle looks very shabby now that it is in the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... writing—the personal charm: apart from that there is little in it. A man may see a thing with hideous distinctness, but he may not be able to invest it with charm: and the danger of charm is that some people can invest very shallow, muddled, and shabby thinking with a sort of charm. It is like a cloak, if I may say so. If I wear an old cloak, it looks shabby and disgraceful, as it is. But if I lend it to a shapely and well-made friend, it gets a beauty from the wearer. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... They remarked that the stores seemed to disappear in a way truly marvellous, leaving the backwoods soldiers who were to have benefited by them "as ragged as ever." The petitioners complained that the undisciplined militia quartered among them, who on their arrival were "in the most shabby and wretched state," and who had "rioted in abundance and unaccustomed luxury" at the expense of the Creoles, had also maltreated and insulted them; as for instance they had at times wantonly shot the cattle merely to try their rifles. "Ours was the task of hewing and carting them firewood to the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... be guessed as to his parentage (the windmiller knew nothing), but there was scope for any amount of fancy; and if the child displayed any better manners or talents than the other children, Mrs. Lake would purse her lips, and say, with a somewhat shabby pride, - ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a very old man, with tremulous limbs and silvery locks, presented himself at the door for admission. The driver shouted through the sky-light, "Room for one more, there, inside;"—but the gentlemen looked at the old man and frowned, and the ladies spread out their ruffled skirts, for his hat was shabby, and his coat very threadbare. He saw how it was, and why there was "no room," and meekly turned about to go down the steps, when a fine-looking young man, who sat next to me, sprang to the door, and seizing him by the arm, said, "Take my place, sir; you are quite welcome to it. I am ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... three days, and then the General's behaviour strengthened her in her belief that he was not to blame for the shabby way in which he had ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... young Fellow that affects to dress and appear genteelly, might with artificial Management save ten Pound a Year; as instead of fine Holland he might mourn in Sackcloth, and in other Particulars be proportionably shabby: But of what great Service would this Sum be to avert any Misfortune, whilst it would leave him deserted by the little good Acquaintance he has, and prevent his gaining any other? As the Appearance of an easy Fortune is necessary towards making one, I dont ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... does not become shabby like paint; but the surfaces assume weather beaten grays, very soft and harmonious, and varying slightly according to the original hue. The Stain may be renewed at any time with little trouble or expense, as the natural hues which nature ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... favoured the voluntary sleuth. The station was well thronged, a circumstance which enabled him to keep inconspicuously close to his victim. Furthermore, Dupont was obviously looking for somebody, and so distracted. Presently a shabby, furtive little rat of a man nudged his elbow, and Dupont followed him to a corner, where they confabulated in undertones for many minutes; while Lanyard loitered just outside their normal range of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... best crops are killed with blight, When at the plough his oxen drop down dead, Stung with his losses, up one night from bed He springs, and on a cart-horse makes his way, All wrath, to Philip's house, by break of day. "How's this?" cries Philip, seeing him unshorn And shabby. "Why, Vulteius, you look worn. You work, methinks, too long upon the stretch." "Oh, that's not it, my patron. Call me wretch! That is the only fitting name for me. Oh, by thy Genius, by the gods that be Thy hearth's protectors, I beseech, implore, Give me, oh, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... housewifery that Mrs. Brownlow kept up the somewhat handsome establishment she had started with at her marriage. Caroline felt that she neither could nor would have made herself such a slave to domestic details; yet this was life and duty and interest to Ellen. Where one sister would be unheeding of shabby externals, so that all her children might be free and on an equality, if they did not go beyond her, in all enjoyments, physical, artistic, or intellectual; the other toiled to keep up appearances, kept her children under restraint and in the background, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... resistance. Within him, a certain second self, another better McTeague rose with the brute; both were strong, with the huge crude strength of the man himself. The two were at grapples. There in that cheap and shabby "Dental Parlor" a dreaded struggle began. It was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world—the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be resisted, and the simultaneous arousing of the other man, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... was giving a party, the boundary between the favored and the slighted families would have been known pretty well beforehand, and there would have been no great amount of grumbling. But the Colonel, for all his title, had a forest of poor