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More "Stale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... charm, despite the efforts of modern novelists and playwrights to render it stale and hackneyed, attaching to the middle of the seventeenth century—that period of upheaval and turmoil which saw a stately debonnaire Court swept away by the flames of Civil War, and the reign of an usurper succeeded by the Restoration of a ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... foremost in the fight, Not quite a Felon, yet but half a Knight. [xiv] The gibbet or the field prepared to grace; A mighty mixture of the great and base. 170 And think'st thou, SCOTT! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance, Though MURRAY with his MILLER may combine To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line? [24] No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade, Let such forego the poet's sacred name, Who rack their brains ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... suddenly aware of a sickish, heavy odor in the chamber. The window had been closed. But it was something more than stale air that ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... would have been, Apparently, in being seen. He may have had for evil or for good No argument; he may have had no care For what without himself went anywhere To failure or to glory, and least of all For such a stale, flamboyant miracle; He may have been the prophet of an art Immovable to old idolatries; He may have been a player without a part, Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies For such a flaming way to advertise; He may have been a painter sick ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... tried them; that in only once trying them, and viewing them, we find out their secret, and that afterwards the show is too superficial to arrest our attention. As dramatists and novelists repeat their plots, so does man's life repeat itself, and at length grows stale. This is what, in my desponding moments, I have sometimes suspected. What to do, if this ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive genius—these were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... It reeked of stale cigar-smoke, which would hang in the curtains for a week. It was very untidy. There were many indications that old Robinson had quitted in haste. On the table were ash-trays, old cigar-stumps, matches, burned and new; magazines, hairpins, a tooth-brush, and two calf-bound ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... clouds of tobacco smoke, and perhaps all redolent of rum, was enough to disenchant the most ardent lover of the sea. The food, bad enough in all ages of seafaring, was, in the early days of our merchant marine, too often barely fit to keep life in men's bodies. The unceasing round of salt pork, stale beef, "duff," "lobscouse," doubtful coffee sweetened with molasses, and water, stale, lukewarm, and tasting vilely of the hogshead in which it had been stored, required sturdy appetites to make it even tolerable. Even in later days Frank T. Bullen was able to ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... only place to live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... that he caused the essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as the most delicious perfume: that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose; nor was this effect to be wondered at, when we consider that this substance abounds with the self-same volatile salts that are so greedily smelled to by the most delicate invalids, after they have been ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... His appearance was typically English; his manner as free and forthcoming as a Frenchman's. Thirty years before he had been drawn by a master-hand as Mr. Vavasour in Tancred, but no lapse of time could stale his infinite variety. He was poet, essayist, politician, public orator, country gentleman, railway-director, host, guest, ball-giver, and ball-goer, and acted each part with equal zest and assiduity. When I first knew him he was ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... thought money so desirable as it is usually imagined; if you would enjoy you must transform it; and this transformation is frequently attended with inconvenience; you must bargain, purchase, pay dear, be badly served, and often duped. I buy an egg, am assured it is new-laid —I find it stale; fruit in its utmost perfection—'tis absolutely green. I love good wine, but where shall I get it? Not at my wine merchant's —he will poison me to a certainty. I wish to be universally respected; how shall ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... creaking sound, and a new damp chilliness was added to the stale atmosphere of the passage. Someone had quietly ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... there with such violence that the Galla peasantry would allow neither ingress nor egress. [21] I had the pleasure of reflecting for some time, dear L., upon the amount of responsibility incurred by using the phrase "I will;" and the only consolation that suggested itself was the stale assurance that ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... were on their feet now, insisting that the King modify Joan's frankness; but he was not minded to do it. His ordinary councils were stale water—his spirit was drinking wine, now, and the taste of it ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... dream? It seems like one. Have we been to Holland? Have we heard the chimes at midnight at Antwerp? Were we really away for a week, or have I been sitting up in the room dozing, before this stale old desk? Here's the desk; yes. But if it has been a dream, how could I have learned to hum that tune out of Dinorah? Ah, is it that tune, or myself that I am humming? If it was a dream how comes this yellow NOTICE DES TABLEAUX ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... which recognized not the angels of the Lord, that ye be not delivered into the hands of your enemies, and your land be cursed, and your sanctuary destroyed, and you be scattered to the four corners of the earth, and scorned in the confusion like stale water, until the Most High shall visit the earth, and break the heads of the dragons in the waters. Tell this, my sons, unto your children, that they be not disobedient toward God, for I read in the tablets of the heavens that you will be contumacious ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... ever, the heart sickens and the will flags, and life becomes a pageant that hath ceased to entertain. As I moved through the mist and the silence, and felt the tug of the thong that bound me to the wrist of the savage who stalked before me, I cared not how soon they made an end, seeing how stale and unprofitable were all ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... to me, thus pining for some one who could page me a quotation from Burton on Blue Devils; what to me, indeed, were flat repetitions of long-drawn yams, and the everlasting stanzas of Black-eyed Susan sung by our full forecastle choir? Staler than stale ale. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... foigne, to see thee trauerse, to see thee heere, to see thee there, to see thee passe thy puncto, thy stock, thy reuerse, thy distance, thy montant: Is he dead, my Ethiopian? Is he dead, my Francisco? ha Bully? what saies my Esculapius? my Galien? my heart of Elder? ha? is he dead bully-Stale? is he dead? Cai. By gar, he is de Coward-Iack-Priest of de vorld: he is not ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... in a big way. You are not a chip on the River of Life, you are a Supreme Master in a Universe of Facts. You think you are stuck in the harbor mud, but it is only that the tide is out. Command your Will to put up the sails, God will send you wind and tide to bear you out of the stale, sordid mental and bodily conditions you are living in, give you wider horizon, and a limitless ocean of experience. If anybody does not wish to sail with you, leave them on the shore. Let go of your past, break away from conditions that hold ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... all, Clara? You, the well-known leader of a large social circle—you, the proud beauty and envied lady of rank and fashion,—you will be made a subject for the coarse jests of lawyers,—the very judge on the bench will probably play off his stale witticism at your expense,—your dearest friends will tear your name to shreds,—the newspapers will reek of your doings,—and honest housemaids reading of your fall from your high estate, will thank God that their souls and bodies are more ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... neither, are signs visible to the dullest apprehension. The once national sport of horse-racing is being degraded to a trade in which it is difficult to perceive anything either sportive or national. The old pretence about the improvement of the breed of horses has become a delusion, too stale for jesting.' ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... intelligent person for all the annoyances and trouble which are necessarily encountered. It was past midnight when we arrived at the railroad station at Burgos, where, having telegraphed from Madrid, a very dirty omnibus was in waiting to take us to the hotel. How that vehicle did smell of garlic, stale tobacco, and accumulated filth, to which the odor of an ill-trimmed kerosene lamp added its pungent flavor. But we were soon set down before the hotel, where there was not a light to be seen, every one, servants and ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Stale bread, pilot-bread, dried corn-cakes, and crumbs, soaked a few minutes in water, or better still in milk, and fried, are ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... can plainly see it is nearing the end. For more than two hours we have been strolling about the boulevards, but have not met with one adventure. Everywhere the stereotyped faces and masks; the same jokes as last year; even the coffee and the cake look stale to me. Arthur, don't you ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... typewriters and the hum of subdued voices, but now the rooms were empty and the only sound to be heard was the heavy tread of Varr himself as he walked through the main office to the small room where his own desk was located. He frowned at the difference, and sniffed discontentedly at the stale air which seemed already to have taken on the peculiar flat mustiness appropriate to closed and deserted habitations. He frowned again when he drew his finger along a desk and noted the depth of the furrow it had made ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other circumstances than it is at present, and lies ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... has now become the great variety artist, one in truth whose infinite variety detention cannot stale any more than Customs officers can arrest the ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... tears, thin and watery blood; Brazening the conscious lie unto the world That it was done for hallowing Freedom's sake, Until the names of "Freedom," "Patriot," stank, Blown on and poison'd by these beggar lips; That men had need to coin fresh words to mean The holy things with stale use so defil'd. ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... I could observe the old Fellow was very uneasy at the Affront, and at his being obliged to repeat his Commands several times to no purpose; 'till at last one of the [Lads [2]] presented him with some stale Tea in a broken Dish, accompanied with a Plate of brown Sugar; which so raised his Indignation, that after several obliging Appellations of Dog and Rascal, he asked him aloud before the whole Company, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... add the hot milk, and cook till creamy, put in the salt and vanilla, and cool. Then cut stale cake into strips, or split lady-fingers into halves, and spread with jam. Put them on the sides and bottom of a flat glass dish, and gently ...
— A Little Cook Book for a Little Girl • Caroline French Benton
... Council (1904), were reforms of the highest importance, resulting from the report of a "triumvirate" consisting of Lord Esher, Sir John Fisher and Sir George Clarke, appointed in November 1903. The Unionist regime as a whole, however, had collapsed. Its ministers had become "stale." The heavy taxation of the war years was still retained, to the disgust especially of the income-tax payers; and new issues arose over the Education Act, labour questions, and the introduction of Chinese labour into South Africa (in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... so," said Lord Reggie. "Nothing is really worth much till it is a trifle stale. A soul that is fresh is hardly a soul at all. Sensations give the grain to the wood, the depth and dignity to the picture. No fruit is so worthless as the fruit ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... beg you to believe," he went on with great dignity, "that just so soon as I made certain you had nothing to learn from me I left you to your rose-gathering. Observe I have not said one word about the thorns. That is the stale gibe of the cynic whose heart of youth has dried before its time. And what if there are thorns? A single rose with the dew of love upon it is worth more than a pair of scratched hands. Gape? Could you believe it of me—of me, Francois Villon? No, son of my teaching, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... I could turn his mind away from the events of that strenuous day; and when at length I succeeded in doing so, and could get him to talk about himself, it appeared that, stirring though the events seemed to be which were nightly happening before Port Arthur, they were all flat, stale, and unprofitable, compared with such an event as the storming of the Nanshan Heights. And so, as a matter of fact, they were, as I soon discovered for myself; for the duty of our destroyer flotilla ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... weeks, to visit Polpier—cleared up soon after midday. At one o'clock or thereabouts Nicky-Nan, having dined on a stale crust and a slice of bacon, and recovered somewhat from his first alarm (as even so frugal a meal will put courage into a man), ventured to the porch again for a look at the weather. The weather and the set of the wind always come first ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... hard on yer head-rails," said Ricks, trying to bite through a piece of stale bread. A baker had let them have three loaves for a dime because they ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... sensitiveness, moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions, with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted; he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... years ago, has disappeared since Paris has become the world's railway terminus. M. Emile Villars, who is so obliging as to make the observation, proceeds to be very clever. Scratch the Russian, and you know what you will find. I answer, a gentleman uninfluenced by a stale proverb; we have a delightful specimen in this very house. M. Villars is great at scratching, since his readers are recommended to grate Peruvians and Javanese. Under the three articles, we are told, lies the one barbarous material! The ladies of these are charming, seductive, ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... what Zilah thought, however. He wondered if this happy hallucination which had lasted so many years, these eternal love-scenes with Vivian, love-scenes which never grew stale, despite the years and the wrinkles, were not the ideal form of happiness for a being condemned to this earth. This poetical monomaniac lived with his dreams realized, finding, in an asylum of Vaugirard, all ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... independent, anyhow." I suspect I must have been a rather unlovely customer, take it all together. Still, every once in a while it boils up in me yet against the discretion that has come with the years, and I want to slam in after the old fashion. Seems to me we are in danger of growing stale with ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... expense Hath won for him coeval youth With the immaculate prime of Truth; While we, who make pretence At living on, and wake and eat and sleep, And life's stale trick by repetition keep, Our fickle permanence (A poor leaf-shadow on a brook, whose play Of busy idlesse ceases with our day) Is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... history of the malloc {arena}. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by use of higher-level languages, such as {LISP}, which employ a garbage collector (see {GC}). Also called a {stale pointer bug}. See also {precedence lossage}, {smash the stack}, {fandango on core}, {memory leak}, {memory smash}, {overrun ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... cried Jack. "Split me to the chin like a cod! Stood I not abaft of you all day long, packed like a herring in a pickle! 'Twas a pretty kettle of fish in your Noah's ark to-day! 'Tis all along o' goodness gone stale from too much salt," ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... this black shadow of war had loomed up with its deadly menace a great party of German editors had returned our visit and once again I had listened to speeches about the blood- brotherhood of the two nations, a little bored by the stale phrases, but glad to sit between these friendly Germans whom I had met in their own country. We clinked glasses again, sang "God Save the King" and the "Wacht am Rhein," compared the character of German and English literature, of German ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... must not open them. One was thankful for such modicum of comparatively pure air as came up the open stair from the floor below; but in the freshness of the morning one trembled to anticipate the atmosphere of this stale and stuffy eyrie through the heat of a summer's day. And yet neither the size nor the scent of the place, nor any other merely scenic feature, was half so disturbing or fantastic as the appearance of ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... wanted to look at the Moon," she said, turning around, and then it was all gone—the face, the night, the Moon, the magic—and she was back in the grubby, stale little hole, facing an angry, stale little man. It was then that the eternal thud of the air-conditioning fans and the crackle of the electrostatic precipitators that sieved out the dust reached her consciousness again like the ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... remember forms, and gaits, and faces; and you can't disguise a person that's done me a kindness so that I won't know him thereafter wherever I find him. I know the art of searching for a trail, and I know the stale track from the fresh. I can keep a trail all by myself, with Buffalo Bill asleep in the saddle; ask him—he will tell you so. Many a time, when he has ridden all night, he has said to me at dawn, "Take the watch, Boy; if the trail freshens, call me." Then he goes to sleep. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... story here commence, But you might think it stale; So we'll suppose that we have reached The ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... she clapt him down to sit on a clutch of stone eggs for the rest of his life. How often have I thought how deplorable it was to see a man issuing a series of books, every one of which is feebler than its predecessor, dishing up the old characters, the stale ideas, the used-up backgrounds. I have always hoped that some one would be kind and brave enough to tell me when I did that. But now that the end seems to have come to me naturally and spontaneously, I cannot accept my defeat. I am like the monkey of whom Frank Buckland ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people's hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say "I am misunderstood," or "I have become second-rate," because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... shirts, blue dungarees and glazed black hats with trailing ribbons, or in cheap and clumsy shore clothes. There was a scraping of fiddle from an upper window, the sound of heavy capering feet and the stale laughter of harborside women. ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... A little indulgence may, perhaps, be shown toward persons who are a week or a fortnight from us by the post, since otherwise we could never converse together. But even they should reply to only the weightier matters suggested, since what they say will probably be stale before it reaches the eyes for which it was written. For the like reasons, I hold a Californian or European correspondence to be an impossibility. As for him whose want of politeness fixes a gulf, a week broad, between himself and his correspondent, there is no excuse. As one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown; And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down; Creep home, and take your place there, The spent and maimed among; God grant you find one face there, You ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... reached at the end of about twenty or twenty-four hours. As the germinating disk contains 100 apertures for as many seeds, it is only necessary to count the number of seeds that have germinated in order to get the percentage of fresh and stale ones. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... occurs more frequently in big, than small Oysters; in those that are pierced by the Worm, oftner, than {206} in those that are not, and rather upon the Convex-side, than the other; and more in fresh ones; than in the stale. ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... literary world; you are no longer young, you have padded the hoof till your soles are worn through!—Yes, my boy, you turn your socks under like a street urchin to hide the holes, so that the legs cover the heels! In short, the joke is too stale. Your excuses are more familiar than ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... three days, and the players were getting a bit "stale" with nothing to do. Then the sun came out, the grounds dried up and the series was resumed. But the ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... a different thing. 'Influence' makes me think of canting clergymen, and stout pompous women, who don't know what they're talking about, and can't argue—who think they've settled everything by a stale quotation—or an appeal to 'your better self'—or St. Paul. If Mr. Winnington tries it on with 'influence'—we'll ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to "do up" his rooms; he had gone with his purse open and his eyes shut to Grindot, who by this time was quite forgotten. It is impossible to guess how long an extinct reputation may survive, supported by such stale admiration. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the townsfolk of Tarascon could have seen the great Tartarin, lying in his commode drawer, in the pale, dismal light which filtered through the porthole, amongst the stale smell of cooking and wet wood, the depressing odour of the ferry boat. If they had heard him groan at every turn of the propeller, ask for tea every five minutes, and complain to the steward in the weak voice of ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... the Union"; "our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country";—these are the mottoes, old, stale, hackneyed, and threadbare as they may have seemed when employed as the watchwords of an electioneering campaign, but clothed with a new power, a new significance, a new gloss, and a new glory, when uttered as the battlecries of a nation struggling ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... him; but it will subject me to a pinch for stale news. There, give me my patient's picture, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... feet The first of all, and, drawing near thy lady, Remove her chair and offer her thy hand, And lead her to the other room, nor suffer longer That the stale reek of viands shall offend Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites The grateful odor of the coffee, where It smokes upon a smaller table hid And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums That meanwhile burn, sweeten and purify The heavy ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... his praise, and continued to look about the room over his shoulder. She was not like a girl at her first ball, for whom all faces in the ballroom melt into one vision of fairyland. And she was not a girl who had gone the stale round of balls till every face in the ballroom was familiar and tiresome. But she was in the middle stage between these two; she was excited, and at the same time she had sufficient self-possession to be able to observe. In the left corner ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... that this too too solid Flesh, would melt, Thaw, and resolue it selfe into a Dew: Or that the Euerlasting had not fixt His Cannon 'gainst Selfe-slaughter. O God, O God! How weary, stale, flat, and vnprofitable Seemes to me all the vses of this world? Fie on't? Oh fie, fie, 'tis an vnweeded Garden That growes to Seed: Things rank, and grosse in Nature Possesse it meerely. That it should ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... know. It's just their perversity. It'll look so stupid to have two separate shows. Whichever comes last will seem so stale after the other." ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... the Prussians the day before, and our fellows had been sore put to it to hold their own against Ney, but had beaten him off at last. It seems an old stale story to you now, but you cannot think how we scrambled round those two men in the barn, and pushed and fought, just to catch a word of what they said, and how those who had heard were in turn mobbed by those who ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... necessary to count the landings to know, in the dimness of the hallway, when he reached the fifth floor. He had to pause outside the door to catch his breath; a moment's nausea seized him at the smell of stale food and ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... healing rays had come too late. We crossed some deserted public gardens commanded by a gorgeous casino, its porticos heaped with chairs and tables; so past kiosques and cafs, great white hotels with boarded windows, bazaars and booths, and all the stale lees of vulgar frivolity, to the post-office, which at least was alive. I received a packet of letters and purchased a local time-table, from which we learned that the steamer sailed daily to Borkum via Norderney, touching three times a week at ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... have some before I go. Come; don't move till I have done." And as he spoke to her he went on tugging at the bone, and swallowing the lumps of stale bread. He had already finished the bowl of milk. "And, now," said he, "tell me who ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... coach led his tired horses under cover of a shed in the courtyard. The chief room of the inn was a cheerless apartment, long and dark, with narrow, rough wooden tables fitted round the walls. A strong, stale smell greeted the nose disagreeably. One or two peasants sat at the far end of one of the tables; they stared rudely as the lady entered, and whispered remarks about her, grinning broadly the while. She glanced haughtily at them and called to the innkeeper, who had followed her from the ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Hamlet, Act i. Sc. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... he had ordered that these people be well fed; that he had supplied the money to buy them good and nourishing food. Now, if his poor pensioners received nothing but dry bread, and very stale, hard bread at that, while he paid for good food for them, somebody must be making money out of him, to whom he had no idea of being charitable ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... small, The liquorice and the setewall,* *valerian And many a clove-gilofre, And nutemeg to put in ale, Whether it be moist* or stale, *new Or for to ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... joints; laying them by until cool, she then tore them to pieces with her fingers; and afterward fried the already over-roasted meat with onions, garlic, red pepper, and oil, which is always rancid in Portugal, from the custom of never pressing the olives until they are stale. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... hugely while he was whipping things into shape, but the last month he's been going stale. The tenants are all so thankful to do as they please that they're excruciatingly polite to him, no matter what he does or says. He's tired of the beaches and he has begun to cuss the long, smooth roads that are signed so that he couldn't get lost if he tried. It does seem ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... was of sufficient concentration to support human life. Not that he had any real choice, but it would have been good to know. As it was, he turned the air valve automatically, and listened nervously as the stale air hissed out and the fresh air ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... is it?" the plump man murmured at last. "So that's it. And I never dreamed of it once. I must be going stale." ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... women, haggard, painted and old, One fresh bud in a garland withered and stale, She, with her innocent voice and her clear eyes, told Tale after ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... "difficult to work," says Dickens, with obvious truth. How was he to get the quicklime into the vault, and Drood, alive, out of the vault? As to the reader, he would at first take Datchery for Drood, and then think, "No, that is impossible, and also is stale. Datchery cannot be Drood," and thus the reader would remain in a pleasant state of puzzledom, as he ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... smell, no decay! Frost cannot hurt them, heat preserves them! For long voyages, army and navy use, mining, lumbering, and hunting outfits, they are simply invaluable! For all classes of consumers, they are cheaper, cleaner and more wholesome than the ordinary stale and wilted vegetables, for sale in the city markets! We have named these cubes, 'Solaris Vegetable Concentrates,' a title which we have copyrighted. The packages readily wholesale at 75 cents, to be retailed at one ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... woodwork; but she was not sure that they had not been there eleven years before; and there were darnings in the carpets and curtains, which affected her with the same mixture of novelty and familiarity. Certain stale smells about the place (minor smells as compared with the prevalent odour) confused her; she could not decide whether she remembered them of old, or was reminded of the odours she used to catch in passing the ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... preparing for it: these dull victims dancing before the palace of their sacrificer: this first consul designated the father of the nation which he was about to devour: this mixture of stupidity on one side, and cunning on the other: the stale hypocrisy of the courtiers throwing a veil over the arrogance of the master: all inspired me with an insurmountable disgust. It was necessary however to constrain one's feelings, and during these solemnities you were exposed to meet with official congratulations, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... all was with its droning old-world smell of ancestor, dry rot, and stale incense. As the clouds came and went, the grey-green, cobweb-chastened, light ebbed and flowed over the walls and ceiling; to watch the fitfulness of its streams was a sufficient occupation. A hen laid an egg outside ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... of the gloomy hall was not pleasant. The red wall-paper was soiled and torn, and weird shadows flickered from the small gas taper that blinked from the ceiling. There were suggestions of old dinners, stale fried potatoes and pork in all the corners, and one moving toward the stairs seemed to stir them up and set them ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... bruised and scraped by sliding, a manager who was not an idiot would have a care of such valuable runmakers for his team. Lake had "Charley-horse." Hathaway's arm was sore. Bane's stomach threatened gastritis. Spike Doran's finger needed a chance to heal. I was stale, and the other players, three pitchers, swore their arms should ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... of Europe come to us so late, and so suspiciously, that observations on them would certainly be stale, and possibly wide of their actual state. From their general aspect, however, I collect that your Majesty's interposition in them has been disinterested and generous, and having in view only the general good of the great European family. When ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... malt, hops, ale, and small-beer, till I began to feel as though the world was one vast brewhouse; and calculated, added, and subtracted pounds, shillings, and pence, until all other lore appeared "stale, flat, and unprofitable." I was in this counting-house four years, and was, finally, discharged by my prudent principal as an unthrifty servant, for having, during a day of unusual business, cut up ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... my bird. Thy shape invisible retain thou still: The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither, For stale[445-46] to catch ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... cleanly beautiful was the autumn sunrise! After her long hardening to the stale noisomeness of London streets, the taint of London air, Marcella hung out of her window at Mellor in a thirsty delight, drinking in the scent of dew and earth and trees, watching the ways of the birds, pouring forth a soul ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Syndicalism Laws, which never convicted a criminal, were used savagely and with full force against the workers in their struggle for better conditions. By means of newspaper-made war hysteria the profiteers of Big Business entrenched themselves in public opinion. By posing as "100% Americans" (how stale and trite the phrase has become from their long misuse of it!) these social parasites sought to convince the nation that they, and not the truly American unionists whose backs they were trying to ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... practically restricted to the man who brings up his ponies from the Punjab, but golf is for all, and the nine-hole course, although flat, is not stale, and need not be unprofitable, unless you are fallen upon—as I was—by two stalwart Sappers, sons of Canada and potent wielders of the cleek, who gave me enough to do to keep my rupees in my pocket and the honour of ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... plane, smooth; prostrate, prone; stale, insipid, vapid, tasteless, unsavory, unpalatable, mawkish; peremptory, unqualified, positive; spatulous, spatulate; sonant, vocal. Antonyms: convex, concave, warped, cambered, undulating, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... soiled collar; breakfast in dress clothes; a wet house-dog, over-affectionate; the other fellow's tooth-brush; an echo of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"; the damp, musty smell of an empty house; stale beer; a mangy fur coat; Katzenjammer; false teeth; the criticism of Hamilton Wright Mabie; boiled cabbage; a cocktail after dinner; an old cigar butt; ... the kiss of Evelyn after the ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... that's stale here, will be new there a twelvemonth hence; and if a man of the town by chance come amongst them, he's reverenced for teaching them ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... meal. We had each of us a fresh cocoa-nut with a hole bored in it, containing at least a pint of clear, sweet- tasting water. This is erroneously termed by us "Milk," but it only becomes thick and milky when the cocoa-nut is very stale, in which condition it is never eaten in ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... up that joke, J. J. It was all very well pulling my leg last night, and I didn't mind it a bit; but a thing like that gets to be stale the ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... appearance of energy which momentarily satisfies a public demand that something shall be done. It also afforded Canning the peg on which to hang a grievance, and dexterously to prolong discussion until the matter became stale in public interest. By the irrelevancy of the punishment to the crime, and by the intrusion of secondary matters into the complaint, the "Chesapeake" issue, essentially clear, sharp, and impressive, became hopelessly confused ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... as every one of us may find Him, in Christ, has found a Good that cannot change, pass, or grow stale. His blessedness will always last, as long as he keeps fast hold of that which he has, and lets no man ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... place. It would be a pity if all these problems could be solved. The joy of the intellectual life would be largely gone. I would not rob a man of his problems, nor would I have another man rob me of my problems. They are the delight of life, and the whole intellectual world would be stale and unprofitable if we ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... misfortunes that have ever happened to us; we stoop in our gait, and bury our hands in our breeches-pockets; we say, 'What is life?