relations and a brushwood swamp of shabby friends, for he had scrambled up to fortune, and now the time was come when he must define his new ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... little astonished at the appearance of the man who had thus announced himself as the cura of Caracuaro. For one of the clerical calling his costume was altogether singular—to say nothing of its being rather shabby. A double-barrelled gun, with one barrel broken, hung from his saddle-bow, and an old rusty sabre in a common leathern scabbard dangled against ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... own cousin,—a great honor, many thought, for the Peacock was the most gorgeous of all the birds. But it was not altogether pleasant for the Pheasant, because at that time he wore such plain and shabby old garments that his proud relative was ashamed of him, and did not like to be reminded that they were of the same family. When the Peacock went strutting about with his wonderful tail spread fan-wise, and with his vain little eyes peering to see who might ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... verily,—I mean hear, O Prince, I beseech," she panted. The boy's merry eyes regarded the shabby small person in puzzled astonishment. He felt an impulse to laugh and run away, but his royal blood forbade either. So ...
— The Very Small Person • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... It seemed to me that concealment was no longer possible. She staged at me in bewilderment. I had forgotten my beard, my spectacles and shabby clothes. She did not ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but when he does choose to stir only a joyous elation in the heart he rings a peal of silver bells. Here all is glad thanksgiving. The Divine has come into a sick and sorry world; and, behold, all is changed! Nothing sordid, nothing shabby, consists with the meaning of this miracle. Therefore it is not here. All is transformed; all is a New Jerusalem—splendour, peace, ineffable ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... traitor. Of course one vows one will never write another line; but I do not suppose I shall keep the vow. I reply shortly, eating all the dirt I can collect; and I shall try to forget it too; though it is a shabby end of an ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... seen it. It was cold and also stuffy. It was ugly and shabby and stiff. Three tired girls sat there, two trying to read by a strangled gaslight overhead; one trying to entertain a caller in a social fiction of privacy at the other end ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... years after The Excursion. Byron called Crabbe "Nature's sternest painter, and her best." He was a minutely accurate delineator of the harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and donkey; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble-down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper has the imaginative lift ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sacrament, he is certain to arouse the animosity, not only of orthodox church members, but of members of the community who are lax in their church duties. Goldsmith illustrates this kind of feeling when, in "She Stoops to Conquer," he makes one of the "several shabby fellows with punch and tobacco" in the alehouse say, "I loves to hear him, the squire sing, bekeays he never gives us nothing that's low," and another responds, "O, damn anything that's low." The AntiMormon feeling ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... each scar denotes, And of long miseries gone by, They feel beneath their shabby coats The heart of France ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... few rugs scattered about though extremely worn were very costly. There was also there a beautiful sofa upholstered in pink figured silk, an enormous divan with many cushions, some splendid arm-chairs of various shapes (but all very shabby), a round table, and in the midst of these fine things a small common iron stove. Somebody must have been attending it lately, for the fire roared and the warmth of the place was very grateful after the bone-searching cold blasts ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... question, in the manner of a man whose impetus on the track of self-pity drives him past the signal flags of relief, 'what would there be left to bury me? These clothes I have on might buy me a long box. For the cost of this shabby old suit, that hasn't lasted me a twelve-month, I could get one that I wouldn't wear out in a thousand ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... causes which Lord Grey represented, but it was a recognition—and it was enough. He was installed on the 27th of September, and on the day of his installation he wrote to a friend—"It puts me at my ease for life. I asked for nothing—never did anything shabby to procure ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... of it directly," I whispered, and indeed in a few minutes more Mr. Rowe turned up a shabby entry, and led us to one of several lower buildings round a small court. The house he stopped at was cleaner within than without, and the woman was ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... conscience feels compunction; I hold that that's the stomach's function, For of the sinner I have noted That when he's sinned he's somewhat bloated, Or ill some other ghastly fashion Within that bowel of compassion. True, I believe the only sinner Is he that eats a shabby dinner. You know how Adam with good reason, For eating apples out of season, Was "cursed." But that is all symbolic: The truth is, Adam had ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Miss Jamison had come into this shabby though eminently respectable neighborhood, and opened a small boarding-house in a neighboring street. She had come from some up-State country town, and her bureaus and bedsteads were barely enough to furnish the small, old-fashioned house which she took for a term of years. Miss Jamison ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... be hard to find one so free from prejudice as I am. I have many friends among the Protestants, and now that their system is tottering, they are all the dearer to me.' In spite of his scanty means, his shabby valet, his threadbare cloak, and the humbleness of his diplomatic position, the fire and honesty of his character combined with his known ability to place him high in the esteem of the society of St. Petersburg. His fidelity, devotion, and fortitude, mellowed by many years and by meditative ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... woman near at hand with a very fine deerskin coat on. It was all fancily trimmed with wolverine and other furs, making one of those beautiful coats any woman would love to possess. At the same time, looking down at her own shabby artege, she sighed and remarked to the stranger, "What a beautiful coat you have." The woman smilingly replied, "Yes, how would you like to have it?" Of course she was delighted with the proposition, and when the stranger offered to make the exchange, was only too ...
— Short Sketches from Oldest America • John Driggs
... Scott, I'm awfully ashamed of the way that some of us, my family in particular, have treated you within the last day or two. It was confoundedly shabby, and I beg your pardon for ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... the eyes of the common people. It was said she had a home in the hills somewhere, to which she disappeared for days and weeks, and came back hung about the girdle with crosses; and it was also said that her red robe never became frayed, shabby, or disordered. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with the neck, and the top of the head and forehead, and sometimes nearly the whole body, are smeared with a species of white earth resembling chalk, moistened with water. The lodge, teepee, and all the family possessions except the few shabby articles of apparel worn by the mourners, are given away and the family left destitute. Thus far the custom is universal or nearly so. The wives, mother, and sisters of a deceased man, on the first, second, ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... difference is, that in New York we have more of them. By the time we have passed Fifth Street, which is about half a mile from the river, we have reached the end of the elegant and splendid part of the city; all beyond and around is shabby Philadelphia, begrimed with soot, and "blended in a common element" of smoke. The extensive and swarming German quarter is precisely like the German quarter of Philadelphia, (though the Cincinnati lager-bier is better,) and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... is, as yet, little sign of spring. Its bed is all choked with last year's reeds, trampled about like a manger. Yet its running seems to have caught a happier note, and here and there along its banks flash silvery wands of palm. Right down among the shabby burnt-out underwood moves the sordid figure of a man. He seems the very genius loci. His clothes are torn and soiled, as though he had slept on the ground. The white lining of one arm gleams out like the slashing in a doublet. His hat is battered, and he wears no collar. ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... and quiet contentment of this good woman were very striking. She had beautiful white teeth, and was not prematurely aged, only very sun-burnt and shabby, her black stuff dress blue with age and mended in many places, her partially bare feet thrust in sabots. The women here wear toeless or footless stockings, the upper part of the foot being bare. I ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... there, standing one upon the other, so as to make more space in the small room, and on the rather shabby rug by the fireplace a woman was kneeling with ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... his office in this street—the office of the Mutual Loan Society, of which he was the managing director. The house, in spite of its grandiloquent title, was of excessively shabby exterior. The Mutual Loan Society was frequented by those who, having lost their credit, wished to obtain a fresh amount, and who, having no money, wanted to ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... "impressions." He seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal. Hovering there in this consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of aesthetic hospitality—if the genius of aesthetic hospitality were not commonly some shabby little custode, flourishing a calico pocket-handkerchief and openly resentful of the divided franc. This analogy was made none the less complete by the brilliant tirade with which he greeted ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... sitting down like one of the family, and making them all seem like a picture of some historical and aristocratic romance! And then they were actually "de Fontanges l'Hommadieu." How different he was from that shabby Methodist minister who used to come to see her father in a black cravat with a hideous bow! Really there was something to say for a religion that contained so much picturesque refinement; and for her part—but that will do. I beg to say that ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... never