—a stone to be shied into a horsepond!' We pine for some congenial heart, and have an itching desire to talk prodigiously about ourselves; all other subjects seem weary, stale, and unprofitable. We feel as if a fly could knock us down, and are in a humour to fall in love, and make a very sad piece of business of it. Yet with all this weakness we have at these moments a finer ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... power of narrative. Belonging to the same class of composition, though of a very different order of poetic merit, is Lorenzo's wonderfully graceful tale of Ambra. The grace lies in the telling, for the plot was probably already stale when Phoebus and Daphne were protagonists. The poem recounts how the wood-nymph Ambra, beloved of Lauro, is pursued by the river-god Ombrone, one of Arno's tributary divinities, and praying to Diana in her hour of need, is by her transformed ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... hesitation on my part. I had been, if I may express myself so, put out of gear mentally. But as soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... a very low, close, swampy country, and our goat's flesh began to be very stale through the heat, not only of the sun, but the muletto's back: however, we pleased ourselves we should have one more meal of it before it was too bad to eat; so, having travelled about three miles from the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... this hour the saloons were well patronized, for not only was the camp astir, but also the usual stale crowd of all-night loiterers was not yet sufficiently intoxicated to go to bed. As 'Poleon neared the first resort, the door opened and a woman emerged. She was silhouetted briefly against the illumination ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... inhabitant remaining was out of doors. The women, in twos and threes, bareheaded and in white aprons, gossiped in the alley between the blocks. Men, having a rest between drinks, sat on their heels and talked. The place smelled stale; the slate roofs ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... means a Byronic sea. It has no grandeur of storm, and still less has it the Mediterranean blue. It is the sluggish muddy element which washes the flat shores of his beloved Suffolk. He likes even the shelving beach, with fishermen's boats and decaying nets and remnants of stale fish. He loves the dreary estuary, where the slow tide sways backwards and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Chase, sintenced by yer aunt and cousins to solitary confinement on bread and water till you die—and the sooner you do that last the better they will be pleased!" returned the coarse woman letting down her basket and taking out a glass tumbler, two large bottles of water, some loaves of stale bread, and some of Dainty's clothes, saying, facetiously: "Here's yer duds and yer grub—enough o' both ter last yer a week—and at the end of a week I'll call again with more provisions, miss—and ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... of the oil of the machines and the new leather—a combination which, added to the stale odours of the building, was not pleasant even in cold weather. The floor, though regularly swept every evening, presented a littered surface. Not the slightest provision had been made for the comfort of the employees, the idea being that something was gained by giving them as little and ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy, in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto, which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... where one may obtain a full course dinner, of sorts, and a small bottle of alleged claret included, for an absurdly small sum; but a carton of biscuits, a tin of sardines and a can of condensed milk are usually in evidence on the littered tables of the studios, and, together with the odor of stale coffee, bespeak an economy of diet which is incompatible with the good work which comes ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... at times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glare of our Missis's eye—you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... thronged with fellow passengers similarly haunted by the seven devils of haste, beneath a high glazed but opaque vault penning an unappetizing atmosphere composed in equal parts of a stagnant warm air and stale steam, into a restaurant that had patently been up all night, through the motions of swallowing alternate mouthfuls of denatured coffee and dejected rolls, up again and out and down another platform—at last into the hot and dusty haven ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... the corner house in an angle of a, dismal street, through the open door of which two men had just gone in. Following, they ascended some wooden, fresh-washed stairs, and entered a large boarded room smelling of sawdust, gas, stale coffee, and old clothes. It was furnished with a bagatelle board, two or three wooden tables, some wooden forms, and a wooden bookcase. Seated on these wooden chairs, or standing up, were youths, and older men of the working class, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stand by the ditch with their hands in their pockets sucking a stale pipe. They would rather lounge there in the bitterest north-east wind that ever blew than do a single hour's honest work. Blackguard is written in their faces. The poacher needs some courage, at least; he knows a penalty awaits detection. These fellows have no idea of sport, no courage, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... "A dog especially. You better keep him if you don't want him hurt or anything." He took a bite of pie. (It was not very good pie. The crust was soggy because Johnny Calvert's cook stove was not a good baker, and the frosting had gone watery, because the eggs were stale, and Helen May had made a mistake and used too much sugar in the filling; but Starr liked it, anyway, just because she had made it.) "Maybe you can learn him to herd goats," he suggested, as though the idea ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... more amusing than Woodbridge to a young London Clerk, a Nephew of the Cowells, who comes to me for a short Holyday, when he can get away from his Desk. But early in October I shall be back at my old routine, stale enough. I think that, as a general rule, people should die ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... expect it; but those great thick walls were no way taken by surprise: they had not been confidants of this kind of thing off and on for four or five hundred years to be taken by surprise now. Whether after such long familiarity with the old story they felt it any way stale, you will readily believe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... his reach. And in the same way, when rumours reached him prejudicial to Lizzie in respect of the diamonds, he perceived that such prejudice might work weal for him. A gentleman once, on ordering a mackerel for dinner, was told that a fresh mackerel would come to a shilling. He could have a stale mackerel for sixpence. "Then bring me a stale mackerel," said the gentleman. Mr. Emilius coveted fish, but was aware that his position did not justify him in expecting the best fish on the market. The ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... English satirist in the exposing of the cant and knavery of the pretenders to religion, what room is there for him to lash the infamies of the law! On this point the French are babes in iniquity compared to us—a counsel prostituting himself for money is a matter with us so stale, that it is hardly food for satire: which, to be popular, must find some much more complicated and interesting knavery whereon ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... doors in the rear of the truck, releasing a faint odor of stale bread. The truck was empty. Whedbee deposited the almost weightless burden. The chief looked him in the eye. "I am promoting you to captain," he repeated. "You will replace Hanks, ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... something unusual in her manner. But, when she had slowly mounted the stairs and lighted the gas in the bedroom the sight of her sister's clothes cast over the chairs was proof that Lise had already donned her evening finery and departed. The room was filled with the stale smell of clothes, which Janet detested. She flung open the windows. She took off her hat and swiftly tidied herself, yet the relief she felt at Lise's absence was modified by a sudden, vehement protest against ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... piece of soap was one requiring the closest attention and many an hour of drudgery. The supplying of the household with its winter stock of candles was a harsh but inevitable duty in the autumn, and the lugging about of immense kettles, the smell of tallow, deer suet, bear's grease, and stale pot-liquor, and the constant demands of the great fireplace must have made the candle season a period of terror and loathing to many a burdened wife and mother. Then, too, the constant care of the wood ashes and hunks of fat and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... misery; whether he be able or not, it is expected from him, if there comes a Brief to town, for the Minister to cast in his mite will not satisfy! unless he can create sixpence or a shilling to put into the box, for a stale [lure], to decoy in the rest of the parish. Nay, he that hath but L20 or L30 [ L60 to L90 now] per annum, if he bids not up as high as the best in the parish in all acts of charity, he is counted carnal and earthly-minded; only because ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... it to new uses. As the fisherman's wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels, said when she was asked what was to be done with him, "Take the eels out and set him again," so Harris and Douglas have shown a disposition to take the eels out of that stale fraud by which they gained Harris's election, and set the fraud again more than once. On the 9th of July, 1856, Douglas attempted a repetition of it upon Trumbull on the floor of the Senate of the United ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... by four stones. Ropes stretched across these, and covered by a blanket, constituted the bed. A board, of which one end rested on the bedstead and the other was thrust between the logs that composed the wall, sustained the stale fragments of a rye-loaf, and a cedar bucket kept entire by withes instead of hoops. In the bucket was a little water, full of droppings from the roof, drowned insects, and sand. A basket or two neatly made, and a hoe, with a stake thrust into it by way of handle, made up all the ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... utmost difficulty that the horses performed it. Though they had started so early, it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned the flank of an eminence which formed part of the upland called Greenhill. While the horses stood to stale and breathe themselves Tess looked around. Under the hill, and just ahead of them, was the half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness: Kingsbere, the spot of all spots ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... "cush." You will not find this word in the dictionaries of the day, but it was in the soldier's vocabulary, now obsolete. Chip up bacon in fine particles, place in an oven and fry to a crisp. Fill the oven one-third or one-half full of branch water, then take the stale corn bread, the more moldy the better, rub into fine crumbs, mix and bring the whole to a boil, gently stirring with a forked stick. When cold, eat with fingers and to prevent waste or to avoid carrying it on ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... are the future guineas that now lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some undiscovered Potosi; but dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning! I set to with an unconquerable propulsion to write, with a lamentable want of what to write. My private goings on are orderly as the movements of the spheres, and stale as their music to angels' ears. Public affairs, except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private, I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in, I grieve, indeed, that War and Nature and Mr. Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd's best ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the above a businesslike statement? Away, then, with this stale miracle. If you would see for yourself a miracle which can never pall, a vision of youth and health to be crowned with garlands for ever, come down and see Kate Hickey, whom you suppose to be a little girl. Illusion, my lord cardinal, illusion! She is seventeen, with ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... though we 're ca'd a wee before The stale "three score an' ten," When Joy keeks kindly at your door, Aye bid her welcome ben. About yon blissfu' bowers above Let doubtfu' mortals speir; Sae weel ken we that "heaven is love," Since ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a good deal on the man," said Bartley. "But that's stale, Kinney. It's the old formula of the anti-capital-punishment fellows. Try something else. They're not talking of hanging me yet." He kept on writing, and the philosopher stood over him with a humorous twinkle of enjoyment ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... on from night to day and on to night again. It was a veritable feast of lanterns, and not until the last one had burned to the socket and the wine-vats were empty and the studio strewn with unrecognizable debris and permeated with odors stale, flat and unprofitable, did the revels cease. Paul came to dine; he remained three days; he had not yet worn out his welcome, but he had resolved, as was his wont at intervals, to withdraw from the world, and so he returned to the Eyrie,—which was ever his initial ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... room with no difficulty. A faint cough from within, and a querulous protest, answered his knock. Mr. Hamlin entered without further ceremony. A sickening smell of drugs, a palpable flavor of stale dissipation, and the wasted figure of Jack Folinsbee, half-dressed, extended upon the bed, greeted him. Mr. Hamlin was for an instant startled. There were hollow circles round the sick man's eyes; there ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Human jokes, however stale, He jumps about and wags his tail, And Human People clap their hands And think ...
— The Kitten's Garden of Verses • Oliver Herford
... room, dim with tobacco-smoke and redolent of stale beer. At the far end a small stage with faded red hangings. The card read No. 7, and the programme informed me that the turn was "A Bouquet of Ballads." A slight, fair-haired girl appeared on the stage. Her cheeks were burning, and she kept her eyes fixed on the floor. The piano jangled, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident[17] of the sixteen volumes and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest; and that of a kind that does not stale itself. ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be ...
— The Federalist Papers
... drink only from your canteens. If the canteens fail, never fill them from flowing water unless the Indians also drink from the stream. There are always small pools to be found, and, though their water may be warm and stale, it is not likely to be poisoned, as ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... short of success as a tragic character, if his aspirations are too mean, his qualities too contemptible to win our sympathy save at rare moments of transcendent poetry, what shall be said of the setting provided for the story of his career? Once more we are offered the stale devices of the Moralities, the Good and Bad Angels, the Devil, the Old Man (formerly known as Sage Counsel), the Seven Deadly Sins, Heaven, Hell, and the carefully-pointed moral at the end. Even the Senecan Chorus has been forced into service to tell us of Faustus's ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the greatest lesson in holiness and is from the only one that can teach holiness. Great lessons can be taught by all persons, taught of God, but 'tis better to drink at the fountain than out of a stale bucket. Besides all have imperfection. "To the law and to the testimony if they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them." "They shall all be taught of God." "If any lack wisdom, let him ask ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... bombs remained the tried and practical methods there on the Ridge with its overpowering drama, any act of which almost any day was greater than Spionkop or Magersfontein which thrilled a world that was not then war-stale; and ever its supreme feature was that determination which was like a kind of fate in its progress of chipping, chipping at a stone ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... give them gentle meetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine the matter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own? seeing no man who hath tasted learning, but will confess the many ways of profiting by those who, not contented with stale receipts, are able to manage and set forth new positions to the world. And were they but as the dust and cinders of our feet, so long as in that notion they may yet serve to polish and brighten the armoury of Truth, even for that respect they were not utterly to be cast away. But if ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... was due to this short period of intensive training, "under men who were intelligent enough to know just what was needed and just how to go about to secure it"—men not hampered by any pedagogical nonsense or grown stale over a long attempt to discriminate between the "infinity of nothingness and the nothingness of infinity" (as one might summarize a rather common criticism), rather than to the former years of patient toil, and discipline, and accomplishment ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... to the closet and opened the door. On a shelf he saw half a loaf of bread, dry and stale. He took it in his ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... Richards when the two met, in a display of aggressive tennis so remarkable that the boy was helpless before it. Richards was stale and below form, but even if he had been at his best, he could not have withstood Johnston's attack. Little Bill followed this up by sweeping Williams off the court by another marvellous streak of ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... the odd Englishman; but he was chiefly won by the dolce far niente of the natives, and the Oriental license of polygamy. In a word, Joseph had the same taste for a full-blooded cuffee, that an epicure has for the haut gout of a stale partridge, and was in ecstasies at my extrication. He neglected his siestas and his accounts; he wandered from house to house with the rapture of an impatient bridegroom; and, till every thing was ready for the nuptial rites, no one at the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... went into the dormitory from the fresh, pure, night air he thought at first that he would choke in the atmosphere laden with stale tobacco-smoke and foul odours; but in the end he slept splendidly, despite ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... uneasily and glanced round the dirty room. The place looked as though it hadn't been cleaned for a month. There was a hideous accumulation of unwashed utensils scattered everywhere. The floor was unswept, let alone unwashed. And the smell of stale food and general mustiness helped to add to the keenness of the visitor's nervous edge as he waited for the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... have been sixteen, gave Jane a stolid, incurious look and shuffled down the hall, closing the door on a portion of the stale smell. ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... said I, shrugging my shoulders. "I do not like it at all; it is common, low, vulgar. There is no romance about it; it only reminds one of stale tobacco ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... to preach. He was a duly ordained priest in good standing—technically, at least—in the Catholic Church. He had all the confidence of a sophomore—age did not wither him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety. He questioned and contradicted everybody, young or old, regardless of position. But so cleanly was the man's mode of life, so intellectual, so personally unselfish and sincere was he, that although heretics were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... sent March stumbling up the four or five dark flights of stairs that led to his tenement. It was quite at the top of the house, and when March obeyed the German-English "Komm!" that followed his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove. The place was bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial air. On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it, which seemed also to be ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Zilah thought, however. He wondered if this happy hallucination which had lasted so many years, these eternal love-scenes with Vivian, love-scenes which never grew stale, despite the years and the wrinkles, were not the ideal form of happiness for a being condemned to this earth. This poetical monomaniac lived with his dreams realized, finding, in an asylum of Vaugirard, all the fascinations and chimeras of the Breton land of golden ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... a soldier disguised in drink, a young Jew, and myself completed the company, which was allowed to make itself free of a flagged and whitewashed hall, absolutely devoid of furniture, and smelling at once sour and stale. I am sorry and ashamed to remember that the Jew was the only person of my four fellows in misfortune who kept up any semblance of manners or proper reserve. He differed, indeed, markedly from the others, not only in his behaviour, which was at least conformable, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... revived afresh to throw dishonor on his cause. Even while the free peoples of the earth are making these grateful acknowledgments of the priceless boon that has come to them through his life and labors, press and platform hiss with stale vituperations from the old enemy. And a puling Churchism outside of Rome takes an ill pleasure in following after her to gather and retail this vomit ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... inasmuch as his teeth were not chattering from fear — oh, dear no! oh, certainly not! he marvelled how the 'messieurs' could think of such a thing — but from the chill air of the morning. As for the rag, if monsieur could have but tasted its evil flavour, being compounded indeed of a mixture of stale paraffin oil, grease, and gunpowder, monsieur himself would have spat it out. But he did nothing of the sort; he determined to keep it there till, alas! his stomach 'revolted', and the rag was ejected in an access ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... extinguish it; he may drown its fragrance in voluptuous scents, but, when these have satiated and become hateful, it will re-arise, pure and sweet as ever. Time or separation cannot destroy it—for it is immortal; use cannot stale it, pain can only sanctify it. It will be to him as a beacon-light to the sea-worn mariner that tells of home and peace upon the shore, as a rainbow-promise set upon the sky. It alone of all things ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... above the spring and was also silent. I was disposed to put off the lighting of our fire upon the roof as long as it appeared safe to do so, in order to husband our fuel. The animals, disappointed of the forage usually furnished them at this hour, stamped impatiently and nosed disdainfully the stale straw and pine plumes which we had emptied from the bunks and which were now scattered ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... having passed for plain—the reasons for Lady Beldonald's fond calculation, which they quite justified—were written large in her face, so large that it was easy to understand them as the only ones she herself had ever read. What was it then that actually made the old stale sentence mean something so different?—into what new combinations, what extraordinary language, unknown but understood at a glance, had time and life translated it? The only thing to be said was that ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... an explicit contract that some of the experiences and events of a settler's life should be duly described and recorded? How to fulfil that obligation and at the same time avoid what is ordinarily regarded as the dull and prosaic, the stale, the flat, the unprofitable, is the trouble. I would gladly shirk even this small responsibility, even as greater ones have been outmanoeuvred, but a written promise unfulfilled may be troublesome to a conscience, which, when ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... and knew that they were written in Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of Blackstone's Commentaries, and argal (as the gravedigger in Hamlet says) he was not a person to be laughed at.' He attended the Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled. Even in the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre. 'If a CHARLIE ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that came from you hot are now patched and shivery. Their finer meaning has run out between the lines as though these spaces were sluices for the proper drainage of the page. You had best put on your hat. You will get no comfort from these stale papers. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... into the streets and resumed acquaintance with all my old haunts, the illusion had gone. I strolled into Saint Sauveur's, wandered a while through its dim, dusky aisles, and then sat down near the high altar, where the air was heaviest with stale incense, and indulged in retrospect. I was there for more than an hour. I doubt whether it was quite wise. At my time of life one had best keep out of cathedrals; they are vault-like places, pregnant with rheumatism—at ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... gipsy, with a lot of gaudy finery about her, and a withered, devilment leering in her face; and a hackney-coach drove up to the door, which had conveyed the party from town; and the driver railing in loud tones, after the manner of his kind in old times, at all things, reeking of whiskey and stale tobacco, and cursing freely, pitched in several trunks, one after the other; and, in fact, it became perfectly clear that M. M. was taking possession. And Betty and Moggy, at their wits' end between terror and bewilderment, were altogether powerless to resist, and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... but for the worst? She tried to be sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn't be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a "lot" at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings? ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... answered in the affirmative, and a slipshod girl ushered him into a long back room, filled with boxes for the accommodation of parties, in one of which he took his seat. In a more miserably forlorn place he could not have found himself: the room smelt of fish, and sawdust, and stale tobacco smoke, with a slight taint of escaped gas; everything was rough and dirty, and disreputable; the cloth which they put before him was abominable; the knives and forks were bruised, and hacked, and filthy; and ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... for days, and even the trees that grew in among the houses of Paradise Street were fresh and green, though one of the hot, burning breaks of blue sky and glaring sunlight had baked the road into Indian-red dust once more, and the interior of Mhtoon Pah's curio shop was heavy with stale scents and dark shadows that crept out as the gloom of evening settled in upon it. Mhtoon Pah moved about looking at his goods, and touching them with careful hands. He hovered over an ivory lady carrying an umbrella, and looked ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... lose their interest. The mere words, "There was once a battle fought here" make the traveller stop and think, even if he does not know by what men of what race it was fought. But the parliamentary struggles of one generation seem passing stale and unprofitable to the next. Yet the history of nations depends as much on their civil as on their warlike contests. In Piedmont the strife always turned on the same point: whether the State or the Church should predominate. Free institutions do not settle the question; it ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... oil of the machines and the new leather—a combination which, added to the stale odours of the building, was not pleasant even in cold weather. The floor, though regularly swept every evening, presented a littered surface. Not the slightest provision had been made for the comfort of the employees, the idea being that something was gained by giving them as little ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... which it had pleased Providence to call them, they rode the Great North Road for some days in a northern express. Vine said that the Victoria Falls were all right, but that their surroundings were, many of them, perversely wrong. It was so very stale, the hotel business, with the moonlight river excursions and the Livingstone trips, far too much sleeked and smoothed by foresight, and tamed by taking of thought. If one had only traveled up with pack ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... much of it flies here and there, if a mon lets all of it roost, 'twill stale his pace of mind like the thaving crows stale ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... that nonsense, whilst all with loud houting and laughter confound the Fidlers noise, who may well be call'd a noise indeed, for no Musick can be heard for them; so whilst he utters nothing but old stories, long since laught thridbare, or some stale jest broken twenty times before: His mirth compared with theirs, new and at first hand, is just like Brokers ware in comparison with Mercers, or Long-lane compar'd unto Cheap-side: his wit being rather the Hogs-heads ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... dropped from Ascham's lips his host looked slowly about the library, and every object in it stared back at him with a stale unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It was as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of. He cleared his throat slowly; then he turned his head to the lawyer and said: "I could ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... streets in the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... chosen to go. The former made far more fuss about it, and she was at the same time preparing a new mantle wherein to attend the tournament, of which Amphillis was summoned to do all the plain and uninteresting parts. The result of this preoccupation would have been very stale pastry on the counter, if her father had not seen to that item for himself. Ricarda was less excited and egotistical, yet ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... fact that he had been through the first half of the year before, Haynes actually did go somewhat stale in some of ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... pictures, his garden, he had the hills and valley, the birds, the flowers, the clouds, the sun, he had the Rampio, he had Annunziata, he even had Annunziata's uncle; and with all this he had a sense of having stepped out of a world that he knew by heart, that he knew to satiety, a world that was stale and stuffy and threadbare, with its gilt rubbed off and its colours tarnished, into a world where everything was fresh and undiscovered and full of savour, a great cool blue and green world that from minute to minute opened up ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... old—except in my feelings—and my stories, even the "Black Brig," had not been failures, by any means. But I am sure that every man or woman who writes, or paints, or does creative work of any kind, will understand and sympathize with me. I had "gone stale," that is the technical name for my disease, and to "go stale" is no joke. If you doubt it ask the writer or painter of your acquaintance. Ask him if he ever has felt that he could write or paint no more, and ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... sure of his reception. His combination of soft manners and responsive kindliness, with a certain unseizable reserve and a familiar yet foreign chiselling of feature, reveal the Jew: in this instance the handsome gentlemanly Jew, gone a little pigeon-breasted and stale after thirty, as handsome young Jews often do, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... something to the natives," he said; "it may be an indication to them that their place is becoming important—a metropolis in which things happen—but it is nothing to me. This hanging case is stale and commonplace; it is perfectly clear; a young fellow named Boyd is to be hanged for killing his partner, another miner; no doubt about his guilt, plenty of witnesses against him, his own denial weak and halting—in fact, ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... writes:—"I have just finished reading a most amusing incident, and, as it occurs in a book not likely to fall into the hands of many of the members, I am tempted to relate it, although it might prove to be 'stale.' Well, to begin: It tells of a maiden lady, who, having arrived at the mature age of 51 without ever having seen a railway train, decides to visit New York. The all-important day having arrived, she seats herself calmly on the platform of the country station, and gazes with amazement ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and Nelson's Monument, had lunched at one of Messrs. Lockhart's establishments, had taken a ride in the Tube and performed a hasty tour of the Zoo, where they had consumed, variously, cups of tea, ginger beer, stale buns and ices. Hyde Park they had viewed from the top of a motor bus and descending from this chariot at London Bridge had caught the train home. In the train Flamby had fallen asleep, utterly exhausted with such a saturnalia, and her parents had eaten sandwiches and partaken ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... And how should thought know thought until the whole Of body's beauty is by body learnt? Until the trial of that most dear seclusion Is past, and all the dangers of mere lust Disproved, when in possession is no stale Regret and disillusion, how should be known That the still hours of thought with thought are stable Against the wearing of dissolving time? Dear, we must love by all the tokens of love, Before the presence of love beyond dispute Is ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... Smith!—It was a union to distance every wonder of the kind.—The attachment of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax became commonplace, threadbare, stale in the comparison, exciting no surprize, presenting no disparity, affording nothing to be said or thought.—Mr. Knightley and Harriet Smith!—Such an elevation on her side! Such a debasement on his! It was horrible to Emma to think how it must sink him in the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... lines. A Greek poet could not have conceived them: unless we imagine to ourselves what AEschylus or Pindar, oppressed by long illness, and forgetful of the gods, might possibly have felt. In its sense of spiritual vacancy, when the world and all its uses have become flat, stale, unprofitable, and the sentient soul oscillates like a pendulum between weariful extremes, seeking repose in restless movement, and hurling the ruins of a life into the gulf of its exhausted cravings, we perceive already ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... doesn't need me below for the present, Jack, so I came up to relieve you at the wheel. I don't want to see your steering wrist going stale when the race starts, so you'd better let me have the wheel, while you keep yourself fresh for the ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... of the hollows"—men who were never seen beyond the precincts of their own little "clearings," except upon the Fourth of July and election day, from one end of the year to the other. With these he drank bad whiskey, made stale jokes, and affected a flattering condescension. With others, more important or less easily imposed upon, he "whittled" sociably in the fence-corners, talked solemnly in conspicuous places, and always ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... been budding, and his brother-in-law has been spending his money and leave, Mr. Honeyman's hopes have been withering, his sermons growing stale, his once blooming popularity drooping and running to seed. Many causes have contributed to bring him to his present melancholy strait. When you go to Lady Whittlesea's Chapel now, it is by no means crowded. Gaps are in the pews: there is not the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Elsewhere you trimmed and taught these lamps to burn; You bring them stale and dim to serve my turn. You lit those candles in another shrine, Guttered and cold you offer them on mine. Take back ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... custom stale Her infinite variety; other women Cloy th' appetites they feed; but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies. 55 SHAKS.: Ant. and Cleo., Act ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... men's hearts, but to change their opinions. They take up the New Testament and read Christ's sermon on the Mount; but they find nothing in it to answer their purpose. It is but an ordinary production in their estimation. They pass on through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. How stale, how dull, how uninteresting these gospels, they are led to exclaim. They see but little beauty in the God-like teaching; or the inimitable example of Christ. His last agonies, his death on the cross is insufficient to move their callous hearts. But ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... made his way to the bedroom occupied by Paul Drayton. He opened the door without knocking. It was dark within. Thin streaks of dusty sunlight shot from between a pair of heavy curtains. The air was noisome with dead tobacco smoke and the fumes of stale beer. Hugh's gorge rose, but he conquered ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... no longer is any question about my going," Gray announced, firmly. "I am bored; I am stale; a thrill, of whatever sort, would stir my blood. Animated by purely selfish motives, I now insist upon a serious consideration of my offer. First, you say I 'wouldn't, couldn't'; I assure you that I would, could—and shall, provided I can ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... swiftly dug trenches of a year ago have given way to the peaked mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. Where there were vast stretches of mud, scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with stale, ill-smelling straw, the carcasses of oxen and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a smiling landscape, with miles of growing grain, green ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... restaurant keeper. "The man who runs the hotel, Mr. Brown, had a lot of trouble with him because he wouldn't pay his bill—said it was too high. Then he came here once and said the meat wasn't fresh and the bread was stale and sour. I came close to pitching him out. Don't let him walk over you—if he does ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... hundred and ten degrees. Sydney lived through the experience but had always after that a delicate interior and was petted more than ever in consequence. And there was a tennis court occasionally wetted down with the beer that always went stale while they were saving it for state occasions. It was all a happy, glorious time—because they had discovered and were making one of the great mines ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... a "strong place" well behind a fringe of alder-roots, whence Bob, notwithstanding his most strenuous efforts, failed to "bolt" her. I then drew off the hounds, led them towards the throat of the pool, and for a half hour assisted them to work the "stale drag," till I reached a bend of the river where Lutra's footprints were still visible on the fine, wet sand at the brink of ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... counsellor! If I could find a word that might make known The crime of my destroyer; and that done, 155 My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret Which cankers my heart's core; ay, lay all bare, So that my unpolluted fame should be With vilest gossips a stale mouthed story; A mock, a byword, an astonishment:— 160 If this were done, which never shall be done, Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate, And the strange horror of the accuser's tale, Baffling belief, and overpowering speech; Scarce whispered, unimaginable, wrapped ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Lord Darcy, sent by King Henry the 8. with a lusty crew of soldiers, for that Ferdinands iust assistance, against the Infidels: but vsed by him as a stale, for the vniust conquest of ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... go on with this kind of thing? You might become a sort of interpreter of the two nations to each other. An original idea. The everyday thing is to exasperate Briton against Russ, and Russ against Briton, with every sort of cheap joke and stale falsehood. All the same Mr. Otway, I'm bound to confess to you ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... a golden glory, Delighted me a season with its tale. It pleased the longest, but at last the story So oft repeated, to my heart grew stale. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... bad as that!" returned Clytie. "It was only dull and stale and stupid; the same old sort of knockabouts and serio-comics you can see everywhere down town, only not a quarter so good—just cheap imitations. And all those poor fellows sat moping over their beer-mugs waiting, waiting, waiting for something new and entertaining to happen. I never ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... English visitors; and in the narrow streets pert factory-hands come noisily from work. Still he climbs on toward the Cathedral, through tortuous streets and little alley-ways. And in the gloomiest of them all there is no odour of a stale antiquity, but the perfume of a garden-full of roses, of a thousand orange-blossoms, and of locusts, honey-sweet, and he begins to think himself enchanted. He feels the dark, old houses are unreal, as if, instead of cobble-stones beneath his feet, there ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the Odyssey. The flaming cheeks, dim eyes, loss of consciousness, and paralysis are copied from Sappho; while the Hippolytus of Euripides furnished the model for the dwelling on the subjective symptoms of the "pernicious passion of love." The stale trick too, of making this love originate in a wound inflicted by Cupid's arrows is everlastingly Greek; and so is the device of representing the woman alone as being consumed by the flames of love. For Jason ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... viz. "The Mayor of Northampton opens oisters with his dagger." The meaning of which is, to keep them at a sufficient distance from his nose. For this town being eighty miles from the sea, fish may well be presumed stale therein. "Yet I have heard (says Dr. Fuller,) that oisters put up with care, and carried in the cool, were weekly brought fresh and good to Althrop, the seat of the Lord Spencer, at equal distance; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... with his own eyes, and understood with his own mind, without legal help. So, you see, you've kept me here talking when there's no need and while my business waits. It is urgent, M'sieu' la Fillette—your business is stale. It belongs to last session of the Court." He laughed at his joke. "M'sieu' Jean Jacques and I understand each other." He laughed grimly now. "We know each other like a book, and the Clerk of the Court ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... interesting possession than a gallery of pictures or a cabinet of curiosities. Its glories are never stationary or stale. It has infinite variety. It is not the same to-day as it was yesterday. It is always changing the character of its charms and always increasing them in number. It delights all the senses. Its pleasures are not of an unsocial character; for every visitor, high or low, learned or illiterate, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... she reserved, no doubt, for the accounts. Herself accustomed to pilfer, she knew to the least detail every trick of the servants, and not a centimo escaped her; she always thought she was being robbed. Such was her spirit of economy that at home they ate stale bread, thus confirming the popular saying, "in the house of the ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... nervousness, had completed her last clean copy. She had worked hard each afternoon, and conscientiously, only to be filled at the last with despair and despondence. She had read, re-read, written and re-written it, until she knew every word by heart, and all seemed stale, dull, and trivial. ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... never-failing object, on these occasions, was to instruct the house in law. And here the devil, who is himself a kind of lawyer, for he devours his best friends, the devil I say chose these opportunities to vent his choicest malice. He did not set a lawyer to confound a lawyer: that were but a stale device. He humbled him out of the mouths of men who had occasionally read law-books, it is true: but who had read them without a lawyers' obliquity; and had enquired what was the simple unadulterated intention of their authors. Now ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... it shot him, thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She would go with him; more than that, she should. It was her right, won by years of actual want and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale, meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! Oh! times In which the meagre, stale forbidding ways Of custom, law and statute, took at once The attraction ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... forced open the door of the after compartment, which had once housed the great Stede Bonnet. Instead of its old immaculate and almost scholarly appearance, the place now had an air of desolation. It reeked of filth, stale tobacco-smoke, and the spilled lees of liquor. In the clutter on the cabin table lay two bulging sacks ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... still, as you know I might find the detention inconvenient, I shall therefore sail early in the speronara. Your letters may be addressed to me as before, but bear in mind that your information is generally too stale. Now I will get a little rest, if you will show me where I am ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Barcelona looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side. On the pavement in front of it and of its neighbour, the Cafe Continental, the vendors of lottery tickets were bawling the lucky numbers they had for sale. Even in this wide space the air was close and stale. Within, a few people left over in the town had strayed in to dine at tables placed against the walls under flamboyant decorations in the style of Fragonard. At a table Hillyard was sitting alone over his coffee. Across the room one of the panels represented a gleaming marble ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... clubable than a set of men like this? You might as well set before me the stale bon-bons and sugar-plums of a dessert for a dinner, as ask me to take such people for associates and companions. The tone of everlasting trifling disgraces even idleness; and these men contrive in their ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... with a smile. "But I'll try. Get me a subject. It all lies in the subject. If a subject's given me, it's easy to spin something round it. I often think that the celebrated talkers of the last century would have found it difficult to talk cleverly now. Everything clever is so stale..." ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... my self-hood, Many for you. Allons, camerados, we will drink together, O hand-in-hand! That tea-spoon, please, when you've done with it. What butter-colored hair you've got. I don't want to be personal. All right, then, you needn't. You're a stale-cadaver. Eighteen-pence if the bottles are returned. Allons, from ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... of apricot jam, and a tin of ratifia biscuits a most extraordinary mixture, I admit, but there was nothing else. There were six people to be fed every day, and nothing to feed them with. Thursday's breakfast was a discovered crust of dry bread, very stale, and our dinner that day was rice and salt—the last rice in the store-room. The snow still never ceased falling, and only one window in the house afforded us any light; every box was broken up and used for fuel. The gentlemen used to go all together and cut, or rather dig, ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... In her free hours she sat in their little shelter, her thin, freckly hands busy with the worsted masterpiece that she was working. Pee-wee, at least, had his appetite to console him, but she had no relish for the stale lemonade and melting, oozy taffy which stood pathetically ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... of gesture which belonged to antiquity: it struck the Anglo-Saxon flirt at her feet with amazement. Not having good enough under his skin to sympathize with that pious impulse, he first stagnated a little while; and then, not to be silent altogether, made his little, stale, commonplace comment on what she had told him. "Why, it is like ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... view. The character of the shops became more and more difficult to define. Here a window displayed a heap of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of trumpery glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for the disguise of a "leaving shop," or unlicensed pawnbroker's establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come forth, twisting up her back hair as she came. At a place where the houses ceased, and an open space left free a prospect of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... not been changed since Easter, and were full of dust and grease from the cooking and the table. Even the fresher sprigs of mint among them smelled stale and old. When they were all in the barrow, Nick sighed with relief and wiped his hands ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... time, therefore, the two officers sat opposite to each other inhaling the stale odour of tobacco and spirits peculiar to this room, with little or no ventilation. It was enough to sicken anyone, but both men, accustomed to such places in the pursuit of their calling, apparently thought ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... hears of it. You know Tommy of the 81st? He gave me good advice: 'Always sew a fifty-pound note into the lining of each waistcoat you've got. Then you can't go short.' Tried it once, and, be George! if me demned man-servant didn't stale that very waistcoat and sell it for six and sixpence. You're ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... aware that some Buddhist authors whom Arnold has followed in his "Light of Asia" make Buddha but little better than a stale prisoner, and would have us believe that the glimpses he got of the ills that flesh is heir to were gained in spite of all precautions, as he was occasionally taken out of his rose embowered, damsel filled prison-house, and not as any prince ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... variously stated) from Sadleir. "He saith, whatever pretence they make, the principal mark they shoot at is to make an alteration of the State and authority." This at least is explicit enough. The Reformers were actually renewing the civil war on charges so stale and so false. The Duke had possibly promised to desert her if she broke the truce, and now he seized on the flimsy pretence, because the Congregation, as the leaders said, had "tempted him" sufficiently. They ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... Temperance Room with the second-hand papers in it; but a man of any profession cannot read for eight hours a day in a temperature of 96 degrees or 98 degrees in the shade, running up sometimes to 103 degrees at midnight. Very few men, even though they get a pannikin of flat, stale, muddy beer and hide it under their cots, can continue drinking for six hours a day. One man tried, but he died, and nearly the whole regiment went to his funeral because it gave them something to do. It was too early for the excitement of fever ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... room lined on two sides with deal compartments bulging with dusty papers. There were two or three shelves of uninteresting-looking books, and a desk which extended into a counter. The upper panes of the window were ragged with cobwebs, and the air of the place was redolent of stale publications. A thick-set little man in spectacles sat at the desk. ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... brushed, and the white trousers of last Sunday plentifully besmeared with dust and ink. It evidently requires a considerable mental struggle to avoid investing part of the day's dinner-money in the purchase of the stale tarts so temptingly exposed in dusty tins at the pastry-cooks' doors; but a consciousness of their own importance and the receipt of seven shillings a-week, with the prospect of an early rise to eight, comes to their ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Langley and the Smithsonian, and wishing I hadn't lied so extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt all ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... throng'd with faces, the broadcloth and laces, The booths, and the tents, and the cars, The bookmakers' jargon, for odds making bargain, The nasty stale smell of cigars. ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the time when the troops were satisfying their hunger with a frugal repast. The Persians expressed their desire of being introduced to the presence of the Roman emperor. They were at length conducted to a soldier, who was seated on the grass. A piece of stale bacon and a few hard peas composed his supper. A coarse woollen garment of purple was the only circumstance that announced his dignity. The conference was conducted with the same disregard of courtly elegance. Carus, taking off a cap which he wore to conceal ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... air in a cave constantly occupied would grow stale and close; while smoke from the fires would in time become annoying. But Indians used for fuel only dry wood and bark, the smoke from which would be a negligible factor. The varying pressure of the atmosphere outside creates a current of air in or out which is usually imperceptible ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... or offend his sensitive spirit, she, in some way which he could not exactly define, made him feel that he must defer the thing to him so important, and talk on other subjects. There was one theme on which she was always eager to talk and to get him to talk, and to her it never grew stale or threadbare. It was about what he and she had learned or could remember of the book of heaven, and ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... serious inroads upon his health, from which he never entirely recovered. It was hoped that his life in the East would be beneficial, but it proved otherwise. Meanwhile, the Civil War was raging in the United States, but the news concerning it was very stale long before it reached us. We did not receive the particulars of the battle of Bull Run, for example, until three months after its occurrence. In view of the turbulent state of affairs at home, the government thought it important that Mr. ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... zest, but of late she had begun to find them wearisome. They no longer satisfied her. If this were the result of a few years' experience, what would she feel when she had grown jaded with time and everything was stale? Then her glimpse of the simple, healthful western life had come as a revelation. It was real, a bracing struggle, in which no effort was wasted but produced tangible results: broad stretches of splendid wheat, ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... 6. Stale or Decayed Foods.—Food which has been allowed to stand until it is spoiled, or has become stale, musty, or mouldy, such as mouldy bread or fruit, or tainted meat, is unfit to be eaten, and is often a cause of very ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... importance of the events. She had made no allowance for the absence of the country people, specially wont to visit the town when the quarterly court was in session, but now all dutifully in place voting in their own remote districts. The dust, the suffocating heat, the stale, vapid air, the indescribable sense of a lower level—all these affected her like a veritable burden, accustomed as she was to the light and rare mountain breeze, to the tempered sun, the mist, and the cloud. The new and untried conditions of town life trammeled and constrained ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... after all, is it well worth, the while? Those are uncertain questions—I dismiss them. There is no immediate danger. My humor changes; I am no longer despondent. Away with Doubtful Uncertainty and all of his stale retinue, tricked out in danger-signals—each a false one. Sleep on, sweet Conscience, sleep on! To-night the wedding-reception—given to a woman married for her money! Another glorious ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... me back in due time by monthly instalments of singing. I shall have mine own again with usury. But were a man never so usurious, would he not lend a winter seed for a summer song? Would he refuse to invest his stale crumbs in an orchestra of divine instruments and a choir of heavenly voices? And to-day, also, I ordered from a nursery-man more trees of holly, juniper, and fir, since the storm-beaten cedars will have to come down. For in ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... began the night before with a restless, wakeful vigil of grumbling toothache. When Anne arose in the dull, bitter winter morning she felt that life was flat, stale, ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... me of paying a visit this summer to the land of the Czar; that I want companions; that I like young ones, who will follow my ways better than old ones, who won't; that I enjoy fresh ideas freshly expressed, and am tired of stale platitudes; in short, if you will entrust your youngsters to me, I will take charge of them, and point out what is mostly worth seeing and remembering at the ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... Dear! Dear! But the teacher in those days was ez old and grizzled ez I be—and some o' the scholars—no offense to you, Mr. Brooks—was older and bigger nor you. But times is changed: yet look, Almiry, if thar ain't a hunk o' stale gingerbread in that desk jest as it uster be! Lord! how it all comes back! Ez I was sayin' only t'other day, we can't be too grateful to our parents for givin' us an eddication in our youth;" and Mr. Hoover, with ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Their water was getting stale, and running somewhat low; and they needed fresh foodstuffs. Joel planned to touch at the first land that offered. Tubuai, that would be. He marked their ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... he began, "to discuss what has been done in Galavia. That is long since a stale story. Our governments, acting in concert, made it possible to remove Karyl and crown Louis." He smiled quietly. "You know how short a reign Louis enjoyed before death claimed him. Perhaps you do not know that his death ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... play-hours the children, overcome by hunger, would slip around to the large window that opened into the bakery and there stand gazing wistfully down upon the loaves of fresh bread as they were taken from the large oven. Sometimes some crusts or stale biscuits were given them, and with these they would scamper away to the pump to moisten the bread before dividing it. It sometimes happened that there was not sufficient bread for each child to have ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... proportion," he said. "You've worked so hard you're getting stale. You ought to get out of it for ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... taking the field again. "He may be slow on his pins, but he fights with his head, and he hits like the kick of a horse. When he finished Black Baruk the man flew across the outer ring as well as the inner, and fell among the spectators. If he isn't absolutely stale, Tregellis, he ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sucked up into the bulb, which, when full, is emptied out at the other end. It sometimes happens that the egg is "hard set." The embryo must, in that case, be cut out with small curved scissors specially made. If hard set, putrid, or stale, an egg often bursts when touched. To obviate this, drill and ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... imagination. This is rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of quickness in the perception of analogies is the staple of his mind. His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion and anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago. Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few things, like the Chambered Nautilus ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Grant in the new command I was about to undertake, adding that thus far the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac had not done all it might have done, and wound up our short conversation by quoting that stale interrogation so prevalent during the early years of the war, "Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?" His manner did not impress me, however, that in asking the question he had meant anything beyond a jest, and I parted ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... neighbourhood—the spectacle of an ascension. As one of the gentry concerned, I may be permitted to remark that I am unmoved. I care not a Tinker's Damn for his ascension. No more—I breathe in your ear—does anybody else. The business is stale, sir, stale. Lunardi did it, and overdid it. A whimsical, fiddling, vain fellow, by all accounts—for I was at that time rocking in my cradle. But once was enough. If Lunardi went up and came down, there was the matter settled. We prefer to grant the point. We do not want ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are more interesting than preservers? They vibrate with life and creative energy, they defy impossibilities, they carry enthusiasm aloft on their banners of assault on the existing order of things. Our preservers seem tame and stale indeed. They hobble about the borders of the well-cultivated garden of custom and propriety, they find admirable shelter against the fierce winds of revolt in the offices of bureaucracy. Officialdom is their divinity and respectability ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Denny driving. There was no luggage. Esther hoped a great deal from that. But it proved there was too much to come by cab, and Denny brought it afterward, shabby trunks of a sophisticated look, spattered with labels. Madame Beattie alighted from the cab, a large woman in worn black velvet, with a stale perfume about her. Esther was at the door to meet her, and even in this outer air she could hardly help putting up her nose a little at the exotic smell. Madame Beattie was swarthy and strong-featured with a soft wrinkled ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... friendship for very long,' she replied, plucking a glittering firefly from her fan and laying it on his sleeve with her sweet light laugh. 'Like a firefly I shall dance out my short night, and die quickly before life grows stale!' ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... his versions are not to be compared with Mr. Young's for adherence either to the bard's own meaning or music. In pouring out the Frenchman's champagne, the latter somehow suffers the sparkle and bead to escape, while the former cheats us by making his stale liquor foam with London soda. We shall be impatient for Mr. Young's book, which will be published by Putnam, in a style of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... of stale bread broken in crumbs, one quart of milk, two eggs, half a teaspoonful of salt, half a teaspoonful of ground cinnamon, three tablespoonfuls of sugar and two ounces of Walter Baker & Co.'s Chocolate, grated. Put the bread, milk, cinnamon, and chocolate in a bowl, and soak for two or three hours. ...
— Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes and Home Made Candy Recipes • Miss Parloa
... coal-black wool, and a pair of fur-topped boots. All his garments were new and well fitting, and contrasted greatly with the greasy and long used coats of the Cossacks on the boat. Sheepskin garments can look more repulsive than cloth ones with equal wearing. Age can wither and custom stale their infinite variety. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... makes little difference. His abstention from bowling (to the playing of which Brassfield had been devoted), and his absolute failure at billiards, were discussed in sporting circles, and accounted for on the theory that he had "gone stale" since this love-affair had become the absorbing business of his life. No one understood, however, his sudden interest in photography, and his marvelous skill in it. He seemed to ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... he was a done man, but he went on. When he was going through a wood further on, two men came out to him, one from each side of the road, and they took hold of the bridle of the horse and led it on between them. They were old stale men with frieze clothes on them, and the old fashions. When they came out of the wood he found people as if there was a fair on the road, with the people buying and selling and they not living people at all. The ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... where we may, through city or through town, Village or hamlet, of this merry land, * * * * every twentieth pace Conducts the unguarded nose to such a whiff Of stale debauch, forth issuing from the sties That law has licensed, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... green something, which might be either cabbage leaves or turnip-tops, and a glass of water. The whole mess is lukewarm, including the water—it would all be better cold. Tea: A thin slice of the aforesaid alleged roast or mutton, and the pick of about six thin slices of stale bread—evidently cut the day before yesterday. This is the way Mrs Jones "does" for us for eighteen shillings a week. The bread gave out at tea-time this evening, and a mild financial boarder tapped his plate with his knife, and sent ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... of our enterprizing hero's character always to think the last scheme for making a fortune the best. As soon as he reached home he was in haste to abandon some of his old projects, which now appeared to him flat, stale, and unprofitable. About a score of his flock, though tainted with the rot, were not yet dead; he was eager to sell them, but no one would buy sheep of such a wretched appearance. At last Wright took them off his hands. "I ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... team of six horses, brave with brass harness and bells, a timber-carriage, and a couple of spring-carts, were drawn up on the half-moon of gravel before the porch; while, from out the open door, came a sound of voices and odour of many pipes and much stale beer. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... all right and a arf, mate, I am, and ain't going' to rough up, no fear! Becos two or three second-hand 'ARRIES is tipping the public stale beer. The old tap'll turn on now and then, not too often, and as for the rest, The B.P. has a taste for sound tipple, and knows when it's served with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... offer his services to the king, Louis XVIII. I had much interesting public news from M. d'Argy : but I pass by all now except personal detail, as I write but for my nearest friends; and all that was then known of public occurrence has long been stale. . . . ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... victorious over some undeserved misfortune and of taking possession of a home to which he had some ancient right, was the tone given to Harry's settlement at Yoden, and for a long time he felt compelled to honor it, even after it had become stale and tedious. For it pleased his mother, and she did many unconsidered things to encourage it. For instance, she gave a formal dinner at Hatton Hall to which she invited all the county families and wealthy manufacturers within her knowledge. A dinner at Hatton Hall was a rare social ceremony and ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... stupid and unnecessary opposition to proposals of mine in my own committee. However, he got himself sold at all points...The Polypterus paper and the Aye-Aye paper fell flat. The latter was meant to raise a discussion on your views, but it was all a stale hash, and I only made some half sarcastic remarks which stopped ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... they see others doing so, the more sanguine they are that no one could ever catch them with chaff. I have met many of the latter class, and always tried to down them. They, of course, would not bit at the monte bait, for it was too stale for them; so I would study sometimes for hours how to take ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... indeed the public has been surfeited with sea-stories of late, from many sufficiently dull ones up to the genial wisdom of 'Peter Simple,' and the gorgeous word- painting of 'Tom Cringle's Log.' And now the subject is stale—the old war and the wonders thereof have died away into the past, like the men who fought in it; and Trafalgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by Manchester and 'Mary Barton.' We have solved the old ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... strikingly in keeping with his face and expression. The human face never wore an expression of more withering, relentless scorn than when the orator replied to Hayne's allusion to the "Murdered Coalition"—a piece of stale political trumpery well ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... he drops his pretty head And seems to be dispirited, And then his little mistress says: "Poor Dickie misses his chickweed, Or else I've fed him musty seed As stale as last year's oranges!" But all the time I wonder If we half comprehend In sweet song-words The thought of birds, Or why so oft their raptures ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... historian, in fact—and he persisted heroically in his task, rereading stale paragraphs and checking dreary dates, going over battles and conquests and invasions and interregnums. Despite his mood and despite the heat, the manuscript probably would have arrived at his publishers chronologically complete. So complete, ...
— Collector's Item • Robert F. Young
... me his own MSS. and lent them to me to copy, with the condition, however, that I should not smoke while working at them. He himself did not smoke, and could not bear the smell of smoke, and he showed me several of his MSS. which had become quite useless to him, because they smelt of stale tobacco smoke. I did all I could to guard these sacred treasures against ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... air were kept in motion by the heat of the sun, causing breezes and winds, it would become stale and wouldn't do at all for our lung-bellows to use. The air we breathe must be kept moving and fresh if it is to make us feel bright and strong and happy. Mother Nature has given us miles upon miles and oceans upon oceans of this clear, fresh air to ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... the explanation of the magic of Lycidas. From the standpoint of the formal understanding it was an affected lament over some wholly uninteresting and unimportant Mr. King; it was full of nonsense about "shepherds" and "flocks" and "muses" and such stale stock of poetry; the introduction of St Peter on a stage thronged with nymphs and river gods was blasphemous, absurd, and, in the worst taste; there were touches of greasy Puritanism, the twang of the conventicle was only too apparent. And Lycidas ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... that seems to enrap babys, and lunatiks, and soft little wimmen, when their heads get kinder turned by a man, and to Abram's honest face when she should compare it with Bial Flamburg's, and to Abram's pure, sweet breath with that mixture of stale cigars, tobacco, ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... you couldn't come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and get stale; and then it does a similar lot for the town in the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... themselves to pieces with more than madness through grief and remorse. Below this was a charnel vault where some of the apothecaries had been ground down and stuffed into earthenware pots with Album graecum, dung, and many a stale ointment. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... aither in the parlor or the field. You think him a good dog, looking at him here: but I wisht you seen him on the side ov Sleeve-an-Eirin! Be my soul, you'd say the hill was running away from undher him. O, I wisht you had been wid me," says he, never letting on to see the dog stale, "one day, last Lent, that I was coming from mass. Spring was near a quarther ov a mile behind me, for the childher was delaying him wid bread and butther at the chapel door; when a lump ov a hare jumped out ov the plantations ov Grouse Lodge and ran acrass the road; so I gev the whilloo, and ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... on the hearth burned sullenly, and gave no light. The poor oil-lamp, casting weird shadows from wall to wall, served only to discover the darkness. The room, with its low roof and earthen floor, and foul clothes flung here and there, reeked of stale meals and garlic and vile cooking. I thought of the parlour at Cocheforet, and the dainty table, and the stillness, and the scented pot-herbs; and though I was too old a soldier to eat the worse because my spoon lacked ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance. Though Murray with his Miller may combine To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line? No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, their ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... before he was eligible for promotion to a lieutenancy. Unless an officer had family interest he often stuck there, and as often had to serve under one more favoured, who was not born when he himself was getting stale. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... be gathered that neither writer held this book of jests in very high estimation; and, as no vestiges are traceable of an edition of the work subsequent to 1582, it is possible that about that time the title had grown too stale to please the less educated reader, and the work had fallen into disrepute in higher quarters. The stories themselves, in some shape or other, however, have been reproduced in every jest-book from the reign of Elizabeth ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... entirely agreeable. To be sure the landlord gave us the parlor, and most of the men came in, now and then, to speak to us; but they managed the principal matters all by themselves, in the bar-room, which was such a mess of smoke and stale liquor smells, that it turned my stomach when I ventured ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... augments the misery; whether he be able or not, it is expected from him, if there comes a Brief to town, for the Minister to cast in his mite will not satisfy! unless he can create sixpence or a shilling to put into the box, for a stale [lure], to decoy in the rest of the parish. Nay, he that hath but L20 or L30 [ L60 to L90 now] per annum, if he bids not up as high as the best in the parish in all acts of charity, he is counted carnal and earthly-minded; only because ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... that we began to realise that the new landing had been a failure. It was becoming a stale-mate. It was like a clock with its hands stuck. The whole thing went ticking on every day, but there was no progress—nothing gained. And while we waited there the Turks brought up heavy guns and fresh troops on the hills. They consolidated their positions in a great semicircle all round us—and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... land-lover, but he wants land so that he may live on it, an' he wants to see it before he gives his money for it. Now, ye go to an Englishman, an' till him ye've a bit of land in the cintre of a lost island in the middle of the Pacific say, an' pfwhat does he do? He'll first thry to stale ut, thin thry to bully ye out of ut; but he'll ind by buyin' ut, at anny price ye've conscience to ask, an' he'll thrust to Providence to be able to find the island some day. That's wisdom. I've seen the worrld, me boy, from Injy to the Great American Desert. The Rooshan an' the Frinchman want ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... died before I was twenty. I do not say that I was not for the most part well enough treated, because I hope I did my best, and I believe I generally gave satisfaction. I had my happy hours like other people. But it was all getting so stale, flat, and unprofitable—I suppose because I was growing weary of it all, and longing for a change. You see I had not quite come to the age when we cease to want changes, and are resigned just to go on as we are to the end. In reality I could see no end, except the poorest of poor lodgings and ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... plainly eager to test the virtues of his new tea, for he put a kettle of cold water on the stove, thereby proving that he was an adept at the art of brewing the fragrant herb, since it requires fresh water, brought to a boil, and not stale stuff, to extract the ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... hear all the boys are well and getting on so fast in their respective schools. Agneta [Footnote: Agneta, afterwards Lady Agneta Bevan.] by this time must be a very fine little girl; does she ever talk of me? I really have no news to tell you worth mention, but the service is very stale for want of war, every day the same story. ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... house in law. And here the devil, who is himself a kind of lawyer, for he devours his best friends, the devil I say chose these opportunities to vent his choicest malice. He did not set a lawyer to confound a lawyer: that were but a stale device. He humbled him out of the mouths of men who had occasionally read law-books, it is true: but who had read them without a lawyers' obliquity; and had enquired what was the simple unadulterated intention of their authors. Now law, which in all ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... feeling blue and restless, tired of New York, tired of dancing, tired of everything. Broadway was full of people hurrying to the theatres. Cars rattled by. All the electric lights in the world were blazing down on the Great White Way. And it all seemed stale and dreary ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... all talk with me—all snarling and railing and whining at hard facts, like a viper wasting its venom on steel. I'm sick of myself—weary of the old, stale round of my thoughts. Where can I wash and be clean? Chrissy, for God's sake, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... end of the telegraph. From that point he sent it over the wire to Washington. It was successfully received at the Washington end, and never were human beings more surprised than were the train passengers on alighting at the capital city to find that they brought stale news, and that Clay's nomination was already known throughout Washington. It was the first public proof in America of the powers of the telegraph, and certainly a vital and ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... reasons. I had to dress up, for one thing, and in the summer time ma made me wear linen suits, which was starched stiff by Delia, our girl. They had sharp edges which scratched. And my hat was too small, and my shoes hurt. And the inside of the church smelt like stale coffee grounds, and the teacher looked hungry and kept parting her lips with a sound as if she was gettin' ready to eat, or wanted to, and she trickled inside like the sound of water or somethin'. Besides, there was no end to the Bible stories ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... puddings. He would give much to be in a chair by one of those hearths and in the thick of that blowsy fragrance. Now his nostrils were filled with rain and bog water and a sodden world. It smelt sour, like stale beer in a mouldy cellar. And cold! He crushed down his hat on his head and precipitated a ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... fire-place, his long gray hair streaming over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the orotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing, sagacious eyes ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... a market is still more necessary. We have to trudge four miles for our vegetables and fish, which are obtainable in a more or less stale condition only twice a week. If one were started here, it would be a great boon to ten villages at least." Kumodini Babu assented, without further remark, ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... some kinds of moulds may be apparent to the eye, as in the growths that form on old leather and stale bread and cheese. That of others goes on unseen, as when acids are formed in stewed fruits. Concerning the work of the different kinds of moulds. Troussart says: "Mucor mucedo devours our preserves; Ascophora mucedo turns our bread mouldy; Molinia is nourished at the expense ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... seemed as if scales had fallen off their eyes, showing coarseness and deformity, where previously none had appeared. They had tasted the rapture of a more beautiful life; and now the ordinary toils of humanity appeared "stale, flat, and unprofitable," and common men and women tedious, rude, and mean. But the brave knight struggled against this feeling. "Shall we be so ungrateful, because a glimpse of the earthly paradise has been vouchsafed us, as to sink into idle, repining dreamers? Shall we allow ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... and stale, but the children were too hungry to be disdainful. At home they would have scorned such a supper with infinite disgust, but now they ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... stamped in the church. All inventions are emptied here, and not a few pockets. The best sign of a temple in it is, that it is the thieves sanctuary.... The visitants are, all men without exception, but the principal inhabitants and possessors are, stale knights, and captains out of service, men of long rapiers and breeches which, after all, turn merchants here, and traffic for news. Some make it a preface to their dinner, but thriftier men make it their ordinary, and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... "Split me to the chin like a cod! Stood I not abaft of you all day long, packed like a herring in a pickle! 'Twas a pretty kettle of fish in your Noah's ark to-day! 'Tis all along o' goodness gone stale from ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... back your vows. Elsewhere you trimmed and taught these lamps to burn; You bring them stale and dim to serve my turn. You lit those candles in another shrine, Guttered and cold you offer them on mine. Take ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... am writing— Feeling a bear's wet grinder biting About thy frozen spine! Or thou thyself art eating whale, Oily, and underdone, and stale, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... in stopping those that lead to the heart. Those who attempt by outrage and violence to deprive men of any advantage which they hold under the laws, proclaim war against society. When, I ask, will such truths become obsolete among enlightened people; and when will they become stale?" ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... waggon, all powdery with flour, and its team of six horses, brave with brass harness and bells, a timber-carriage, and a couple of spring-carts, were drawn up on the half-moon of gravel before the porch; while, from out the open door, came a sound of voices and odour of many pipes and much stale beer. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... been paper boomerangs they could not have returned with greater accuracy to their unhappy dispatcher. Oh, the vileness and utter degradation of the moment when the stale little cylinder of closely written pages, which seemed so fresh and full of promise a few days ago, is handed in by a remorseless postman! And what moral depravity shines through the editor's ridiculous plea of "want of space!" ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the name of "C. E. Trench, Prop." He could see the swing-doors of the bar, and hear the click of balls from the poolroom advertising the second of the town's distractions. He could smell the composite odor of varnish, stale air, and boots, which made the overheated station waiting-room hideous. Heavy farmers in ear-mitts, peaked caps, and fur collars spat upon the hissing stove round which their great hide boots sprawled. They were his last memory ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... the ideas which I have quoted, if they were carried to logical lengths, would make heaven a farcical kill-joy, a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable morgue of disappointed hopes, with Ennui for janitor. I admit that the old heaven of the Semitic poets was constructed somewhat along these lines. But that was no real heaven. The real heaven is a quiet, harpless, beautiful place where every one is a heaven-born ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Cherry was pale and fighting tears, as they crossed the porch, and fitted the key in the door. Inside the house the air was close and stale, odorous of dry pine walls and of unaired rooms. Peter flung up a window, the girls walked aimlessly about, through the familiar yet shockingly strange chairs and table that were all coated thickly with dust. Somehow this dust gave Cherry a desolate sensation, ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... your house and the picturesque breakwater. I do so wish that you and he and I did not suffer so much, but could be at least moderately happy. I am sure you would be glad if you knew even in this time of sorrow, when all seems stale, flat, unprofitable, the pleasure and interest I have had in reading your Vol. 3 ["Modern Painters"]. I study your character in your writings, and I find so much to elevate, to love, to admire—a sort of education for my poor ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... this wise. We were out together scouting preparatory to a raid, and were seeking a supposed new "listening post" of the enemy. There had been a very heavy bombardment of the German trenches all day, and it was only held up for three-quarters of an hour to let us do our job. The new-stale earth turned up by the shells extended fifty yards in No Man's Land. (Only earth that has been blown on by the wind is fresh "over there." Don't, if you have a weak stomach, ever turn up any earth; though there may not be rotting flesh, other gases are ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... enough good reputation to preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of them achieved bad reputations, or damaged good ones that had been gained in the Civil War. On the whole, even for Senators, diplomats, and Cabinet officers, the period was wearisome and stale. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... no black fellows and where the net was; the black fellows closing in behind, followed quickly. Poor Noorunglely floundered into the net, up rushed a black fellow and, seizing her, wrung her neck. Having secured her, they would next secure her eggs; that they might be a trifle stale was a ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... ancient graveyard with new gravestones every day,— But, come, regale us with appropriate detail, Those disillusions weeping at the fountains, say, Those new disgusts, just like their brothers, littered stale, ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... ever said it? Again, they plead for women who "revolt" from the "disfigurement" of the gestation period. The great artist Botticelli did not think this was disfigurement. What true women do? Are they not those of whom Kipling writes, "as pale and as stale as a bone"? And, if so, are these unworthy specimens of their sex worth tears? The vast majority of women bear the discomforts of gestation and the actual perils and pangs of birth with exemplary fortitude: ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... days ago, Mr. Seward again sent forth to Europe and to her Cabinets, one of his stale, and by no means Delphic oracles, predicting the success of Burnside's campaign, and immediately follows a bloody and disgraceful calamity! Such is always the result of Seward's prophecies! A diplomat calls Seward the evil eye of the Cabinet, and of the country. I ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... provisions. Memories of the famine of the siege of '70 tormented the imagination. Since war had broken out with the same enemy, it seemed but logical to everybody to expect a repetition of the same happenings. The storehouses were besieged by women who were securing stale food at exorbitant prices in order to store it in their homes. Future hunger was producing more ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... himself postprandially, in full livery of seisin, to the vulturous sun. Wasted, yet daily renewed, enduring, yet murmuring not, he hurled defiance at Fat, scoffed at the vain rage of Jupiter Pinguis, and proffered to the world below a new life in his fiery gift of stale bran-bread. Would you could have heard that vesper hymn stealing hirsute through the mellow evening-air! It sung the Peptic Saints and Martyrs, explored the bowels of old Time, and at last died away in dulcet cadence as it chanted the glories of the coming Age of Grits. Again, in the silent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... letters; more than once I have gleaned a hint from the outside of a letter that has proved valuable when applied to the contents. Here, for instance, is a letter which has been opened after being fastened up—apparently by the aid of steam. The envelope is soiled and rubbed, and smells faintly of stale tobacco, and has evidently been carried in a pocket along with a well-used pipe. Why should it have been opened? On reading it I perceive that it should have reached me two days ago, and that the date has been skilfully altered from the thirteenth to the fifteenth. The inference ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... Lady Ogreham happens to die—I won't say to go the way of all flesh, that is too revolting—I say if Ogreham is a widower, do you aver, on your conscience and honor, that mothers will not be found to offer their young girls to supply the lamented lady's place? How stale this misanthropy is! Something must have disagreed with this cynic. Yes, my good woman. I dare say you would like to call another subject. Yes, my fine fellow; ogre at home, supple as a dancing-master abroad, and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tenderly in the cup of her hands, and began to gaze at them with bent head. After a few moments' silence she raised her head again, and said to me: "You never look at these flowers; therefore they become stale to you. If you would only look into them, then your reading and writing would go to ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... period of a quarter of an hour to several hours after eating, are present. If the esophageal dilatation be great, regurgitation may occur only after an accumulation of several days, when large quantities of stale food will be expelled. The general nutrition is impaired, and there is usually the history of weight loss to a certain level at which it is maintained with but slight variation. This is explained by the trickling ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... and glees enlivened their evenings, and nearly every day there were boating excursions, or rides on horseback, in which Mr. and Mrs. King and Mr. and Mrs. Blumenthal invariably joined. No familiarity could stale the ever fresh charm of the scenery. The beautiful river, softly flowing in sunlight through richly cultivated meadows, always seemed to Mr. Blumenthal like the visible music of Mendelssohn. Mr. King, who had been in Germany, ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... appear to me to have been very much injured by a wrong use of classic antiquity. Nothing could be more glorious and beautiful than the Grecian development; nothing more unlike it that the stale, wearisome, repetitious imitations of it in modern times. The Greek productions themselves have a living power to this day; but all imitations of them are cold and tiresome. These old Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did not imitate. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... he shouted, swinging the halter stale to the shining flank. 'G'lang there!' and he went by, like a flash, the tail of Black Hawk straight out behind him, its end feathering in the wind. It was a splendid thing to see—that white-haired man, sitting erect on the flying animal, ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... that Lily was exchanged into the town near the camp, and Willy Cameron suddenly found life a stale thing, and ashes in the mouth. He finally decided that he had not been such a hopeless fool as to fall in love with her, but that it would be as well not to see her ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that his scent lay best near the ground, and was strongest when he was warm. So if he could get off the ground, and be left in peace for half an hour to cool off, and for the trail to stale, he knew he would be safe. When, therefore, he tired of the chase, he made for the Creekside brier-patch, where he 'wound'—that is, zigzagged—till he left a course so crooked that the dog was sure to be greatly delayed in working it out. He then went straight to D in the woods, ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... moved through her time. Hugging this melody of Marcia. Through the knife-edged nervous evenings in the theater. Bawlings. Purple lips with loose muscles crawling under the rouge. Fetidness of scent on stale bodies. Round faces that could hook into the look of vultures when the smell of success became as the smell of red meat. All the petty soiled vanities, like the disordered boudoir of a cocotte. The perpetual stink of perfume. Powder ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... need at all envy, and that instead of the perennial smell of the grass and woods and shores, their typical redolence is of soaps and essences, very rare may be, but suggesting the barber shop—something that turns stale and musty in a few ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... night" was usually stale and flat at San Francisco. The reaction from the feverish exaltation of the previous twenty-four hours was seen in the listless faces and lounging feet of promenaders, and was notable in the deserted offices and warehouses still redolent ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... had the appearance of energy which momentarily satisfies a public demand that something shall be done. It also afforded Canning the peg on which to hang a grievance, and dexterously to prolong discussion until the matter became stale in public interest. By the irrelevancy of the punishment to the crime, and by the intrusion of secondary matters into the complaint, the "Chesapeake" issue, essentially clear, sharp, and impressive, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... only with your eyes,"—and they can be more eloquent than any Demosthenes of your New England Athens. Women are younger than men, and nearer to nature; they have more animal life and spirits and glee. Their lively, frolicsome, sunshiny chatter keeps existence from growing mouldy and stale. We have it on the authority of the wittiest of Frenchmen, that for the purposes of pleasant, every-day life, L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit. If I wish to discuss a question of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... "only you've got to think of hearses and stale milk when you read it. That isn't as pash as some ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... say no more. I am pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present. I lurk from the sun, during the best part of the day, in a villainous compound of darkness, canvas, sawdust, general dust, stale gas (involving a vague smell of pepper), and disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on Wednesday ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... for it would be better for such a child to put her down to hard work, and to keep her constantly under the eye of her guardians. This threat was more efficient than all the other means which had been used to keep the child within the bounds of common decency; but even this had grown stale ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... For naught than laughter silly sillier be. Thou Celtiber art, in Celtiberia born, Where man who's urined therewith loves a-morn His teeth and ruddy gums to scour and score; So the more polisht are your teeth, the more 20 Argue they sipping stale in ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... She felt that the scent of them must be visible. Every breath she drew was like a long yawning sigh. She felt the easy expansion of her body under her heavy jacket.... "Perhaps I won't have any more fitted bodices," she mused and was back for a moment in the stale little sitting-room of the Barnes dressmaker. She remembered deeply breathing in the odour of fabrics and dust and dankness and cracking her newly fitted lining at the pinholes and saying, "It is too tight there"—crack-crack. ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... going to take care of the news? It is not a magazine of stories and fiction; it is a magazine of news, and the news of the period between August 15th and September 15th, for instance, will become stale if it is not used in the September 15th issue and runs over until the October 15th issue. It is the American Nut Journal. I think your idea can be carried out very fully by featuring the convention as the main thing, but not to use every last ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... not always make an editor. Many of our editors grow discouraged over their failure to arouse a support to their journals, blaming the race for non-appreciation, when the fault lies with themselves. Do they give their readers news? If a local sheet, they deal in stale generalities. If a general sheet, they confine themselves to locals of no ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... I can't say—for I live in a very honest neighborhood. The only two thieves that were in it—Charley Folliott and George Austin—were hanged not long ago, and I don't know anybody else in the country side that would stale it." ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... I myself, as I began to reflect upon it, found it inconceivable that a Jewish God should turn Turk: as well expect him to turn Christian. But indirectly this redoubtable movement entered largely into my life by way of the great Eibeschuetz-Emden controversy. For it will not be stale in the memory of my readers that this lamentable controversy, which divided and embittered the Jews of all Europe, which stirred up Kings and Courts, originated in the accusation against the Chief Rabbi of the Three ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in his room he sat for a while on the edge of the bed, gazing at the curtained window. Life had gone stale. He was sick of hunting men and of being hunted. Pedro Salazar was now a member of the Sonora police through Donovan's efforts. Eventually Salazar would find an excuse to shoot Waring. And the gunman had made up his mind to do no more killing. For that reason he had ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... clothing. There was a smooth water-worn boulder on the beach, and, seeing this, the man who had spoken went up to it and sat down thereon, while his companion, evidently of a more practical turn of mind, collected the stale biscuits which had fallen out of the bag, then, taking the barrel carefully on his shoulder, walked up to where the other was sitting, and threw both biscuits and ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... white sauce, and when it has grown a little cold, add the yolk of one egg, and a few drops of lemon-juice. Sprinkle in a slice of stale bread, and enough grated cheese to flavor it strongly, and leave it to cool for two hours. Then shape into small pieces like corks, dip them into the beaten whites of your egg, and then into grated breadcrumbs. Have ready some ...