good for anything in the literary way till after the first autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me,—multiplying and brightening its hues; though they are likely to be sober and shabby ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... leave my machine. We had not taken a direct road back; so I was stuck in a lonesome, woody place, no houses about. I got chilly and made a fire, and was putting in the time comfortably enough, when this old party steps up. He was in shabby evening clothes and a top hat, and had on his usual white gloves. How he got there, at three o'clock in the morning, miles from any town or railway, I'll leave it to you to figure out. He surely had no car. When I saw him coming up to the fire, I disliked him. He ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... and nudged Tom about how shabby it would look to reneague the adventure. So he asked which way he was to go, and Redhead ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... angry with me! [With a change of tone.] As you did that evening, for instance, when I came with Nannette to your shabby little den in ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... an intern living at home with his widowed sister. Colorado? No, the widowed sister was positive he had never been there. The fourteenth was a handsome fellow of about thirty-five. He looked poor and threadbare, and I had a glimpse of a shabby bed behind a screen. Patients obviously did not often come his way, and his joy at seeing me was pitiful. I had meant to try a bluff and get in my Colorado question this time free of charge; but I hadn't the heart to do it. Slight pains in the head seemed ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... of the idea of wrong may be these. First, the thing is forbidden: then one gets punished for it. Punishment and prohibition enter in by eye and ear and other senses besides. Then the thing is offensive to those we love and revere. Then it is bad for us. Then it is shameful, shabby, unfair, unkind, selfish, hateful to God. All these points of the idea of wrong are grasped by the intellect, beginning with sensory presentations of what is seen and felt and heard said. Again with ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... I was more thirsty for music than for vin ordinaire or cordiale Medoc. Yet I did not expect very much round the corner of a restaurant frequented by shabby intellectuals... That ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... a shabby spectacle as he moved off with his little dog Dan slinking at his heels. It should be said in behalf of Dan, however, that his bristles were up, and that he looked back and growled. It may be that the dog had the advantage of insignificance, but it is difficult to conceive how a dog bold enough ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... weak &c 160; powerless &c 158; frivolous, petty, niggling; piddling, peddling; fribble^, inane, ridiculous, farcical; finical, finikin^; fiddle-faddle, fingle-fangle^, namby-pamby, wishy-washy, milk and water. poor, paltry, pitiful; contemptible &c (contempt) 930; sorry, mean, meager, shabby, miserable, wretched, vile, scrubby, scrannel^, weedy, niggardly, scurvy, putid^, beggarly, worthless, twopennyhalfpenny, cheap, trashy, catchpenny, gimcrack, trumpery; one- horse [U.S.]. not worth the pains, not worth while, not worth mentioning, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of the square, as he swung along toward the Academy Theatre that evening, he found himself suddenly confronted by a man who, lounging against the fence of a shabby dwelling, straightened dramatically at his approach and bent a sharp gaze upon him. He was a tall, shambling fellow with a white cloth swathed about the top of his head; and Varney, in the act of passing, suddenly recognized him as the dog ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... those rivers of the great plains, like the Platte and the Kansas and the Arkansas, are so wasteful of their supply in the spring that by July they are gasping for a shower. So, part of the year they revel in luxury, and during the rest they go shabby—like shiftless people. ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... much taken up. Bezobiedoff was a small, slight fellow, with a face pitted over with smallpox, freckled, effeminate hands, and a huge flaxen moustache much in need of the comb. He was invariably dirty, shabby, uncouth, and uninteresting. To me, Dimitri's relations with him were as unintelligible as his relations with Lubov Sergievna, and the only reason he could have had for choosing such a man for his associate was ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... so would memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale, and there were dark rings round her eyes; also, her dress was worn, her hat curiously shabby. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... are in keeping; of the passengers in the street a sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are putting you off your guard, there will pass you a woman—more likely two or three—of ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... of my beautiful rosewood piano, he had put another, a little shabby thing with all the polish off, half-the notes wanting, and so old and worn that one could hardly hear it. I began to think: "Good gracious! is an artist then, really a little mad? Does he only care for useless things, and despise ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... that Mien-yaun's poem was a versified narration of his own experiences. There was the romantic youth, the beautiful maiden, the obdurate papa, the villanous mother-in-law, and the shabby public. This discovery augmented its popularity, and ten editions were disposed of in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... real beauty of spirits. It is our firm faith that bright solemn angels in celestial watchings were frequent guests in the homely room of the two sisters, and that passing by all accidents of age and poverty, withered skins, bony features, and grotesque movements and shabby clothing, they saw more real beauty there than in many a scented boudoir where seeming angels smile ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to be witnessed on that sad, chill, autumn night, was the small boy in a threadbare gray sweater and shabby cap who stood gazing wistfully into the seductive windows of Pfiffel's Home Bakery. The sight of him standing there with his small nose plastered against the glass, looking with silent yearning upon the jelly rolls and icing cakes, was enough to arouse pity ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... mind,—that criticism of our contemporaries is not criticism, it is only conversation. Yet there is sufficient self-revelation in the fact that those who have been ready enough to praise the 'Lady of Lyons,' with its tawdry rhetoric and its shabby morality, have not seen the superiority of Mr. Pinero over Lord Lytton even as a stylist, as a master of English, tense, nervous, and flexible, adjusting itself to the thought, never protruding itself ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... in the next few days. Hartley had unearthed a somewhat shabby adventurer who swore to having seen the Irishman O'Hara in Paris within a month, but it was by no means certain that this being did not merely affirm what he believed to be desired of him, and in any case the information was of no especial value, since it was O'Hara's ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... stirred, stretched himself and finally sat up. Then he started, sprang to his feet, and strode easily across the vestibule to the reception desk. An officer was standing there in a worn uniform, a very shabby kit-bag by his side, a dirty old Burberry ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... two o'clock came,—three, four, five o'clock,—and no Vavasor. Hour after hour she listened to the chime of the gaudy timepiece decorating their shabby apartment; and while the night advanced, in all its chilly, lonely, comfortless protraction, shivered as she added new logs to the dying embers, and as she hoped or despaired of his return, alternately replaced the veilleuse by candles, the candles by a veilleuse. She had already assumed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... majority of 50 out of 250. The division was very extraordinary, Brougham, Sadler, and O'Connell voting together. It is pretty clear, however, that they are in no danger of being turned out, but that they are wretchedly off for speakers. Huskisson made a shabby speech enough, O'Connell his debut, and a successful one, heard with profound attention; his manner good and his arguments attended and replied to. In the Lords there was nothing particular, but nothing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... last into a shabby street, recognizable even in the twilight of the scattered lamps as being a place for cheap lodging-houses. There was a light burning in the second-floor windows of No. 19; but all the rest of the front was in darkness. I paid Simmons and dismissed him, saying I would walk home. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... "bloods" of those days. But this took most of my available cash, and left me little to expend in treating my fellow students at the tavern or in enjoying the more substantial culinary delights of the Boston hotels. Thus though I made no shabby friends I acquired few genteel ones, and I began to feel keenly the disadvantages of a lean purse. I was elected into none of the clubs, nor did I receive any invitations to the numerous balls given in Boston or even to those in Cambridge. This piqued my pride, to be sure, but only intensified ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... after the visit to Cadurcis, when Lady Annabel was sitting alone, a postchaise drove up to the hall, whence issued a short and stout woman with a rubicund countenance, and dressed in a style which remarkably blended the shabby with the tawdry. She was accompanied by a boy between eleven and twelve years of age, whose appearance, however, much contrasted with that of his mother, for he was pale and slender, with long curling black hair and large black eyes, which occasionally, by their transient flashes, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... flourishing town where I discovered nothing but wilderness, they will commission a second-rate sculptor to make a fancy statue of me. And I shall stand in front of the Stock Exchange, a convenient perch for birds, to look eternally upon the shabby deeds ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... lately, and found even the suburbs of that city immeasurably safer than any part of London is now, to judge from the police-reports. Yet I am accused of inhumanity and selfishness if I decline to write a check for every shabby fellow who calls upon me pretending to be a clergyman, and to represent this or that ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... I suffered. One of the most awful situations in life is to have one of your friends be the sort of girl that has a town named after her and wonderful family portraits and such dainty hands and feet that shabby shoes don't even count, and then