— The Belgian Cookbook • various various
... entangle him in his talk. The meeting agreed with all that had been said regarding the antiquity of the earth and of its life. They had, indeed, known it all long ago, and they rallied the lecturer for coming amongst them with so stale a story. It was quite plain that this large body of clergymen, who were, I should say, to be ranked amongst the finest samples of their class, had entirely given up the ancient landmarks, and transported the conception of life's origin to ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of bursary dinners and passing suppers, was now soliciting a customer to take his choice of three lank cod-fish, ticketed at so much per lb. Billiard-rooms were silent, save where a solitary marker practised impossible strokes: print-shops exhibited a dull uniformity of stale engravings; and the innumerable horde of mongrel puppies of all varieties, that, particularly towards the end of term, are dragged about three or four in a string, and recommended as real Blenheims, genuine King Charles's, or "one of old Webb's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... I think I have only to sit down and write it off, and do it to the quick. "The idea of his life," what he was as a whole, what was his self, all his days, would,—to go on with words which not time or custom can ever wither or make stale,— ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... and he said in a half-musing tone: 'The same stale, hackneyed story. She is on her way to where the first misstep always leads. Already he is wearied, and wants but an excuse to fling her off; and I—I—I—her avenger,' exclaimed he with a burst of fierce impatience, 'I ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... of the difficulties of portrait painters I gave in the same lecture has since been so frequently repeated in the Press that I fear it will be stale to most of my readers—the story of the man who called upon the portrait painter and asked him ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... following little Tale with a perusal, will probably anticipate in the Preface, the so-often-framed apology, that it was not written with an intention of being published. Yet stale as the assurance may be, it is ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... whatever civilization had left that he could use without compromise, he would—and thankfully. There would be no electricity, of course, but he had provided himself with flashlights and bulbs and batteries—not too many of the last, of course, because they'd grow stale. However, he'd also laid in plenty of candles and a vast supply of matches.... Tins of food and concentrates and synthetics, packages of seed should he grow tired of all these and want to try growing ...
— The Most Sentimental Man • Evelyn E. Smith
... the first story had smaller passages opening out of it—one at each end. I turned to the left. Now the sound of the cataracts, which had never left my ears, became a din. The passages were full of stale tobacco smoke. And advancing I suddenly found myself face to face with ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... this time, either," Dick declared. "I know that I'm going to strike out a string in every inning. If I go stale, you have Darrin to fall back on, and he's as baffling a pitcher as I can hope to be. And ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... timber drinks the river's mood, The mighty mood of man's Despair, which runs Like subtle electric blood through all the hulls, And tips each masthead with a glimmering candle Blue pale and flickering like a ghost? For you Are too much lit to mark a corposant. Nor yours the stale smell of the unhealthful stream, Clotted with mud and sullen with its weeds, Who carry your own air with you, blest sweet And drencht with many scattered fragrances. You, sailing in golden ignorance, know not The anxious flow of life under your way: Do you not miss ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... I could find a word that might make known The crime of my destroyer; and that done, 155 My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret Which cankers my heart's core; ay, lay all bare, So that my unpolluted fame should be With vilest gossips a stale mouthed story; A mock, a byword, an astonishment:— 160 If this were done, which never shall be done, Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate, And the strange horror of the accuser's tale, Baffling ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... again at the tray. There were no fresh French rolls— only slices of stale graham bread from yesterday, the most detestable of bread so ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... wondered why the capitalists of New England, in search of recreation and pleasure for themselves and families instead of crossing the Atlantic to visit the oft-described and stale wonders of the Old World, do not charter a yacht or a packet schooner, and with a goodly company take a trip to the West Indies, sail around and among these islands, visit places of interest, accept the hospitality of the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... of me," said Clement, smiling, "as the old woman said when her husband did not die before the funeral cakes were stale. But could it not come off at ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their application to the dyeing of yarns, &c., by the Scotch Highlanders, under the name of "Crottles." "The process of the manufacture of the various crottles, generally consisted in macerating the powdered lichen for two or three weeks, in stale urine, exposing the mass freely to the air by repeated stirring, and adding lime, salt, alum, or argillaceous and other substances, either to heighten the color or impart consistence. To such an extent did this custom at one time prevail, that, in several ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... of the lowest description. Smoking was, of course, permitted. When they arrived the performance was over. People were still sitting at many of the tables. Reeking as the auditorium was with the stench of stale beer, it left the impression of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... It got so the ginnies would line up in a bunch, every time he starts, 'n' holler: 'They're off—there he goes!' They does it regular, 'n' pretty soon the crowds get next 'n' then everybody does it. He begins to stale off at Pimlico, so I ships him to Miss Goodloe, 'n' writes her to turn him out fur three or ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... blankets, upon which occasional soldiers were stretched out; everywhere was a litter of cigarette-butts, bits of bread, cloth, and empty bottles with expensive French labels. More and more soldiers, with the red shoulder-straps of the yunker-schools, moved about in a stale atmosphere of tobacco-smoke and unwashed humanity. One had a bottle of white Burgundy, evidently filched from the cellars of the Palace. They looked at us with astonishment as we marched past, through room after ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... well-broken mounts, rode out in front of the adobe corral and the expectant audience, halted and dispersed to their various stations as directed by Dade, clear-voiced, steady of glance, unemotional, as if he were in charge of a bit of work from habit gone stale. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... were swollen and starting, as though with gulping down strong passions, malice, and ill-will. His dress was of threadbare velveteen—a faded, rusty, whitened black, like the ashes of a pipe or a coal fire after a day's extinction; discoloured with the soils of many a stale debauch, and reeking yet with pot-house odours. In lieu of buckles at his knees, he wore unequal loops of packthread; and in his grimy hands he held a knotted stick, the knob of which was carved into a rough likeness of his own vile face. Such was the visitor who doffed ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Magazine. There lurk his earlier lays; but soon, hot pressed, [xcii] Behold a Quarto!—Tarts must tell the rest. Then leave, ye wise, the Lyre's precarious chords To muse-mad baronets, or madder lords, [cxiii] 730 Or country Crispins, now grown somewhat stale, Twin Doric minstrels, drunk with Doric ale! Hark to those notes, narcotically soft! The Cobbler-Laureats [69] sing to Capel Lofft! [70] Till, lo! that modern Midas, as he hears, [xciv] Adds an ell growth to his egregious ears! [xcv] There lives one Druid, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Cut stale bread into slices one quarter of an inch thick; put on the toaster or fork, move gently over the heat until dry, then brown by placing near the heat, turning constantly. Bread may be dried in the oven before toasting. Hot milk may be ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... worms, no musty smell, no decay! Frost cannot hurt them, heat preserves them! For long voyages, army and navy use, mining, lumbering, and hunting outfits, they are simply invaluable! For all classes of consumers, they are cheaper, cleaner and more wholesome than the ordinary stale and wilted vegetables, for sale in the city markets! We have named these cubes, 'Solaris Vegetable Concentrates,' a title which we have copyrighted. The packages readily wholesale at 75 cents, to be retailed at one dollar. At these prices, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... had been through the first half of the year before, Haynes actually did go somewhat stale in some ...
— Dick Prescott's Third Year at West Point - Standing Firm for Flag and Honor • H. Irving Hancock
... have work requiring attention but want to go to the game, I should certainly be lacking in reasoning ability if I could not find something in the situation that made my attendance at the game imperative. I am stale, and the game will freshen me up and make me work better afterward. Or, I am in serious danger of degenerating into a mere "grind", and must fight against this evil tendency. Or, my presence at the game is necessary in order to encourage ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... for very long,' she replied, plucking a glittering firefly from her fan and laying it on his sleeve with her sweet light laugh. 'Like a firefly I shall dance out my short night, and die quickly before life grows stale!' ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... to these volumes with full assurance of faith for a fresh rehearsal of the old facts, which no time can stale, and for new views of those old facts, according to the larger framework of ideas in which they can now be set by the master of a captivating style and an expert in historical philosophy.—New York ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... themselves, ridiculing that young man! For five good minutes they stood there, shouting ribaldry at him, deriding him, mocking him, jeering at him. They peppered him with stale jokes, they even made a few new ones and threw at him. They hurled at him all the private family jokes belonging to our set, and which must have been perfectly unintelligible to him. And then, unable to stand their brutal jibes any longer, he turned round ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... The stale excuse, so often repeated by the lovers of tobacco, that they have been advised to use it by physicians, for the mitigation or removal of some bodily infirmity, may be urged with equal force and propriety by the tippler and the sot; for many, very many, have been ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... that French invasion, which had been threatened for such a time, and kept so long impending, "the cry of wolf" grows stale at last, and then the real danger comes. Napoleon had reckoned upon this, as he always did upon everything, and for that good reason he had not grudged the time devoted to his home affairs. These being settled according to his will, and mob turned into pomp as gaily ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... And beer that is stale Rosa-solis and damnable hum, But we will rack In the praise of sack 'Gainst Omne quod exit ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... is not to take advantage of his situation to utter stale jests or vulgar puns. A careful perusal of "The Jest Book" will be his best security against ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... an end when she saw the stale cakes and the weak and watery tea and oily chocolate which, out of politeness, we felt obliged to swallow; and the nightmare set in when she saw his apartment on the first floor, furnished by himself with his own individual taste, which was simply awful. But ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... note; but it may be my muddle. I see clearly that any satisfaction which Pan may give will depend on the constitution of each man's mind. If you have arrived already at any similar conclusion, the whole will of course appear stale to you. I heard yesterday from Wallace, who says (excuse horrid vanity), "I can hardly tell you how much I admire the chapter on 'Pangenesis.' It is a POSITIVE COMFORT to me to have any feasible explanation of a difficulty that has always been ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Darcy, sent by King Henry the 8. with a lusty crew of soldiers, for that Ferdinands iust assistance, against the Infidels: but vsed by him as a stale, for the vniust conquest ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... shelves, and are not used very often at that. It was explained to me that when you are running a submarine you do not go in much for sleep. Luncheon consisted of a cup of coffee and a piece of canned beef on a stale slice of bread. Tinned food is about all that can be used aboard a submarine. It does not take up much room, and it requires little in the way of cooking utensils. We were still having our luncheon below when we dived again, so for ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... hours afterwards, and naps are not yet over in the kitchen. The hatchments in the dining-room look down on crumbs, dirty plates, spillings of wine, half-thawed ice, stale discoloured heel-taps, scraps of lobster, drumsticks of fowls, and pensive jellies, gradually resolving themselves into a lukewarm gummy soup. The marriage is, by this time, almost as denuded of its ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... guide into a parlour, redolent of stale cigar smoke, with oilcloth on the floor and varnished walls, an abode even more horrible than Hassan's lair. Joseph closed the door carefully behind him, and made no apology for his dishabille. He ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for giving up the writing of tales in verse was that Byron beat him. But there must have been something besides this: it is plain that the pattern of rhyming romance was growing stale. The Lay needs no apology; Marmion includes the great tragedy of Scotland ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... dictionaries of the day, but it was in the soldier's vocabulary, now obsolete. Chip up bacon in fine particles, place in an oven and fry to a crisp. Fill the oven one-third or one-half full of branch water, then take the stale corn bread, the more moldy the better, rub into fine crumbs, mix and bring the whole to a boil, gently stirring with a forked stick. When cold, eat with fingers and to prevent waste or to avoid carrying it on ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... account, in which, according to all appearances, she must have sunk at least ten good years; allowance, too, being made for the havoc which a long course of hackneyship and hot waters must have made of her constitution, and which had already brought on, upon the spur, that stale stage in which those of her profession are reduced to think of showing company, instead of ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... worked in, slept in, and, what is more, often inherited from a parent who had also worn it as his winter hide. Added to the smell of the sheepskin is that of an unwashed human, and the reek of stale food, for the poorest of the Russian peasants have no chimneys to their houses. They cannot afford to let the ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... Play, or some bawdy song; this speaking bilk, that nonsense, whilst all with loud houting and laughter confound the Fidlers noise, who may well be call'd a noise indeed, for no Musick can be heard for them; so whilst he utters nothing but old stories, long since laught thridbare, or some stale jest broken twenty times before: His mirth compared with theirs, new and at first hand, is just like Brokers ware in comparison with Mercers, or Long-lane compar'd unto Cheap-side: his wit being rather the Hogs-heads than his own, favouring ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... which started in life with a passport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning. Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... said Jenkins to Dion, after the latter had taken the shower bath. "You aren't as stale as I expected to find you, not near as stale. But I hope you'll keep it up now you've started ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... last extremity. He drank the water from the sheet as we caught it (we holding it above him as he lay so as to let it run into his mouth), for we had now nothing left capable of holding water, unless we had chosen to empty out our wine from the carboy, or the stale water from the jug. Either of these expedients would have been resorted to had ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fled from the scene of their labours. Halfway across the square, however, I met McNeice. He seemed quite glad to see me and invited me to luncheon in his rooms. I accepted the invitation and was fed on cold ham, stale ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... his work, and this he loved with an increasing ardour. How devotedly he laboured he never knew until long afterwards, when what had once been a passion of delight and a necessity of nature degenerated into a stale drudgery practised for the sake of mere money. But, oh! the sweetness of brain-toil whilst the heart was fresh and whilst it still seemed worth while to preach some kind of gospel to mankind! To pace the streets and read the faces of people as they went by, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... was not tolerated by our frantic greenback opponents, and stale eggs with decayed cabbages hurled at the heads of Republican orators were the strongest arguments used by the General's admirers to combat our appeals for protective tariff and sound money. At a meeting of our state committee in Boston, Judge Thayer announced that General Hall of Maine, one of ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... had sharp work with Sir Arthur; he tried some of his stale tricks, but soon found that I was Yorkshire too: it would not do—you understand me. We went to the work like good ones, head, heart and soul; and, in fact, since I came here, I have lost no time. I am rather fagged, but I am sure to be well paid for my hardship; ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... appealing to his neighbours; "didn't I tell you he talked rot? Did you ever hear such a stale ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... almost he would ask, in Italian, 'Do you understand?' His young wife laughed heartily at the story of his dressing up in woman's clothes." A dull, garrulous husband, boring people with stories of which they were sick; a childish little wife, trying to make the best of things, and laughing over the stale old jokes; this is what may be called the idyllic moment in the wedded life of Charles Edward and Louise. What would she have felt, that strong, calm lady, growing old far off in the Isle of Skye, had she been able to see what Bonstetten saw; ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... not appeal to him when he awoke in the morning. He walked over, through the earliest light, to the hotel, where he made a meal of musty eggs, chemical-looking biscuits, and coffee of a rank hue and flavor, in an atmosphere of stale odors and flies, sickeningly different from the dainty ceremonials of Io's preparation. Rebuking himself for squeamishness, the station-agent returned to his office, caught an O.S. from the wire, took some general instructions, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... intermittent, years, Cheyenne laughed loudly. Lin McLean laughed, too, and went about his business, ready to swagger at the necessary moment, and with the necessary kind of joke always ready to shield his hurt spirit. And soon, of course, the matter grew stale, seldom raked up in the Bow Leg country where Lin had been at work; so lately he had begun to remember other things beside the ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... the oil of the machines and the new leather—a combination which, added to the stale odours of the building, was not pleasant even in cold weather. The floor, though regularly swept every evening, presented a littered surface. Not the slightest provision had been made for the comfort of ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... in Lisbon having heard that his physician and friend was imprisoned by the Inquisition, under the stale pretext of Judaism, addressed a letter to one of them to request his freedom, assuring the inquisitor that his friend was as orthodox a Christian as himself. The physician, notwithstanding this high recommendation, was put to the torture; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of Days that have Been the dark of the Days that Are, And Love's torch stinking and stale, like the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... calculated to keep the spirits up, under depressing circumstances? I need one very much, and have nothing more suggestive than the old Methodist hymn, "Better days are coming, we'll all go right," which I shout so constantly, as our prospects darken, that it begins to sound stale. ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... treasure once more in the depths of the rick; he himself knows not how much there might be. Then he attacks anew the hard, stale bread, the rancid bacon, and devours it to the last morsel. Perhaps some ready-prepared banquet awaited him on the morrow. Or perhaps he is accustomed to feasting only every third day. At last he stretches himself out on the grass, ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... imperial colour, and of some flexible shoots of some thorny plant, and out of these they fashion a burlesque of royal trappings. Then they shout, as they would have done to Caesar, 'Hail, King of the Jews!' repeating again with clumsy iteration the stale jest which seems to them so exquisite. Then their mood changes, and naked ferocity takes the place of ironical reverence. Plucking the mock sceptre, the reed, from His passive hand, they strike the thorn-crowned Head with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... level of those fitted to satisfy a rational being—so far that she almost looked down on them with contempt. The truth was, that having tasted a little of the purer joy of religion, all other substitutes were stale and flat, and this although she scarcely knew enough of the matter to be able correctly to analyze her ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... Gymnosophists go into a wood, with all nature seething around them, with romance on every side; it would be much more to the purpose if they took up their abode in a dull country town, where they should see just so much of humanity as to keep them from desiring more, and only the stale externals of man's life. These externals are as dead to us as so many formalities, and speak a dead language in our eyes and ears. They have no more meaning than an oath or a salutation. We are so much accustomed ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to use his own language, when he wanted to "do up" his rooms; he had gone with his purse open and his eyes shut to Grindot, who by this time was quite forgotten. It is impossible to guess how long an extinct reputation may survive, supported by such stale admiration. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... continent—probably within a few hours of the moment wherein he made his unceremonious exit from Mr. Halfpenny's office. Even Markledew was not so keen about the Herapath affair as he had been. His policy was—a new day, a new affair. The Herapath mystery was becoming a little stale—it would get staler unless a fresh and startling development took place. As it was, nothing was likely to arise which would titillate the public until Barthorpe Herapath, now safely lodged in the remand prison, was brought to trial, or unless Burchill was arrested. Consequently, ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the innumerable little states of the Peninsula,—halted every other mile to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat,—the present railroad period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it, and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change in the cooking or the methods of extortion, he ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... laugh at their laboured jokes or not. Of course, it is pretty manners to do so, be the wit never so stale; but on the other hand it encourages them in their evil habits, and seems to me as doubtful a form of hospitality as offering a brandy-and-soda to a ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... contented now to give his single "Imprimatur," but brings his chair into the title-leaf; there sits and judges up or judges down what book he pleases. If this be suffered, what worthless author, or what cunning printer, will not be ambitious of such a stale to put off the heaviest gear?—which may in time bring in round fees to the Licenser, and wretched mis-leading to the people. But to the matter. He approves 'the publishing of this Book, to preserve the strength and honour of Marriage against those sad breaches and dangerous abuses ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... with your window open. What could be more stupefying than to shut yourself up in a closet and swallow your own gas? But is it any less stupefying to shut yourself up within the last few thousand years of the history of your own corner of the world, and suck in the stale atmosphere of its own self-generated prejudices? Or, to vary the metaphor, anthropology is like travel. Every one starts by thinking that there is nothing so perfect as his own parish. But let a man go aboard ship to visit foreign parts, and, when he ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... despair. In her free hours she sat in their little shelter, her thin, freckly hands busy with the worsted masterpiece that she was working. Pee-wee, at least, had his appetite to console him, but she had no relish for the stale lemonade and melting, oozy taffy which stood pathetically on the counter ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the stake of all the game of one! Then would the world have seen again what power A people can put forth in Freedom's hour; Then would the fire of France once more have blazed;— For every single sword, reluctant raised In the stale cause of an oppressive throne, Millions would then have leaped forth in her own; And never, never had the unholy stain Of Bourbon feet disgraced her ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... a fawning voice. "If your majesty designed to be angry, it was not necessary to light the pipes and fill the beer-mugs; for while you are neither smoking nor drinking, the pipe goes out, and the beer becomes stale." ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... scholarship. The introduction to a literary career was supposed to be obtained only by a profound study of the classics, with a view to avoiding everything classical, both in language and ideas, except Cicero, the apostle of the ancient Roman Philistines; and the tendency to clothe stale truisms and feeble sentiments in high-sounding language is still found in Italian prose and is indirectly traceable to the same source. As for the literature of the country since the Latins, it consisted, and still consists, in the works of the four poets, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... get stale," declared the clown, with a faint smile. "Give us a hand, partner—one at a time, and we'll get my togs ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... and then kept on going until we reached a big city where there was a brewery, but they had set fire to the whole city before they left. We got some beer and wine just the same. It was a little stale, but it was fine. The Huns' warehouses were all fixed for the winter and the boys got cigars and cigarettes, but I was a little too late to ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... struggle against it. She allowed the evil thoughts to take their course—wherever they would, over all the faults she had detected among the Brethren or suspected in her own mother; over Skipper Worse, with his oaths and his flavour of stale tobacco-smoke, until he seemed quite unbearable—away, far away into forbidden regions, where there was sunshine and joy, where she was alone ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... stale. Talk of the hatchet, and the faces pale, Wampum and calumets and forests dreary, Once so attractive, now begins to weary. Uncas and Magawisca please us still, Unreal, yet idealized with skill; But every poetaster, scribbling witling, From the majestic oak his stylus whittling, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... value of vegetables Exclusive diet of vegetables not desirable To select vegetables Poison in potato sprouts Stale vegetables a cause of illness Keeping vegetables To freshen withered vegetables Storing winter vegetables Preparation and cooking To clean vegetables for cooking Methods of cooking Time required for cooking various vegetables Irish potato, description of The chemistry of cooking Digestibility ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... in the little inn-parlour that smelt of honeysuckle and stale tobacco, and looked across the village street. It looked even narrower than in the old days, and the pond on the green had shrunk to a mere dark puddle. The old grey church on the hill looked like a child's toy, and the quiet that brooded everywhere was the quiet of stagnation. An ancient dog ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the two officers sat opposite to each other inhaling the stale odour of tobacco and spirits peculiar to this room, with little or no ventilation. It was enough to sicken anyone, but both men, accustomed to such places in the pursuit of their calling, apparently thought nothing of it, the Sheriff seemingly absorbed in contemplating the long ash at the end ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... Street, filled at this time of the year principally by Americans, and he dined alone there—dined well, and smoked a long cigar. Then he went for a walk. London at the beginning of August was not empty, but stale, crowded, untidy, hot—unlike itself. He tried not to think of the garden of the Green Gate. Suddenly, with a stab, he imagined Harry and Valentia; probably now he was telling her that the engagement was ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... Rawheads? And if Lady Ogreham happens to die—I won't say to go the way of all flesh, that is too revolting—I say if Ogreham is a widower, do you aver, on your conscience and honor, that mothers will not be found to offer their young girls to supply the lamented lady's place? How stale this misanthropy is! Something must have disagreed with this cynic. Yes, my good woman. I dare say you would like to call another subject. Yes, my fine fellow; ogre at home, supple as a dancing-master abroad, and shaking in thy pumps, and wearing a horrible grin of ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thee there; to see thee pass thy punto, thy stock, thy reverse, thy distance, thy montant. Is he dead, my Ethiopian? is he dead, my Francisco? 25 ha, bully! What says my AEsculapius? my Galen? my heart of elder? ha! is he dead, bully-stale? is he dead? ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... Then came the sound as of harder ground and a stop— undertones, gruff and manly, could be heard, the peculiar noise of horses' drinking; and her captor came up this time on foot, saying, "Plaguy little to be had in this accursed hole; 'tis but the choice between stale beer and ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... convince them that the Holy Scriptures can not be understood except through grammatical rules and an exact science of vowel-points. No exposition is so absurd but that they defend and polish it with their stale grammatical rules. ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... serenely beautiful, how eloquent of peace and benediction, the scene that met him as he crossed the threshold of the great quadrangle! Some thousands of times his eyes had rested on it, yet how could it ever stale? ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... old favourites. They have been used so often. They have been worn in our service. No matter how well we know the contents, we turn to them again and again; there is a very joy in knowing what to expect. Time does not age nor custom stale the ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... pocket." And Bab produced from that chaotic cupboard two rather stale and crumbly ones, saved from lunch for the fete. These were cut up and arranged in plates, forming a graceful circle around the ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... that is filled with negative, discordant or inharmonious thoughts, I am separating myself from the full expression of the Divine within me. I am the bucket of water going stale on a human island; but, when I make my spirit at one with the Father by harmonious thinking, by love, kindness, good will, fellowship and co-operation, I am not only maintaining all of my original properties, ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... late she had begun to find them wearisome. They no longer satisfied her. If this were the result of a few years' experience, what would she feel when she had grown jaded with time and everything was stale? Then her glimpse of the simple, healthful western life had come as a revelation. It was real, a bracing struggle, in which no effort was wasted but produced tangible results: broad stretches of splendid wheat, sweeps of ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... oats. There was a large amount of matted mycelium, and this when given to other horses for experiment, killed them within thirty-six hours." The writer has himself seen seven hogs die within a few days while being fed on mouldy corn. Flour which has become stale may produce similar injurious effects, although most of the germs are destroyed in the process of baking. It is quite probable, however, that a poisonous substance is generated by the mould fungus, which cannot be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... room of the cabin was littered up with a variety of things, the wings of birds, feathers of chickens, shells of eggs, bones, bits of tree branches, an old iron chain, a tiny square looking-glass, badly cracked, some stale bread and cake, cores of apples and pears, and a ...
— Out with Gun and Camera • Ralph Bonehill
... the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage—but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... Fanny, King, Ratke—doubtful, he may go—Emma, Mary, Belle; weapons: eight revolvers and a shot gun, and swords galore; but we're pretty far gone when we come to the swords. It has been rather a lark arranging; but I find it a bore to write, and I doubt it will be cruel stale to read about, when all's over and done, as it will be ere this goes, I fancy: far more ere ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hazer mejor vida, zimulando por venture algunos mas la virtud, que exercitando la." (Cosas Memorables, fol. 182.) "L'hypocrisie est l'hommage que le vice rend a la vertu." The maxim is now somewhat stale, like most others of its ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance. Though Murray with his Miller may combine To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line? No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... gildings, wax flowers, and indescribable mantel-piece atrocities, that there is not a simple or restful corner anywhere. Yet I find myself touched by its very hideousness, when I think that it probably looked even so, smelt even so stale and sweet, in the days of my dear father's boyhood. There is a picture in the large drawing-room that gives me infinite pleasure. It is a portrait of my own grandmother with papa in a white frock on her knees, and my poor ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... the bit of bacon and stale bread with which each plate had been served. There were excitement and hilarious good-humor, as though the flood had come for their especial benefit to give them an experience new and unusual. A bit of bacon and stale bread! One could get along very well for a few hours on that. ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... was old and stale, it was to be taken away, and new and warm put in its place, to show that God has but little delight in the service of his own people when their duties grow stale and mouldy. Therefore he removed ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... thing, no doubt, for the man to go out to his work and to his play, while the wife attends to her social and domestic duties. The evening brings reunion with new impressions and new interests to discuss. Such a life with its brief restorative separations prevents love growing stale, and soothes the irritation of nerves which, by the strain of petty repetitions, are exasperated sometimes into blasphemy of the heart's true creed. But the Barrington menage was an unusual one. By adopting a life of travel, they had ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... in some degree have felt it a charm there that we were not, under his rule, inordinately prepared for "business," but were on the contrary to remember that the taste of Cornelius Nepos in the air, even rather stale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking our next ordeal and that I conceive to have proceeded from some rank predominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. It had consorted with this that we found ourselves, by I know not what inconsequence, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... taste than a bottle of beer and hard-boiled eggs at The Nimble Rabbit. Heaven knows I trust you will be happy, but I cannot persuade myself that this Pomponnet shares your ambitions; with his slum and his stale ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... castell, which they besieged till the Danes within it gaue hostages, and couenanted to depart out of the kings land. The king caused the coasts about Seuerne to be watched, that they should not breake into his countrie: but yet they stale twise into the borders: neuerthelesse they were chased and slaine as manie as could not swim, and so get to [Sidenote: The Ile of Stepen. Deomedun.] their ships. Then they remained in the Ile of Stepen, in great ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (6 of 8) - The Sixt Booke of the Historie of England • Raphael Holinshed
... but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the most religious sentiment of which ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... limits of the little Canton. As to matters of faith the struggle was yet going on in his own bosom. Here, on the one hand, stood the Church, to whose priesthood he had been consecrated, with her stiff, unbending dogmas, and her stale, lifeless forms, yet esteemed holy, to touch which was regarded as an unpardonable crime in the individual; and there, on the other, eternal truth, superior to the narrow restrictions of human power, raised above decretals ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... that is, it makes the familiar thing and round seem and feel common. It's the unhallowed and unhallowing touch of the selfish, of sin, that makes things seem common, in the sense of not being holy and sweet and pure and refreshing. Sin makes things grow stale to you. Selfishness affects your eye, the way things look to you. God's presence recognized keeps things fresh. His touch upon us, ever afresh, makes us fresh. Everything we touch and see is touched by a God-freshened hand, and seen through a ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... I false? thy conscience witness, Iachimo, Thou didst accuse him of incontinency, Thou then look'dst like a villain: now methinks, Thy favour's good enough. Some Jay of Italy, Whose mother was her painting, hath betray'd him: Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, And for I am richer than to hang by th' walls, I must be ript; to pieces with me. Oh, Men's vows are women's traitors. All good seeming By thy revolt, oh husband, shall be thought Put on for villainy: not born ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... matters, that the pupils are made to memorize, take up most of their time and engage their most precious brain-power; whereupon, at the University, the identical process is carried on further. They are there taught a mass of antiquated, stale, superfluous lore, along with comparatively little that is valuable. The lectures, once written, are reeled off by most of the professors year after year, course after course, the interlarded witticisms included. The high ministry of education becomes with many, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... before me, side by side, their faces solemn and black, and I walked at their heels. My mouth stank of the drink, and my head was sick with the stale fumes of it, and I would have cut off my right hand for a drink of water, one drink, a mouthful even. And, had I had it, I know it would have sizzled in my belly like water spilled on heated stones for the roasting. It is terrible, ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... been told how great ye be. I'm a-goin' fer to tell ye the truth. I don't like the way ye look at this job. It ain't no job o' workin' out. We're all workin' fer ourselves. It's my fight an' it's yer fight. I won't let no king put a halter on my head an', with the stale in one hand an' a whip in t' other, lead me up to the tax collector to pay fer his fun. I'd ruther fight him. Some o' you has fam'lies. Don't worry 'bout 'em. They'll be took care of. I got some confidence ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... waiter was obliged to leave Ferdinand, but he proved his confidence in that gentleman's fortunes by his continual civility, and in the course of the day brought him a stale newspaper. It seemed to Ferdinand that the day would never close. The waiter pestered him about dinner, eulogising the cook, and assuring him that his master was famous for champagne. Although he had no appetite, Ferdinand ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side. On the pavement in front of it and of its neighbour, the Cafe Continental, the vendors of lottery tickets were bawling the lucky numbers they had for sale. Even in this wide space the air was close and stale. Within, a few people left over in the town had strayed in to dine at tables placed against the walls under flamboyant decorations in the style of Fragonard. At a table Hillyard was sitting alone over his coffee. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... that, by this time, we had done with that stale, second-hand, one-sided, and misunderstood saying of Raffaelle's; or that at least, in these days of purer Christian light, men might have begun to get some insight into the meaning of it: Raffaelle was a painter of humanity, and assuredly there is something the matter ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... other matters she reserved, no doubt, for the accounts. Herself accustomed to pilfer, she knew to the least detail every trick of the servants, and not a centimo escaped her; she always thought she was being robbed. Such was her spirit of economy that at home they ate stale bread, thus confirming the popular saying, "in the house of the ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... the historical facts are alluded to in English, unless by Dr. Moore in his View of Italy[368]. His account is false and flippant, full of stale jests about old men and young wives, and wondering at so great an effect from so slight a cause. How so acute and severe an observer of mankind as the author of Zeluco could wonder at this is inconceivable. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... withdrawal to a depth, in places, of 40 kilometres, restored the principle of manoeuvre to armies which had fronted one another for two years in positions hitherto justifying the description of stale-mate. Strong moral and political effects accompanied. And this manoeuvre, though carried out upon a part only of the entire battle front, infused a sense of change and movement into the most static portions ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the mercantile world, and for many days I had heard nothing spoken of but the vast losses which houses and individuals of high character and standing had incurred, and the bankruptcy with which the community had become suddenly threatened. The subject had grown stale and wearisome to me. It had little interest, in fact, for one whose humble salary of one hundred and fifty pounds per annum depended so little upon the great fluctuations of commerce, and I accordingly disposed myself for sleep as soon as the words bills, money, and bankruptcy, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... ramblings Rogron picked up various bits of information about Provins, its inhabitants, their marriages, together with stale political news; all of which he narrated to his sister. Scores of times in his walks he would stop and say,—often to the same person on the same day,—"Well, what's the news?" When he reached home he would fling himself on the sofa like a man exhausted with labor, whereas he was only worn ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... make its appearance than a number of critical labels were fixed on it: the revolt against the village, the espousal of sexual freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such tags may once have had their point, but by now they seem dated and stale. The revolt against the village (about which Anderson was always ambivalent) has faded into history. The espousal of sexual freedom would soon be exceeded in boldness by other writers. And as for the effort to place Winesburg, Ohio ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... going to weary you by indulging in the stale old diatribes against the publisher. For, to speak seriously the honest truth, I think they are in the main a very much abused race. Thackeray put the matter with a good deal of common-sense, in that scene in Pendennis where Pen and Warrington walk home together from ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... 'a b, abs,' jest like the old days. Dear! Dear! But the teacher in those days was ez old and grizzled ez I be—and some o' the scholars—no offense to you, Mr. Brooks—was older and bigger nor you. But times is changed: yet look, Almiry, if thar ain't a hunk o' stale gingerbread in that desk jest as it uster be! Lord! how it all comes back! Ez I was sayin' only t'other day, we can't be too grateful to our parents for givin' us an eddication in our youth;" and Mr. Hoover, with the air of recalling an alma mater of sequestered gloom and cloistered erudition, gazed ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... applied to Greene, in his "Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, 1592," the year when Nash's "Summer's Last Will and Testament" was performed: "They wrong him much with their epitaphs and solemn devices, that entitle him not at the least the second Toy of London, the stale ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... gravity of the middle classes, or into the noisy, empty mirth of the lower. The man of sense and feeling, wherever he goes, will find himself in a minority, in which few will speak his language or comprehend his ideas. He will seldom return to his home without a weary sense of the "stale, flat, and unprofitable" nothings he has been compelled to entertain in his intercourse with the world,—without the recollection of some outrage on his independence, some dogmatism that he dared not question, some impertinence that he ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... up the heat does not rise above 75 deg. or 80 deg.. In such a case if the manure is otherwise in good condition and fresh, it is well enough and a good crop may be expected. But if the manure, to begin with, had been a little stale, rotten and inert, I certainly would not hesitate to at once break up the bed, add some fresh horse droppings to it, mix thoroughly, then make it up again. Or a fair heat may be started in such a stale bed by sprinkling it over rather freely with urine from the barnyard, ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... handwriting, but in these days of the typewriter such a thing makes little difference. His abstention from bowling (to the playing of which Brassfield had been devoted), and his absolute failure at billiards, were discussed in sporting circles, and accounted for on the theory that he had "gone stale" since this love-affair had become the absorbing business of his life. No one understood, however, his sudden interest in photography, and his marvelous skill in it. He seemed to ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... necessary as a means of providing for physical, mental, and social wants; for the pleasure that it affords. But it is also important in its relation to work, for without it body and mind become "fagged," people grow "stale" at their work, producing power and power of service ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... blamed independent, anyhow." I suspect I must have been a rather unlovely customer, take it all together. Still, every once in a while it boils up in me yet against the discretion that has come with the years, and I want to slam in after the old fashion. Seems to me we are in danger of growing stale with all our soft ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... live on yesterday's manna; we can gather it fresh to-day. Compassion becomes stale when it becomes thoughtless. It is new thought that keeps our pity strong. If our perception of need can remain vivid, as vivid as though we had never seen it before, our sympathies will never fail. The fresh eye insures the sensitive heart. And our God's compassions ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... made a halt, under the lee of a sheltering mountain, for rest and refreshment. And, sitting down on a fallen tree, from whose barkless trunk they brushed off the snow, they took out and commenced chewing their stale and frozen bread, with a few small pieces of duck-meat, remaining from their breakfast, and comprising the last of their provisions. The animal heat, produced by their great and continued exertions in travelling, had thus far prevented them, from suffering much from the cold, or perceiving ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... decidedly an ass. His jokes strike you as funny at first; but there's nothing in him, he's a mere hawker of stale puns; there's nothing but selfishness under his jesting exterior. I have no belief in him. Yet he is an old school friend; the only one of my twenty-eight classmates whose acquaintance I have kept up. Four are dead, twenty-three others are scattered about in obscure country places; lost for want ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... will he come back again? Will his proud spirit brook an uncertainty? But, after all, is it well worth, the while? Those are uncertain questions—I dismiss them. There is no immediate danger. My humor changes; I am no longer despondent. Away with Doubtful Uncertainty and all of his stale retinue, tricked out in danger-signals—each a false one. Sleep on, sweet Conscience, sleep on! To-night the wedding-reception—given to a woman married for her money! Another glorious opportunity ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... labors of rural life: but how changed did all at first appear! It seemed as if scales had fallen off their eyes, showing coarseness and deformity, where previously none had appeared. They had tasted the rapture of a more beautiful life; and now the ordinary toils of humanity appeared "stale, flat, and unprofitable," and common men and women tedious, rude, and mean. But the brave knight struggled against this feeling. "Shall we be so ungrateful, because a glimpse of the earthly paradise has been vouchsafed us, as ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... spoiled. Our Kipling winter was a failure. We read a play or two, with Sperry's wife reading the heroine, and the rest of us taking other parts. She has a lovely voice, has Mrs. Sperry. But it was all stale and unprofitable, after the Wells affair. With Herbert on a lecture tour on spirit realism, and Mrs. Dane at a sanatorium for the winter, we have now given it up, and my wife and I spend ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Caviare. It needs all the violence of the fresh, strong, monsoon winds to even partially purge these villages of the rank odours which cling to them at the end of the fishing season; and when all has been done, the saltness of the sea air, the brackish water of the wells, and the faint stale smells emitted by the nets and fishing tackle still tell unmistakable tales of the one trade in which every member of these communities is more ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... look at Richard before she went, for in externals she forced herself to be loyal to Roger. When she got into the house she would linger about the rooms at factitious operations, pouring out of the flower-glasses water that was not stale, or putting on the kettle far too soon, until she heard Richard coming to look for her, lightfootedly but violently, banging doors behind him, knocking into furniture. He would halt at the door ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... eating hunches of stale bread and knocking the necks from wine bottles with their bayonets. One lumpish fellow came to the door and offered me part of a sausage which he was devouring, a kindly act that touched me, and I wondered whether the other prisoners might find ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Teian Muse" Ruled us as tyrants absolute; Now even pedagogues refuse To stodge us with such stale old fruit. Why should the STANLEY-dowered West Make the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... boy was howling, and holding one hand under his arm, while he danced a hornpipe and protested, that, if I'd save him this time, he'd "niver stale another cint's worth as long as ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... continually stirred to fresh vigour by the influence of Savonarola. In spite of the wearisome visions and allegories from which she recoiled in disgust when they came as stale repetitions from other lips than his, her strong affinity for his passionate sympathy and the splendour of his aims had lost none of its power. His burning indignation against the abuses and oppression that made the daily story of the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the judge. It is this which has blighted the countries of the East as much as cruel laws or despotic executives. Thus the legislature has seen fit in certain cases to assign a limit to the period within which actions shall be brought; in order to urge men to vigilance, and to prevent stale claims from being suddenly revived against men whose vouchers are destroyed or whose witnesses are dead. It is true, in foro conscientiae, a defendant, who knows that he honestly owes the debt sued ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... executed their prisoners without mercy or favour.] where they cut each other's throats for the chance of finding twelve pennies Scots on the person of the slain. Marry, my lord, to make amends, they will eat mouldy victuals, and drink stale ale, as if their bellies were puncheons.—But the dinner-bell is going to sound— hark, it is clearing its rusty throat, with a preliminary jowl. That is another clamorous relic of antiquity, that, were I master, should soon be at the bottom of the Thames. How the foul fiend can it interest the peasants ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... well behind a fringe of alder-roots, whence Bob, notwithstanding his most strenuous efforts, failed to "bolt" her. I then drew off the hounds, led them towards the throat of the pool, and for a half hour assisted them to work the "stale drag," till I reached a bend of the river where Lutra's footprints were still visible on the fine, wet sand at ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... pig's head into halves, sprinkle them with pepper and salt, and lay them with the rind part uppermost upon a bed of sliced onions in a baking dish. Next bruise eight ounces of stale bread-crumb, and mix it with four ounces of chopped suet, twelve sage leaves chopped fine, pepper and salt to season, and sprinkle this seasoning all over the surface of the pig's head; add one ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... yellow wall a lizard ran for shelter, at his elbow a macaw compassing the circle of its tin prison muttered dreadful oaths. Outside, as the washerwomen beat their linen clubs upon the flat rocks of the river, the hot, stale air was spanked with sharp reports. In Camaguay theirs was the only industry, the only sign of cleanliness; and recognizing that another shirt had been thrashed into subjection and rags, Everett winced. No less visibly did his own thoughts cause him to ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... Biblical and philological topics, and his prose work will always be respectfully regarded by the students alike of divinity and of language. But though, on these subjects, his pronouncements may in time grow stale or require correction, he will ever hold an honourable place in English literature as one of the most thoughtful and vigorous of those parson poets of whom this country has always had so large and ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... roped off for dancers; a mysterious tent with a fortune-teller inside; a lottery-stall resplendent with vases and knick-knacks, which nobody was ever known to win; in short, all kinds of attractions, stale enough, no doubt, to my companions, but sufficiently ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... worth something!" he exclaimed. "It may be stale news, and it may be something for the future, but it's worth trying. I wonder I didn't think ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... Outside these windows, Drysdale had rigged up hanging gardens, which were kept full of flowers by the first nurseryman in Oxford, all the year round; so that even on this February morning, the scent of gardenia and violets pervaded the room, and strove for mastery with the smell of stale tobacco, which hung about the curtains and sofa. There was a large glass in an oak frame over the mantelpiece, which was loaded with choice pipes and cigar cases and quaint receptacles for tobacco; and by the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... wayside inn. A florid, overdressed man was drinking in the parlor, and I could have sworn it was at the sight of him that Raffles recoiled on the threshold, and afterwards insisted on returning to the station through the rain. He assured me, however, that the odor of stale ale had almost knocked him down. And I had to make what I could of his speculative, ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... with fire! Was it always like this when people fell in love? What a ridiculous, uncomfortable, outrageous thing it was! How destructive to common sense and sanity and everything that kept life running on reasonable lines. A poor joke at best, and oh, how stale! ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... conquests north of the Rhine. Of causes as well as of men it is true that there is a tide in their affairs which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but which, once missed, ebbs to defeat. Every generation has a different interest; to every era the ideals of that immediately preceding become stale and old-fashioned. The writings of every age are a polemic against those of their fathers; every dogma has its day, and after every wave of enthusiam [Transcriber's note: enthusiasm?] a reaction sets in. Thus it was that the Reformation ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... then, I will assume that those who have influenced you in the matter have not been able to make any impression upon one so well grounded as yourself in our distinctive doctrine, by the stale ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... over some length of time, as is the case with the ball player, working for six months at a stretch, his system will not stand the strain of too much training. Working solely on bone and muscle day after day, his nervous system will give way. He will grow weak, or as it is technically known, "go stale." This over-training is a mistake oftenest made by the young and highly ambitious player, though doubtless many of the instances of "loss of speed" by pitchers and "off streaks" by older players are really attributable ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... employed by the artists and craftsmen of the past. Archaeology, no less than love, "adds a precious seeing to the eye"; and without that gain of mental sight, the treasures of our public collections are regarded by the general visitor as mere "curiosities"—flat and stale for the most part, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... desires for social pleasures, whereas it will only dampen the zeal and eagerness of the first child. There is a hearty simple type of person who is naively eager and enthusiastic, full of desire, passion and enthusiasm, who finds joy and satisfaction in simple things, whose purposes do not grow stale or monotonous; there is a finicky type, easily displeased and dissatisfied, laying weight on trifles, easily made anhedonic, victims of any reduction in their own energy (which is on the whole low) or of any disagreeable event. True, these sensitive folk are creators of beauty and ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... pan or a toasting-fork," said Curtis, disinterestedly, "wouldn't it be as well to have the dough-nuts now, and leave the herrings till supper, eh, Pil? Pity for them to get stale." ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... for nearly an hour. An opera is far more real than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion of them all—an opera—would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I don't know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would soon pall: imagine asking for three-kreuzer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... take systematic exercise, and he finds that his strength increases. He takes more exercise and keeps on until he gets "stale"—that is, he becomes sore and lame. He has passed the Pivotal Point and is getting ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... than had ever before come whooping out of the inexhaustible store where they were kept for the public entertainment. Austria, and then Germany, made a not bad attempt on public attention by raking up some forgotten sensation over a stale excitement at a place called Sarajevo; but on the twenty-sixth, Ireland magnificently filled the bill again by the far more serious affair of Nationalist Volunteers landing three thousand rifles and marching with ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... servile State," and revolted with all the petulant anarchism of the literary profession against the ideal Interfering Female as typified in their heated imaginations by poor Mrs. Sidney Webb, who became the Aunt Sally of our young artists in stale anti-bureaucratic invective; and, above all, the mulishly silent refusal of our governing classes to see why the unemployed should not be simply left to starve, as they had always been (the Poor Law being worse than useless for so large a purpose), nothing was done; ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... you give your mind this needless care, And for yourself, and me, new pains prepare? I ne'er approved this passion in excess: If you would show your love, distrust me less. I hate to be pursued from place to place; Meet, at each turn, a stale domestic face. The approach of jealousy love cannot bear; He's wild, and soon on wing, if ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... kingship! The Lord would rather wash the feet of his weary brothers, than be the one only perfect monarch that ever ruled in the world. It was empire he rejected when he ordered Satan behind him like a dog to his heel. Government, I repeat, was to him flat, stale, unprofitable. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... quickly does this bourgeois phrase call up before us a hodgepodge room, an atmosphere of stale tobacco smoke, a table covered with pipes, books and magazines, littered with tobacco, walls burdened with hideous prints, a mantel adorned with objects dear to their owner from their associations, to the visitor hideous. The alien mind which had conceived ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... be sold. Each cheese weighs several hundred pounds, is a foot thick, and is as big as a cart-wheel. We eat it every day for luncheon and dinner. I like it so much better, fresh and straight from the farm (if anything four years old can be called fresh), than when stale and grated. ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... "We can take the broken buns and feed them to Skyrocket and Top, and Mr. Nip and Jack will eat them, too," he said to his father. "It will be just as good as buying stale bread for the monkey and the parrot, Daddy. I guess ...