to know that she is hungry most of the time from being too poor to get enough food. For two days I have had to keep my mind off Roxanne Byrd to make myself swallow one single morsel of anything to eat. I suspected ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... in the dance, nor tuneful in her song. She had broad cheeks, thick lips and a flat nose. She had very red cheeks, very dark hair. She was exuberant in figure, moving with vigor and life. Her clothes were shabby but bright in color. Red bands edged the striped skirt and bright colored worsted fringes outlined the seams of her bodice. Other young maidens resemble roses and lilies, but she was like the heather, strong, gay ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... king has ordered me to shoot you.' The prince started at this, and said, 'Let me live, and I will change dresses with you; you shall take my royal coat to show to my father, and do you give me your shabby one.' 'With all my heart,' said the huntsman; 'I am sure I shall be glad to save you, for I could not have shot you.' Then he took the prince's coat, and gave him the shabby one, and went away ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... a prospector and a company promoter all the working years of his rather shabby life. He had organized some dubious concerns; but his new offices on Broadway were fitted so unostentatiously that anyone could see the Northern Exploitation Company was not trying to glitter for the ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... headlong drove his rival round the Ring; Nor stops nor stays, nor rest, nor breath allows. Thereon the Corner raised redoubled rows, Yelled false alarms of "Rescue!" heaved half-bricks, And murderous missiles and unmanly kicks Poured on ENTELLUS, whilst fat DARES slunk Between his bullies, like a shabby skunk. ("Bah!" growled SAYERIUS. "Fancy CRIBBS or GULLIES Backing down under guard of blackguard bullies!") But now the Ref., who saw the row increase, Declared a "draw," and bade the combat cease. ("A draw?" SAYERIUS shouted. "Was he drunk? Or had he, like the rest, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... endowment fund for the Pope and his court so big that his Holiness and every official in the place might get salaries all round out of the interest that would enable them to live like—well, I was going to say like princes, but there's a lot of princes in Rome that live so shabby that the comparison ain't ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... to him. It was on the third day that there came a little personage, without horse or carriage, walking quite merrily up to the castle. His eyes sparkled like yours; he had fine long hair, but his clothes were shabby." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the passing years to the starting-point of those strange events, lands me in a shabby little ground-floor room in a house near the Walworth end of Lower Kennington Lane. A couple of framed diplomas on the wall, a card of Snellen's test-types and a stethoscope lying on the writing-table, proclaim it a doctor's ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... acquainted with so few dragoons that I do not know their general characteristics. Few of them, I imagine, would have gone about with the slouch which characterized his method of locomotion, nor would many of them have dined in a hat so shabby that it was picked off the peg and passed ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... were made each year for the family clothing. The child had always really preferred that the others should have "new things" rather than herself—until Miss Margaret came; and now, before Miss Margaret's daintiness, she felt ashamed of her own shabby appearance and longed unspeakably for fresh, pretty clothes. Tillie knew perfectly well that her father had plenty of money to buy them for her if he would. But she never thought of asking him or her stepmother for anything more than what they saw ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... with sudden sunshine; both hands were put out to receive the shabby driving glove, and the voice was full of that affectionate alacrity which makes ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... shabby outcast, a tavern hanger-on, a genial wayfarer who tarries longest where the inn is most hospitable, yet with that suavity, that distinctive politeness and that saving grace of humor peculiar to the American man. He has his own code of morals—very exalted ones—but honors them in the breach ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... imagined him ever to be in need of small ones. It was the same young fellow at George's who, whenever he wanted credit for a new suit from his tailor, used to dress himself in laced clothes in which to give the order, for he had found that to appear shabby on such occasions defeated the purpose ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... knocking out his shabby heels against the box in an agony of confusion. Then he grew emboldened by the other's dejected mien. "No, I'd never throw no race," he said ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... figure entered the room just as Miriam finished speaking. But Jessica was too late with her warning. The young girl had, without doubt, heard the cruel speech and her face flushed painfully as she pinned on a shabby old hat, slipped her arms into a thin black jacket and stepped out again without looking at the crowd of schoolmates who ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... he withdrew, it became my business to step forward; but cautiously and gently, so as not to alarm the lady, and yet