— The Curlytops and Their Pets - or Uncle Toby's Strange Collection • Howard R. Garis
... cuffs to adjust, and there was sometimes a ten or fifteen-minute delay before the bills for the day began to come up. But the afternoons knew no such delays, the girls were tired, the air in the office stale. Every girl, consciously or not, sighed as she took her seat ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... described for the first time in his life by a perfect stranger! This thing happened to me at Bristol, some time ago, in the way I am about to relate. I slept at a Commercial Hotel, and early next morning was joined in the big empty coffee-room, smelling of stale tobacco, by an intensely respectable- looking old gentleman, whose hair was of silvery whiteness, and who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a heavy gold watch-chain with many seals attached thereto; whose linen was of the finest, and whose outer ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... increase, or positive variation. This is seen in the response of the retina to light. Again, a tissue which normally gives a negative variation may undergo molecular changes, after which it gives a positive variation. Thus Dr. Waller finds that whereas fresh nerve always gives negative variation, stale nerve sometimes gives positive; and that retina, which when fresh gives positive, when stale, ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... reflection, I followed him down the glittering vestibule, and into a palatial dining-hall. The hour was something between one and two o'clock, and a minute before I had been thoughtfully weighing the relative merits of an immediate allowance of sausages and mashed potatoes for fivepence, or a couple of stale buns for one penny, to be followed at nightfall by a real banquet—seven-pennyworth of honest beef and vegetables. Now, with a trifle over four shillings in my pocket, I was, to outward seeming, carelessly scanning a menu, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... games for three days, and the players were getting a bit "stale" with nothing to do. Then the sun came out, the grounds dried up and the series was resumed. But the ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... narrow income put the longed-for life in Paris quite out of the question, she looked about her at the people with whom her life must be spent, and shuddered at her loneliness. There was not a single man who could inspire the madness to which women are prone when they despair of a life become stale and unprofitable in the present, and with no outlook for the future. She had nothing to look for, nothing to expect from chance, for there are lives in which chance plays no part. But when the Empire was in the full noonday of glory, and Napoleon was sending the flower of his ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... of European statecraft; and the defence of Christendom (p. 055) became with him, as with others, a hollow pretence, a diplomatic fiction, the infinite varieties of which age could not wither nor custom stale. Did a monarch wish for peace? Peace at once was imperative to enable Christian princes to combine against the Turk. Did he desire war? War became a disagreeable necessity to restrain the ambition ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... a lot of things. I remember forms, and gaits, and faces; and you can't disguise a person that's done me a kindness so that I won't know him thereafter wherever I find him. I know the art of searching for a trail, and I know the stale track from the fresh. I can keep a trail all by myself, with Buffalo Bill asleep in the saddle; ask him—he will tell you so. Many a time, when he has ridden all night, he has said to me at dawn, "Take the watch, Boy; if the trail freshens, ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... mind, overloading the stomach, the use of improper food, such as stale vegetables and meat, unripe fruits, indigestible articles, improperly prepared food, irregular meals, disorderly habits, the use of alcoholic stimulants, loss of sleep, masturbation irritability of temper, anxiety, or grief may all give rise to indigestion. If the functions performed ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... downstairs and into a snug little parlor with a roaring fire that is not altogether unacceptable this dreary evening. The smell of stale tobacco smoke that pervades it is a drawback, but, if you think of it, we can't have ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... of The Crags, the light of dawn stole in through the windows and turned the brilliant light of the lamps into a pale glow. The odor of stale flowers was all about. Mrs. Wellington, with a headache, stood in the doorway. Her husband sat in an armchair with legs outstretched, smoking about his fortieth cigar. Sara Van Valkenberg stood in the middle of ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... need not take the pains With neither beauty, youth, nor brains, For man or maid's desiring: Pert as female, fool as male, As boy too green, as girl too stale ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of omission, the Worcestershire sauce is left out by braggarts who aver that they can take it or leave it. And, in these degenerate days, when it comes to substitutions for the original beer or stale pale ale, we find the gratings of great Cheddars wet down with mere California sherry or even ginger ale—yet so far, thank goodness, no Cokes. And there's tomato juice out of a can into the Rum Turn Tiddy, and sometimes celery soup in place of milk ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... gave no light. The poor oil-lamp, casting weird shadows from wall to wall, served only to discover the darkness. The room, with its low roof and earthen floor, and foul clothes flung here and there, reeked of stale meals and garlic and vile cooking. I thought of the parlour at Cocheforet, and the dainty table, and the stillness, and the scented pot-herbs; and though I was too old a soldier to eat the worse because my spoon lacked washing, I ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... damask was lit both by rose silk-shaded candles and by the radiance of a suspended alabaster bowl. August Turnbull sat at the head of a table laden with silver and crystal and flowers. There were individual pepper mills—he detested adulterated or stale spices— carved goblets for water, cocktail glasses with enameled roosters, ruby goblets like blown flowers and little gilt-speckled liqueur glasses; there were knives with steel blades, knives all of silver, and gold fruit knives; there were slim oyster ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... mostly on top of tall trees or the top of some old ruined farmhouse. From these "pozzies" (positions) a good deal of the country behind the enemy lines could be seen, and the observers, who were given frequent reliefs so that they would not become stale, had their eyes glued to it through a telescope. Every single thing that happened was written down, including the velocity and direction of the wind; the information from all these and other sources being summarized by myself into a daily ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which every one has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,—not, perhaps, of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... feel in other matters she reserved, no doubt, for the accounts. Herself accustomed to pilfer, she knew to the least detail every trick of the servants, and not a centimo escaped her; she always thought she was being robbed. Such was her spirit of economy that at home they ate stale bread, thus confirming the popular saying, "in the house of ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... merely here and there a half-humorous, but unsuccessful attempt to entangle him in his talk. The meeting agreed with all that had been said regarding the antiquity of the earth and of its life. They had, indeed, known it all long ago, and they rallied the lecturer for coming amongst them with so stale a story. It was quite plain that this large body of clergymen, who were, I should say, to be ranked amongst the finest samples of their class, had entirely given up the ancient landmarks, and transported the conception of life's origin to ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... soap was one requiring the closest attention and many an hour of drudgery. The supplying of the household with its winter stock of candles was a harsh but inevitable duty in the autumn, and the lugging about of immense kettles, the smell of tallow, deer suet, bear's grease, and stale pot-liquor, and the constant demands of the great fireplace must have made the candle season a period of terror and loathing to many a burdened wife and mother. Then, too, the constant care of the wood ashes and hunks of fat and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Old Vancouver did the same thing long ago, and no doubt found these shores exactly as we find them to-day. We entered a shallow creek at the top of the cove; landed on a dreary point redolent of stale fish, and the beach literally alive and creeping with small worms above half an inch in length. A solitary squaw was splitting salmon for drying. She remained absorbed in her work while we gathered about and regarded her with impudent ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... wings, no man can tell.[101] Douglas made the stronger impression, though Whigs professed entire satisfaction with the performance of their protagonist. There were some in the audience who took exception to Lincoln's stale anecdotes, and who thought ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... go and ryde and runne and flie thether, they make great hast to cum to her; they make great sute to serve her: yea, I could point out some with my finger that never had gone out of England, but onlie to serve Circes in Italie. Vanitie and vice and any licence to ill living in England was counted stale and rude unto them."[108] ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... for some days past he had practised with the key of the schoolroom door; he did not believe in trusting too much to luck and accident. The key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned. The door opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land, compared with which the gooseberry garden was a stale delight, ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... keep you from the curious and shy Eye of the Game; having your Net so ready that the least pull may do your work, strew'd over with Grass as it lies to hide it: A live Hern, or some other Fowl lately taken, according to what you seek for, will be very requisite for a Stale. And you will have sport from the Dawning, till the Sun is about an hour high; but no longer; and from Sun-set till Twilight; ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... noticed some curious machinery, and were looking at it rather inquisitively when a young lad came up out of the bakery in the cellar, and, in answer to our inquiries, said in a matter-of-course way that it was a mill for grinding old bread and stale crackers into flour, which was again baked into a cheaper class of bread. This grade of flour may make a very nourishing food, but the incident left a most unpleasant ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... both sides of a crown-piece," to use his own language, when he wanted to "do up" his rooms; he had gone with his purse open and his eyes shut to Grindot, who by this time was quite forgotten. It is impossible to guess how long an extinct reputation may survive, supported by such stale admiration. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... useless matter is pounded into the pupils. These matters, that the pupils are made to memorize, take up most of their time and engage their most precious brain-power; whereupon, at the University, the identical process is carried on further. They are there taught a mass of antiquated, stale, superfluous lore, along with comparatively little that is valuable. The lectures, once written, are reeled off by most of the professors year after year, course after course, the interlarded witticisms included. The high ministry of education becomes with many, an ordinary trade; nor ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... town was a morose, surly, and ill-natured man. He sent them only a few bananas, and a calabash of eggs, which were all stale and unfit to be eaten, so that some of their people were obliged to go supperless to bed. The governor ascribed the badness of his fare to extreme poverty, yet his vanity exacted from their Jenna messengers the most abject method of salutation, with which they were acquainted. These men walked ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the most obvious ways to cut down crashes was by making sure that the pilot was in good condition physically. Flight surgeons assigned to every camp were detailed to make a study of the very delicate relationship between a sick and stale pilot and the crash. It was discovered, for instance, that a man who went up not in the best condition multiplied by many times the ordinary hazards in the air. It became the duty of these surgeons to conduct recreation and ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... the house in law. And here the devil, who is himself a kind of lawyer, for he devours his best friends, the devil I say chose these opportunities to vent his choicest malice. He did not set a lawyer to confound a lawyer: that were but a stale device. He humbled him out of the mouths of men who had occasionally read law-books, it is true: but who had read them without a lawyers' obliquity; and had enquired what was the simple unadulterated intention of their authors. Now law, which in all its ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... to stay at the hotel, much to Mother's disgust. I'm doing a little medical inspection among Father's poor people, though. That whiles away a few hours every day, and of course, every time I go to the hospital the doctors there tell me about any interesting new cases, so I'm not 'going stale' entirely." ...
— Ethel Morton at Rose House • Mabell S. C. Smith
... plura meant. He snorted. "Hoo! Stale! It means, what are you crying about? naturally. Who said it? That letter? Who's it ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... winter, he occupied a couch in the opposite corner. A rude cupboard had been built against the logs next to the fireplace. It contained supplies and utensils. Toward the center, somewhat closer to the door, stood a crude table and two benches. The cabin was dark and smelled of smoke, of the stale odors of past cooked meals, of the mustiness of dry, rotting timber. Streaks of light showed through the roof where the rough-hewn shingles had split or weathered. A strip of bacon hung upon one side of the cupboard, and upon ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... room was all there was of it, and that was smoky and dirty, the air thick with the smells of stale cooking and musty fur garments. Dogs were lying about, and there was a goat-pen in the corner; but a fire roared in the centre, a ring of steaming hot drinks stood around it, and behind them sat a circle of jovial-hearted sportsmen, who seemed to ask no greater pleasure ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... to see no more of my neighbour, but in he came as I was sitting at breakfast, smelling like a bar-parlour, with stale ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... glances across them, are like a gay southern meadow in June, variegated and brilliant, sweet and pensive and rather luxuriant, and here and there even a little rank. Yet they are swept by the air and the light and the rain of Nature, and so their seduction never grew stale. During sixteen centuries, while the world was spiritually revolutionised again and yet again, the influence of Ovid never failed; it entered even the unlikeliest places. Homer might be an obscure forgotten bard and Virgil become a fantastic magician, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... northern part of this country. Without going into detail it seems to me that we have achieved the object of our association, at least to the extent of making practical use of our accumulated knowledge. Public interest has been aroused, which may become stale. Articles have appeared in magazines and newspapers from time to time on subjects relating to nut culture. We are also on a continual lookout for new varieties, and those of our members skilled in the art are constantly improving ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... hooks and lines to be served to all the ship's company, that they might catch fish for themselves; but at the same time I also ordered that no man should keep his fish more than four-and-twenty hours before it was eaten, for I had observed that stale, and even dried fish, had made the people sickly, and tainted the air ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... tricky," said Kerry, "only you've got to think of hearses and stale milk when you read it. That isn't as pash as some ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... at the story at first, but when we came across it about every other week, it began to get rather stale. It was one of those canards that stick, and I shall be spoken of always as the man who forgot his wife within an hour ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... distinguished foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse in the gun-room," many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better sounding in the world's ears. You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else. You can forgive ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made all things new. Through eternity, new joys, new knowledge, new progress, new likeness, new service will be ours— and not one leaf shall ever wither in the amaranthine crown, nor 'the cup of blessing' ever become empty or flat and stale. Eternity will be but a continual renewal and a progressive increase of ever fresh and ever familiar treasures. The new and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... If I could find a word that might make known The crime of my destroyer; and that done, 155 My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret Which cankers my heart's core; ay, lay all bare, So that my unpolluted fame should be With vilest gossips a stale mouthed story; A mock, a byword, an astonishment:— 160 If this were done, which never shall be done, Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate, And the strange horror of the accuser's tale, Baffling belief, and overpowering speech; Scarce ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mysterious mortification an instance of that strain of disillusionment which runs like a dark thread through the brilliant texture of the literature of the Grand Siecle. Racine had known to the full the uses of this world, and he had found them flat, stale, and unprofitable; he had found that even the triumphs of his art were all compact of worldliness; and he had turned away, in an agony of renunciation, to lose himself in the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... in town, as the cattleman learned at Monte Joe's dance-hall, piled high with tables and chairs and reeking with the stench, left over from the previous night, of whiskey fumes and stale tobacco smoke. Monte Joe professed not to know where the puncher had gone, but as Trowbridge pressed him for information the voice of a woman, as shrill as the squawk of a parrot, floated down from ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... little man, and his thin hands shook as he held them out over the stove, and nodded at Roscoe. The bearded man had opened his can, and approached the stove with a pan of water, coming in beside Roscoe without noticing him. He brought with him a foul odour of stale tobacco smoke and whisky. After he had put his water over the fire he turned to one of the bunks and with half a dozen coarse epithets roused Thompson, who sat up stupidly, still half drunk. Henry had gone to a small table, and Scotty followed him with the ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... A cake of dry stale bread will hunger out to flight: Why then are grief and care so heavy on my spright? Death is, indeed, most just, since, with an equal hand, Khalif and beggar-wretch, impartial, it ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... fellows and where the net was; the black fellows closing in behind, followed quickly. Poor Noorunglely floundered into the net, up rushed a black fellow and, seizing her, wrung her neck. Having secured her, they would next secure her eggs; that they might be a trifle stale was a matter ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... protecting nook where one could escape them and sit in any degree of comfort. The cabin was close and stuffy, and its atmosphere was heavy with that indescribable odor that rises from the bowels of old ships. The smoking room, bare and dismal and reeking with stale tobacco smoke, was deserted, save when the mail boat doctor and Hugh Wise were occasionally discovered there in ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... a bowl of nice-looking eggs in the pantry and a piece of home-cured bacon neatly sewed into a white muslin bag and partly sliced. This, with slices of golden brown toast—the bread box held only half a loaf of decidedly stale bread—solved her breakfast menu. There were two pans of milk standing on the table, thick with yellow cream, and Betty was just wondering if Bob had milked and when, for the cream could not have risen under two or three hours' time, when the boy came whistling cheerfully ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... all tune, to the pain and astonishment of Pen, who thought that she was as beautiful as an angel, and that she sang like a nightingale; and when Hoppus came on as Sir Harcourt Featherby, the young man of the piece, the gentlemen in the box declared that Hoppus was getting too stale, and Tiptoff was for flinging Miss Blenkinsop's bouquet ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... becoming more crowded; while at the two patent theatres "a beggarly account of empty boxes," and an equally beggarly account of flat, stale, and unprofitable performances, greets me whenever I am rash enough to take my post of observation. Lady Romford has a private box, which she visits only in preference to staying at a still duller home, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... by a single squadron of the 17th Lancers. Upon this the Boers made a sudden and very fierce attack, their approach being facilitated partly by the mist and partly by the use of khaki, a trick which seems never to have grown too stale for successful use. The result was that they were able to ride up to the British camp before any preparations had been made for resistance, and to shoot down a number of the Lancers before they could reach their horses. So terrible was the fire that the single squadron lost ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... new rooms on Twenty-Eighth Street, there was an odor of stale tobacco, permeating the confusion created by a careless person. Dresser had been occupying them lately. He had found Sam Dresser, whom he had known as a student in Europe, wandering almost penniless down State Street, and had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the strong tea, and did her best to relish the little blocks of cake, though they were slightly stale; and not the less did she enjoy them that she settled in her private mind to propose buttered toast next time, and to prepare it herself. She listened and replied to Miss Sandys' conversation, which did not now run so much on school incidents as on affairs in general. Miss Sandys' ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... from Ascham's lips his host looked slowly about the library, and every object in it stared back at him with a stale unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It was as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of. He cleared his throat slowly; then he turned his head to the lawyer and said: "I could explain the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... chaps say it's rather stale to be in the school. I don't see why your fellows should be looked down on, ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outr results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable." ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... shuffled after her, her slippers, evidently down at the heel, pattering on the worn oil-cloth in the entry as she shambled toward the front door. Hope opened it. The morning was pleasant, though cool, and the air refreshing after the odor of mingled grease and stale ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... the man in his present stale of mind. He recognizes Calypso as beautiful, deathless, ever young; still he must have something more than sensuous life and beauty; though it last forever, it can never satisfy. Not to be compared with ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... I didn't let on. A stale actor in a play couldn't have pulled himself together in a more unconcerned-I-do-this-every-night fashion than I signed for the note, tipped the poor little ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... some of the zest out of what had seemed, once Lieutenant Ernst's loan had saved him from his most pressing worry, likely to be a bully adventure. Now it seemed rather flat and stale. But that was partly because having tramped all night, he was really beginning to be tired. So he went on to the village, and there he found a little inn, where he got a good breakfast and a bed, in which, as soon as he had eaten his ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... she didn't have some made with stale bread, that she could let me have for five cents, but she said they didn't sell stale sandwiches. She seemed real put-out about it, too. She needn't have. Stale bread's better for you than ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... It was a perfect mixture of flavors; oilskins, stale tobacco-smoke, brine, burned grease, tar, and, as a background, fish. His ears almost immediately detected water noises running close by, and he could feel the pull of stout oak timber that formed the inner ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... glowing with a golden glory, Delighted me a season with its tale. It pleased the longest, but at last the story So oft repeated, to my heart grew stale. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and a crowd of more than fifty half-drunken men and women, smoking and drinking stale beer, sat at the little tables which were placed against the walls. The centre of the room was kept clear for the dancers. He was amazed to find among them a lot of boys and girls not out of their teens. Many of the dark-visaged brutes who sat at the tables watching the dancers were beyond a doubt ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... afterwards. The truth was perhaps that Dr. Spencer's visit was to every one more of an excitement and amusement than it was to Ethel. Not that she did not like him extremely, but after such a week as she had been spending, the home-world seemed rather stale and unprofitable. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... latter just getting out of bed. I shall always think of him in his proletarian grey woollen underdrawers and undershirt. In which he had evidently slept. He had the bed-habits of the masses. And the room was stale with bad air; like the masses, he, too, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... sweepers employed a boy to climb up the inside of the chimneys and sweep the parts that could not be reached with their brush from below, the method of screwing one stale to the end of another and reaching the top in that way being then unknown. These boys were often cruelly treated, and had even been known to be suffocated in the chimney. The nature of their occupation ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... in the British camp. Vaudreuil could not keep any news to himself. But he tried to keep news from Montcalm and to carry out thwarting plans of his own. Wolfe had no drawbacks like this. News from his camp was always stale, because the fleet was a perfect screen, and no one on the French side could tell what was going on behind it till long after the ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... the broad lady who paid for one seat and was compelled by Nature to use three, "you know there's only five in our family, and so I take just five slices of stale bread and have a bowl of water ready in which I've dropped a pinch of salt. Then I take a piece of butter about the size of a walnut, and thoroughly grease the bottom of a frying-pan; then beat five eggs ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... Sith, since, Sithen, afterwards, since, Skift, changed, Slade, valley, Slake, glen, Soil (to go to), hunting term for taking the water, Sonds, messages, Sort, company, Sperd, bolted, Spere, ask, inquire, Spered, asked, Sperhawk, sparrowhawk, Sprent, sprinkled, Stale, station, Stark, thoroughly, Stead, place, Stert, started, rose quickly, Steven, appointment,; steven ser. appointment made, Steven, voice, Stigh, path, Stilly, silently, Stint, fixed revenue, Stonied, astonished,; became confused, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... straps and the backs of seats, clutching each other with little gusts and ripples of laughter, they filled the aisle of the crowded car with a fresh and joyous life that touched the tired woman like a breath of spring. In all this work stale, stupidly weary, world there is nothing so refreshing as the wholesome laugh of a happy, care free, young girl. The woman whose heart was heavy with knowledge of life would have liked to take them in her arms. She felt ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... advance a judgment of their own, But catch the spreading notion of the town; They reason and conclude by precedent, And own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of author's names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men. Of all this servile herd, the worst is he That in proud dulness joins with Quality. A constant critic at the great ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... with the same wretched pretence of exclusive favoritism? And do we not know that no warrant has ever been given to you to recite a single line before the emperor, either in or out of the arena? We are here to revel, not to listen to your stale aphorisms upon death and immortality. Ho, there, more wine! Take off these viands, which already pall ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Scotland and other countries the peasantry use a Lichen, called Lecanora tartarea to furnish a red or crimson dye. It is found abundantly on almost all rocks, and also grows on dry moors. It is collected in May and June, and steeped in stale urine for about three weeks, being kept at a moderate heat all the time. The substance having then a thick and strong texture, like bread, and being of a blueish black colour, is taken out and made into small cakes of about 3/4 lb. in weight, which are wrapped ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... that stiffened rather than relaxed his lips. Then he drew out the duplicate key he always carried, and, inserting it quietly, opened the door. A close, unpleasant smell greeted him as he entered the small passage that divided the bed and sitting rooms—a smell of whiskey mingling with the odor of stale smoke. With a quick gesture he pushed open the bedroom door; then on the threshold he paused, a look of contempt and ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... love to them," interrupted Margaret, again laughing in the gayest fashion. "Could you blame the poor unfortunates for wanting to shin up them and pick peaches and apples and everything else? The only fruit they had ever seen was stale and on city stands, and when they saw the real article it was no wonder that they wanted it. ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... and when it has grown a little cold, add the yolk of one egg, and a few drops of lemon-juice. Sprinkle in a slice of stale bread, and enough grated cheese to flavor it strongly, and leave it to cool for two hours. Then shape into small pieces like corks, dip them into the beaten whites of your egg, and then into grated breadcrumbs. Have ready some hot fat, ...
— The Belgian Cookbook • various various
... themselves at leisure to mind him. I could observe the old Fellow was very uneasy at the Affront, and at his being obliged to repeat his Commands several times to no purpose; 'till at last one of the [Lads [2]] presented him with some stale Tea in a broken Dish, accompanied with a Plate of brown Sugar; which so raised his Indignation, that after several obliging Appellations of Dog and Rascal, he asked him aloud before the whole Company, Why he must be used with less Respect than that Fop there? pointing to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... arm of Vere's chair, speculative yellow eye observant of his master's carving, while the Swedish Cristina served us her good food with the spice of an occasional comment on farm or neighborhood events—how perfect a beginning for the day! How stale beside our breeze-swept table was any board at which I had ever sat! I do declare that I have never seen a more winning face than the bright one of my little cousin whom her world had pronounced "plain." Vere and I basked in ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... before this black shadow of war had loomed up with its deadly menace a great party of German editors had returned our visit and once again I had listened to speeches about the blood- brotherhood of the two nations, a little bored by the stale phrases, but glad to sit between these friendly Germans whom I had met in their own country. We clinked glasses again, sang "God Save the King" and the "Wacht am Rhein," compared the character of German and English literature, of German and English ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... cat lay asleep on a chair, a dog under the table. One perceived an odor of milk, apples, smoke, that indescribable smell peculiar to old farmhouses; the odor of the earth, of the walls, of furniture, the odor of spilled stale soup, of former wash-days and of former inhabitants, the smell of animals and of human beings combined, of things and of persons, the odor of time, and of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... we 're ca'd a wee before The stale "three score an' ten," When Joy keeks kindly at your door, Aye bid her welcome ben. About yon blissfu' bowers above Let doubtfu' mortals speir; Sae weel ken we that "heaven is love," Since ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the skillful shifting of painted masks, false-faces, continued uninterrupted its progress. A new lethargy enveloped Lee: his interest, his confidence, in what he was trying to prevent waned. What did it matter who went and who stayed? In the end it was the same, unprofitable and stale. All, probably, that his thought had accomplished was to rob his ride of its glow, make flat the taste of the whiskey and charged water he prepared. However, shortly a pervading warmth—but it was of the spirits—brought ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... frequently attempts to stale, and passes a little urine at each time; he still walks and stands with his back bound. Syr. papav. et rhamni, with tinct. ferr. mur., a large spoonful being given ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... broad expanse of white shirt front. At the other end is the so-called stage, while scattered about indiscriminately are the tables and chairs. The air is filled—yea, reeking—with the fumes of bad whiskey, stale beer, and the odor of foul smelling cheap tobacco smoke, and through all this haze the would-be "show," goes on, and the applause is manifested by whistles, cat calls, the pounding of feet on the floor and glasses on the tables. Occasionally some artist (?) will appear who does not seem to strike ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... back, through the lapse of nearly sixty years, upon that toilsome and perilous journey, notwithstanding its numerous harrowing events, memory presents it to me as an itinerary of almost continuous excitement and wholesome enjoyment; a panorama that never grows stale; many of the incidents standing out to view on recollection's landscape as clear and sharp as the things of yesterday. That which was worst seems to have softened and lapsed into the half-forgotten, while the good and happy features have grown brighter ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... been within five miles of the open Atlantic, though he had not seen it. Along the endless flat potato-fields, broken by pine-groves under whose sultry shadow negro cabins sweltered, the heat clung persistently. The show-tent was always filled with a stale scent ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... plaudits of the flower of the Stale the monarch affixed the cherished tokens to the heroes' breasts. "My Braves!" he exclaimed. "In the name of the Fatherland ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... abandon of a man who has changed a dress-coat for a morning-gown; "Certes, thou art destined for great things; even here, where fate had seemed 'to do its worst' to thee, a little paradise opens, and what, to ordinary mortals had proved but a 'flat, stale, and most unprofitable' quarter, presents to thee all the accumulated delight of a hospitable mansion, a kind, almost friendly, host, a condescending Madame Mere, and daughters too! Ah ye Gods! But what is this;" ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... expected an affirmative reply to this question, she was doomed to disappointment. Disgusted with such paltry meanness, Clemence, who had pushed her plate away, unable to partake of the stale food, replied quietly, "I should say they ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... prevented games for three days, and the players were getting a bit "stale" with nothing to do. Then the sun came out, the grounds dried up and the series was resumed. But the Cardinals ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... Jennie Stone solemnly, "burned incense upon any and all occasions—red letter days, labor days, celebrating Columbus Day and the morning after, I presume. But we moderns burn gasoline. And, phew! I believe I should prefer the stale smoke of incense in the unventilated pyramids of Egypt to this odor of gas. O-o-o-o, Tommy, do ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... never monotonous or stale. There was always Pisah, the fish, to be caught in the many streams and the little lakes, and Sabor, with her ferocious cousins to keep one ever on the alert and give zest to every instant that one ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at least, my troubles straight, (Let women have their boast;) Homed well with chance, and passing where The gods kept house would take a chair, Perchance at ease, with naught ado, With Jove would toss a quip or two; The nectar stale, A mug of ale On goodly ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... The lovelorn damsel reads well in erotic novels, but remember this, the men don't like stale beer." ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... fine for building; and also many cedar trees of beautiful color and strong perfume. Some Indians came alongside of us in their canoes, whom we called on board, and bought from them a very large striped bass, as large as a codfish in the Fatherland, for a loaf of stale bread worth about three stivers, Holland money, and some other fish for a little old ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... off into somewhere—one had no idea where. It was dingy, with a worn wooden floor, some heavy, plain, wooden benches lining the four sides, no pictures or ornaments of any kind. A single two-arm gas-pipe descended from the center of the ceiling. It was permeated by a peculiarly stale and pungent odor, obviously redolent of all the flotsam and jetsam of life—criminal and innocent—that had stood or sat in here from time to time, waiting patiently to learn what a deliberating fate ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... stories, even the "Black Brig," had not been failures, by any means. But I am sure that every man or woman who writes, or paints, or does creative work of any kind, will understand and sympathize with me. I had "gone stale," that is the technical name for my disease, and to "go stale" is no joke. If you doubt it ask the writer or painter of your acquaintance. Ask him if he ever has felt that he could write or paint no more, and then ask him how he liked the feeling. The fact that ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the book was called for; it was translated even into Japanese and Hindustani; the stagnation of scientific thought, which Buckle, only a few years before, had so deeply lamented, gave place to a widespread and fruitful activity; masses of accumulated observations, which had seemed stale and unprofitable, were made alive; facts formerly without meaning now found their interpretation. Under this new influence an army of young men took up every promising line of scientific investigation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... travelling. I shall send you to a particular place for a particular purpose, and you will have to write about it on lines which I shall indicate. The danger of this sort of life is that of getting stale. That's why I don't want you to see too much of each other. And last of all," he said, rather gravely, "you must do what I tell you to do. There must be no mistake about that—but with all the apparent discipline of it, I believe you will ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of bureaucracy, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Gentleman of Figure in a County would make his Family a Pattern of Sobriety, good Sense, and Breeding, and would kindly endeavour to influence the Education and growing Prospects of the younger Gentry about him, I am apt to believe it would save him a great deal of stale Beer on a publick Occasion, and render him the Leader of his Country from their Gratitude to him, instead of being a Slave to their Riots and Tumults in order to be made their Representative. The same thing might be recommended to all who have made any Progress in any Parts ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... were now vying with one another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... shocked people and that we ought, perhaps, to give it up. I listened closely to what she had to say, and at the end remarked that it appeared to me to be quite absurd. Godfrey Webb agreed with me and said that people who were easily shocked were like women who sell stale pastry in cathedral towns; and he advised us to take no notice whatever of what any one said. We hardly knew the meaning of the word "fast" and, as my mother went to bed punctually at eleven, it was unthinkable that men and women friends should not be allowed to join us. Our bedroom had ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... ale And beer that is stale Rosa-solis and damnable hum, But we will rack In the praise of sack 'Gainst Omne quod exit ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... insidiously crept in on my brain; and as before, the noise and glitter of the Toledo had been unbearable, so now I found it a relief and a distraction. Two maskers bedizened in violet and gold whizzed past me like a flash, one of them yelling a stale jest concerning la nnamorata—a jest I scarcely heard, and certainly had no heart or wit to reply to. A fair woman I knew leaned out of a gayly draped balcony and dropped a bunch of roses at my feet; out of courtesy I stooped to pick them up, and then raising ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... with a sanatorium, or a rest-cure. The walls were hidden by dark blue hangings, in which sparkled tiny mirrors, the floor was covered with Turkish rugs, the lights concealed inside lamps of dull brass bedecked with crimson tassels. In the air were the odors of stale tobacco-smoke, of cheap incense, and the sickly, sweet smell of opium. To Ford the place suggested a cigar-divan rather than a bedroom, and he guessed, correctly, that when Prothero had played at palmistry and clairvoyance this had been the place ...