firmly, so as to convince her of the hopelessness of her design of uniting herself with her shabby lover, the sub-lieutenant. The Princess Olivia was good enough to perform this necessary part of the plan in my favour, and solemnly to warn the Countess Ida, that, though Monsieur de Magny had retired from paying ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... old childish way, the big Highlander lifted his master up in his arms, and carried him, flight after flight, to the summit of the long dark stair. It narrowed up to a small door, very mean and shabby-looking, from the keyhole of which, when Malcolm hid his lantern, a ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... City, Samuel declares, were setting up his arms; merchant-ships—more important in those days—were hanging out his colours. He hears, too, how the Mercers' Company were making a statue of his gracious Majesty to set up in the Exchange. Ah! Pepys's heart is merry: he has forty shillings (some shabby perquisite) given him by Captain Cowes of the 'Paragon;' and 'my lord' in the evening 'falls to singing' a song upon the Rump to the tune ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... and taking possession of places he had no right to. It is delightful to see the great, generous poet going upon grounds of reason and justice in the teeth of the trumped-up rights of the "pious AEneas," that shabby deserter of Dido, and canting prototype of Augustus. He turns the tables, also, with brave candour, upon the tyrannical claims of the stronger sex to privileges which they deny the other; and says, that there ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... simple society had its own social habits. If he did not take this well-meant advice, he must justify himself by his own method. He made up his mind to go to the next meeting of the medical society. His clothes were a trifle shabby, but as the meeting was in the evening, he could go in his evening dress—drop in casually, as it were, from an evening entertainment. That silly bit of pride, however, angered him with himself. He went in his shabby everyday suit. The experience ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... a week of travel, the party went into camp near a shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry Mississippi. The river astonished the children beyond measure. Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... she could not love her any longer! It was Fanny, after all, who was a noble girl. Fanny wanted to get to the bottom of things. Fanny herself could not do what an unimportant little girl like Sibyl could do. After all, there was nothing shabby in it. If it were shabby, Fanny Crawford, the last girl in the school to do wrong, would not have asked her to attend to ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... Should I return it? Should I communicate with Mr. Semitopolis at once?" he wondered. "No," he concluded finally, "nothing without Mr. Finsbury's advice." And he arose and produced a shabby leathern desk. It opened without the formality of unlocking, and displayed the thick cream-coloured note-paper on which Mr. Pitman was in the habit of communicating with the proprietors of schools and the parents of his pupils. He placed the desk on the table by the window, and taking a saucer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ought to be able to look things straight in the face. What can I get on that threadbare coat of yours? Perhaps three francs at the outside. How many days will that last us? We will say three. And then, what then? Besides, can you not understand that your dress is too shabby for you to make an impression on the people you go to see? Well-dressed applicants only have attention, and to obtain money, you must appear not to need it; and, pray, what will people think of you if you have no overcoat? Without one you will look ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... accordingly did so, and found her seated on her throne, surrounded by the lords and ladies of her court, glittering in jewels and dressed in magnificent apparel. Hans felt rather shy as he marched up the splendid room, amongst all these grandly dressed people, in his shabby old clothes; but he put as good a face on it as he could, and when he stopped before the throne and looked into the Princess's eyes, all his shyness vanished. He was conscious of nothing but a strong determination to win her for himself, or ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... see that he had pretty shabby clothes and a peaked cap and I guess he was startled to hear us coming. In just a few seconds he was gone in the woods and we all stood gaping there while the boat bobbed up and down, on account ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... she raged, in the depths of the comfortable shabby arm-chair that had been her father's. "I don't care! Aunt Trudy always cries and it isn't fair. I suppose Hugh will be furious, but let him. I'm so tired and so hot and so miserable—" and Rosemary gave herself up to ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... and rickety houses, where the character and peculiarities of the humbler classes of Parisians are best to be studied. Returning, after dark, from an expedition of this kind, I was surprised by a violent shower in a shabby street of the Faubourg St Antoine, and took refuge under a doorway. Immediately opposite to me was the wretched shop of a traiteur, in whose dingy window a cloudy white bowl of mashed spinach, a plate of bouilli, dry as a deal plank, ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
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