— The Lost House • Richard Harding Davis
... all, that awful parody on municipal charity, the police station lodging room, is gone, after twenty years of persistent attack upon the foul dens,—years during which they were arraigned, condemned, indicted by every authority having jurisdiction, all to no purpose. The stale beer dives went with them and with the Bend, and the grip of the tramp on our throat has been loosened. We shall not easily throw it off altogether, for the tramp has a vote, too, for which Tammany, with admirable ingenuity, found a new use, when the ante-election inspection of lodging ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... never-changing tale Of mortal maladies is worn and stale. You cannot charm, or interest, or please, By harping on that minor chord, disease. Say you are well, or all is well with you. And God shall hear your words ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... wakes stale at morn, From heavy sleep that no rest brings: This life of quiet joy wakes fresh, And claps its wings ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies
... disagreeable. As most of the men who have attracted me have been great smokers, there is doubtless a direct association of ideas. It has only once occurred to me that an indifferent unpleasant smell became attractive in connection with some particular person. In this case it was the scent of stale tobacco, such as comes from the end of a cold cigar or cigarette. It was, and is now, very disagreeable to me, but, for the time and in connection with a particular person, it seemed to me more delightful and exciting than the most delicious perfume. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... length the old woman came into the room with two plates, one spoon, and a dirty cloth, which she laid upon the table. This appearance, without increasing my spirits, did not diminish my appetite. My protectress soon returned with a small bowl of sago, a small porringer of sour milk, a loaf of stale brown bread, and the heel of an old cheese all over crawling with mites. My friend apologized that his illness obliged him to live on slops, and that better fare was not in the house; observing, at the same time, that a milk diet was certainly the most healthful; and ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... the door, showed himself a burly individual, with traces of coal-dust in all comers not to be reached by hurried and not too fastidious ablutions. Clouds of tobacco-smoke preceded and followed him, and much stale incense from the fragrant weed exhaled itself from his well-worn corduroys. "I ha' not nivver seed him afore," he remarked after a gruff by no means-ill-natured greeting, signifying the stranger by a duck of the head ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... do men, Save for the thousandth man, deny themselves And live in meagreness to make sure a life Of meagreness by hearth stones long since stale; And live in ways, companionships as fixed As the geared figures of the Strassburg clock. You wonder at war? Why war lets loose desires, Emotions long repressed. Would you stop war? Then let men live. ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... although it possesses not a few drawbacks, can be made both amusing and instructive; we can even find something attractive in the quality of the local atmosphere, which suggests at one and the same time sunshine, garlic, incense, stale fish and wood smoke; it is the pungent but characteristic aroma of the South, filled "with spicy odours Time can never mar." And what truly charming pictures do the family groups present in the wide archways giving on the untidy courts ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... had to do any sums that made more than three," is the putative horse's comment. "But there are only two possible, alas! And the totals are stale, as ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... this light occurs more frequently in big, than small Oysters; in those that are pierced by the Worm, oftner, than {206} in those that are not, and rather upon the Convex-side, than the other; and more in fresh ones; than in the stale. ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... ay, to order goblets of champagne, and, in the end, not having change to repair the "damage" (a mean, but true, term, as often applied), they get young Brown to pay the complicated sum added up by the waiter, upon a mahogany ditto, in lieu of a slate, with stale stout spilled in the corner, receipted with a wipe of the towel:—and so, home in the "safety" cab, with large wheels and a spanking grey,—lettered along the side "Nil desperandum," thinking "handsome is as Hansom does;" tumbling into bed just before the peep o' ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... my soul— as the black cup, sullen and dark with fire, burns till beside it, noon's bright heat is withered, filled with dust— and into that noon-heat grown drab and stale, suddenly wind and thunder and swift rain, till the scarlet flower is wrecked in the slash of ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... must continually furnish his mind, and which, after he has acquired them, he must continually apply and exercise. They must be not only entries in note-books, to be hurriedly consulted; in the actor's phrase, he must be STALE in them; in a word of my grandfather's, they must be 'fixed in the mind like the ten fingers and ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... needs all the violence of the fresh, strong, monsoon winds to even partially purge these villages of the rank odours which cling to them at the end of the fishing season; and when all has been done, the saltness of the sea air, the brackish water of the wells, and the faint stale smells emitted by the nets and fishing tackle still tell unmistakable tales of the one trade in which every member of these communities ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Bacchus, later born, The old world was sure forlorn, Wanting thee; that aidest more The God's victories than before All his panthers, and the brawls Of his piping Bacchanals; These, as stale, we disallow, Or judge of thee meant: only thou His true Indian Conquest art; And, for Ivy round his dart, The reformed God now weaves A finer Thyrsus ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... up in bed, with her teapot, tea-cup, and a piece of stale loaf, laid out on a tray before her; and little Judy beside her, drinking out of a cracked mug. Judith's eyes had a strange look of fright in them, but there was an air of ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Garland, and his man Rowley. Aug. 13th, Mr. Thomas Sowthwell ryd to Prag ward from Trebon. He told us of the philosopher (his scholemaster to write) whose name was Mr. Swyft, who gave him a lump of the philosopher's stone so big as his fist: a Jesuit named Mr. Stale had it of him. Aug. 14th, Mr. Sowthwell cam againe. Aug. 24th, vidi divinam aquam demonstratione magnifici domini et amici mei incomparabilis D. Ed. Kelei ante meridiem tertia hora. Aug. 27th, John Basset (so namyng ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... to see the play "Bartholomew-fair," with puppets. and it is an excellent play; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it; only the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale and of no use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest. This night Knipp tells us that there is a Spanish woman lately come over that pretends to sing as well as Mrs. Knight; [A celebrated singer and favourite of Charles Il. Her portrait was engraved in 1749 ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... not scruple to put this diseased or unfortunate version of yourself into the jail cauldron, to stew there with others like or worse than himself, for doing what, in most cases, he actually could not help doing; and when at last he was ejected like stale refuse, you were indignant because his looks did not please you, because he bore upon him the stains and the stench which the cauldron had fastened on him, because he did not, in the teeth of the secret service, the postoffice ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... was full of reproach. "The very thought of that place, with its smell of stale beer and those awful creatures behind the bar, makes me shiver," he confessed. "I shall walk for an hour before lunch in Kensington Gardens. If I have a moment to spare I shall run into the Museum and spend a ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... feats of horsemanship are always well worth seeing, but the rest grows very tiresome on frequent repetition. Persons must be very fond of this sort of thing who can twice visit the circus, as year after year the clown repeats the same stale jests, and shows up the same style ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... up to him, but, to his amazement, none came. As a man may walk unhurt amid a shower of bullets, he had walked unseen under twenty policemen's eyes. From Castlereagh Street came a murmur of voices. The theatres were out, and a huge crowd, fresh from the painted scenes and stale odours of the stalls and gallery, watched with hilarious interest the harlequinade on the roofs. In half an hour a procession was formed, two deep, guarded by the police, and followed by a crowd stumbling over one another to keep pace ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... and all these pieces have their accidents, corresponding with the trines and quadrates, and conjunction and opposition, and ascendancy and decline—such as the heavenly bodies have; and the eclipse of the sun is figured by shah caim or stale mate;' and much more to the same purport. We question whether the astronomer-royal ever suspected he was illustrating his own science when engaged in one of his quiet games of chess with the master ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for some hours—I mean those ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Bacchus, later born, The old world was sure forlorn, Wanting thee, that aidest more The god's victories than before All his panthers, and the brawls Of his piping Bacchanals. These, as stale, we disallow, Or judge of thee meant; only thou His true Indian conquest art; And, for ivy round his dart, The reformed god now weaves A finer ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... those almond-cakes, Witberg! Well, I started on the job, and then of course the discovery was inevitable. The play, which I had not read since my youth, and then only in a mediocre Hebrew version, appeared unspeakably childish in places. Take, for example, the Ghost—these almond-cakes are as stale as sermons; command me a cream-tart, Witberg. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... were shut, and he was apparently quite insensible of her presence. For the first time she was conscious of a distressful faintness, which, as she had come suddenly out of the stinging frost into the little overheated room, which reeked with tobacco smoke and a stale smell of cooking, was not astonishing. She mastered it, however, and presently, seeing that Hawtrey did not move; glanced about her with some curiosity, for this was the first time she had ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... sharply. "When I ran after her she was standing in some spruces, screaming and pointing in front of her. I saw the blood on the ground, and——Here's Dudley's cap! I found it, all chewed, close by." She pulled out a rag of fur from under her snow-caked sweater; and as the stale reek of the Skunk's Misery wolf dope rose from the thing, I knew the smell in the room had been no fancy, and how Dudley Wilbraham had died. I wheeled and saw Macartney's face,—the face of a man who took me for a fool whose nose would tell ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... an Idealist) he united a fondness for observation, a love of the actual in nature, and a susceptibility to deep impressions from and interest in the objects of sense, which would have seemed to mark him out for a Realist. But is not this the true stale of the mind, instead of being; one which should excite astonishment? Is it not one-sidedness rather than many-sidedness that should be regarded as strange? Is it not as much an evidence of disease as the preponderance of one element or function in ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... impression and a stamp; stow, to stow, to bestow, steward, or stoward; stead, steady, stedfast, stable, a stable, a stall, to stall, stool, stall, still, stall, stallage, stage, still, adjective, and still, adverb: stale, stout, sturdy, stead, stoat, stallion, stiff, stark-dead, to starve with hunger or cold; stone, steel, stern, stanch, to stanch blood, to stare, steep, steeple, stair, standard, a stated measure, stately. In all ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... of portrait painters I gave in the same lecture has since been so frequently repeated in the Press that I fear it will be stale to most of my readers—the story of the man who called upon the portrait painter and asked him to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... as for preceding months and unstrained cereal, half of soft-cooked egg, both white and yolk, chopped or strained cooked vegetables, such as spinach and other greens, asparagus, carrots, celery, and squash, stale bread, crackers, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... to watch the flower set up its face. I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea, Its heaving roods of intertangled weed And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit; The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn, The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones, The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves, Rotting ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... closing in behind, followed quickly. Poor Noorunglely floundered into the net, up rushed a black fellow and, seizing her, wrung her neck. Having secured her, they would next secure her eggs; that they might be a trifle stale was a matter of indifference ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... I live in a very honest neighborhood. The only two thieves that were in it—Charley Folliott and George Austin—were hanged not long ago, and I don't know anybody else in the country side that would stale it." ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... cover them over with sand. Natives who have been on the watch then place sticks in the ground to mark the place where they may be found, and they are the next morning dug out in enormous quantities, and exported to various parts of Borneo and the adjacent islands. The eggs have a stale fishy flavour, are very sandy, and to my mind extremely nasty, although they are considered a great delicacy by the natives, who eat them ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... pound. This evening we met again for prayer, when I found that ten shillings sixpence more had come in since the morning. With this one pound ten shillings sixpence we were able to buy, even this Saturday evening, the usual quantity of bread (as it might be difficult to get stale bread on Monday morning), and have some money left. God be praised, who gave us grace to come to the decision not to take any bread to-day, as usual, nor to buy anything for which we cannot pay at once. We were very comfortable, thankfully taking this money ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as the most delicious perfume: that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose; nor was this effect to be wondered at, when we consider that this substance abounds with the self-same volatile salts that are so greedily ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... inconceivable that a Jewish God should turn Turk: as well expect him to turn Christian. But indirectly this redoubtable movement entered largely into my life by way of the great Eibeschuetz-Emden controversy. For it will not be stale in the memory of my readers that this lamentable controversy, which divided and embittered the Jews of all Europe, which stirred up Kings and Courts, originated in the accusation against the Chief Rabbi of the Three Communities that the amulets which he—the head of the orthodox ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that herrin'-gutted bush-ranger over yonder? He'd stale the milk out of your tea, he would, be the same token. Well, last night he got vicious and took a crack at my lines. I had rayson to suspect he'd be afther tryin' somethin' on, so I laid for him. I planted a certain mule where he could stale it an' guarded the rest four deep. Begob, will ye ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... mother did not for a moment pretend that her son was an honest man, getting his bread after an honest fashion. The Grinder's mode of life was too well known for even a mother to attempt to deny it. But she pretended that she was very honest herself, and appealed to sundry brandy-balls and stale biscuits in her window, to prove that she lived after a decent, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... "A stale crust was proffered. The cat ate it greedily, and afterwards rubbed himself gratefully against the man's ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... seem stale when we get back into the land of crowded business streets and schoolhouses?" grumbled Reade, as, perched on the seat of the camp wagon, he drove out onto the highway the next morning, followed by the other members of Dick ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... have walked like a lamb by the friend, by the friend, That stuck to my skirts like a burr; I have borne the stale talk without end, without end, Of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... to write down a full description of the country immediately behind our present line. The Skipper, for fear we should become stale, allowed us plenty of leave. We would make little expeditions to Bethune for the baths, spend an afternoon riding round Armentieres, or run over to Poperinghe for a chop. We even arranged for a visit to the Belgian lines, but that excursion was forbidden by a new order. Right through ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... sublimity, and a little humor, and a little antiquarianism,—all very neatly associated in a very charming picture, but not working together for a definite end. Or if the aim be higher, as was the case with Barrett and Varley, we are generally put off with stale repetitions of eternal composition; a great tree, and some goats, and a bridge and a lake, and the Temple at Tivoli, etc. Now we should like to see our artists working out, with all exertion of their concentrated powers, such marked pieces ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... contempt for this booby people which comes to celebrate the yoke preparing for it: these dull victims dancing before the palace of their sacrificer: this first consul designated the father of the nation which he was about to devour: this mixture of stupidity on one side, and cunning on the other: the stale hypocrisy of the courtiers throwing a veil over the arrogance of the master: all inspired me with an insurmountable disgust. It was necessary however to constrain one's feelings, and during these solemnities you were exposed to meet with official ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... as Doltaire had said, like a rat in a trap. But I would not let panic seize me. So I sat and ate the stale but sweet bread, took a long drink of the good water from the earthen jar, and then, stretching myself out, drew my cloak up to my chin, and settled myself for sleep again. And that I might keep up a kind delusion that I was not quite alone in the bowels ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... condition, however, that I should not smoke while working at them. He himself did not smoke, and could not bear the smell of smoke, and he showed me several of his MSS. which had become quite useless to him, because they smelt of stale tobacco smoke. I did all I could to guard these ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... on a crowded back seat, where, leaning one elbow on his knee, he shaded his eyes with his hand. On his right a big, sweaty farmer was smoking a stale pipe. The smell of the cheap, vile tobacco, bad as it was, became a welcome substitute for the odor of the ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... from the first, with its stale air, its chink of louis d'or, its cry of the croupiers, its strained faces about the tables, and its general atmosphere of wasted hopes and fears and needless misery ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... largely-gifted nature which, missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other circumstances than it is at present, and lies ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... bed, with her teapot, tea-cup, and a piece of stale loaf, laid out on a tray before her; and little Judy beside her, drinking out of a cracked mug. Judith's eyes had a strange look of fright in them, but there was an air of relief ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cart round by Hard Scrabble, Moderation, 'n' Scratch Corner way. Mis' Maddox used to buy all her baked victuals of him, 'specially after she found out he was a widower beginnin' to take notice. His cart used to stand at her door so long everybody on the rout would complain o' stale bread. But bime bye Fiddy begun to set at her winder when he druv up, 'n' bime bye she pinned a blue ribbon in her collar. When she done that, Mis' Maddox alles hed to take a back seat. The boys used to call it a danger signal. ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he to harden himself to the weather that he could not be induced to wear an overcoat in winter. "I will not give in to the cold," he said. For a year, on account of dyspepsia, he lived on buttermilk and stale bread, and wore a wet shirt next his body because his doctor advised it, although everybody else ridiculed the idea. This was while he was professor at the Virginia Military Institute. His doctor advised him to retire at nine o'clock; and, no matter where he was, or who ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... sniffed. A dull, "burnt" smell, some pungent, "scorched" odour, which he recognised as the stale stench of exploded cordite. He went into the tiny dining-room; ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... know what the sincerest form of flattery is, and certainly our dear old pet, Alice in Wonderland, whose infinite variety time cannot stale, will gracefully acknowledge the intenseness of the compliments conveyed in Olga's Dream, as written by NORLEY CHESTER, illustrated by Messrs. FURNISS AND MONTAGU (the illustrations will carry the book), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... all hands. And she saw glimpses, beautiful and compensatory, of the romantic quality of common life. She was in a little office of a perfectly ordinary boarding-house—(she could even detect the stale odours of cooking)—with a realistic man of business, and they were about to discuss a perfectly ordinary piece of scandal; and surely they might be called two common-sense people! And withal, the ordinariness and the midland gumption of the scene were shot through with the bright ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... He was a duly ordained priest in good standing—technically, at least—in the Catholic Church. He had all the confidence of a sophomore—age did not wither him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety. He questioned and contradicted everybody, young or old, regardless of position. But so cleanly was the man's mode of life, so intellectual, so personally unselfish and sincere was he, that although heretics were being burned in France by twos and sevens, yet for several ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... stands now at the same door. She says: "You tell me I have no intellect. Give me a chance." "You tell me I shall only embarrass politics; let me try." The only reply is the same stale argument that said to the Jews of Europe: You are fit only to make money; you are not fit for the ranks of the army, or ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... action."—A. Murray cor. "There is, indeed, one form of orthography which is akin to the subjunctive mood of the Latin tongue."—Booth cor. "To bring him into nearer connexion with real and everyday life."—Philological Museum, Vol. i, p. 459. "The commonplace, stale declamation of its revilers would be silenced."—Id. cor. "She [Cleopatra] formed a very singular and unheard-of project."—Goldsmith cor. "He [William Tell] had many vigilant, though feeble-talented and mean-spirited enemies."—R. Vaux cor. "These old-fashioned people would ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... slip on husks wet from Truth's lip, which drops them and grins— Shells where no throb stirs of life left in lobsters since joy thrilled their fins— Hues of the prawn's tail or comb that makes dawn stale, so red ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in a few minutes; and the party followed a waiter up stairs, and were shown into a small room, neatly furnished, though smelling villanously of stale ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... eating mouldy oats. There was a large amount of matted mycelium, and this when given to other horses for experiment, killed them within thirty-six hours." The writer has himself seen seven hogs die within a few days while being fed on mouldy corn. Flour which has become stale may produce similar injurious effects, although most of the germs are destroyed in the process of baking. It is quite probable, however, that a poisonous substance is generated by the mould fungus, which cannot be destroyed in this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... docksides is loud all the day, And the breezes come bringing off basin and pond And all the piled acres of lumber beyond From the Oregon ranges the tang of the pine And the breath of the Baltic as bracing as wine, In a fly-spotted window I there did behold, Among the stale odours of hot food and cold, A ship in a bottle some sailor had made In watches below, swinging South with the Trade, When the fellows were patching old dungaree suits, Or mending up oilskins and leaky ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... somewhere in the neighbourhood; and, like a trusty servant of the public, turned out of his bed instantly and went in search; till he discovered, hanging among what he judged to be the stems of ore-weed (Laminaria), three or four large pieces of stale thornback, of most evil savour, and highly prejudicial to the purity of the sea, and the health of the neighbouring herrings. Happy Squinado! He needed not to discover the limits of his authority, to consult any lengthy Nuisances' Removal Act, with its clauses, and counter- clauses, and ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... did not appeal to him when he awoke in the morning. He walked over, through the earliest light, to the hotel, where he made a meal of musty eggs, chemical-looking biscuits, and coffee of a rank hue and flavor, in an atmosphere of stale odors and flies, sickeningly different from the dainty ceremonials of Io's preparation. Rebuking himself for squeamishness, the station-agent returned to his office, caught an O.S. from the wire, took some general instructions, and went out to look ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... another, with the same wretched pretence of exclusive favoritism? And do we not know that no warrant has ever been given to you to recite a single line before the emperor, either in or out of the arena? We are here to revel, not to listen to your stale aphorisms upon death and immortality. Ho, there, more wine! Take off these viands, which already pall upon us! Bring ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in the door. And, as a rule, it was never even locked with a key. Lichonin pushed the door and they entered. It was dark in the room, because the window curtains were lowered. It smelt of mice, kerosene, yesterday's vegetable soup, long-.used bed linen, stale tobacco smoke. In the half-dusk some one who could not be seen was snoring deafeningly and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... your assistance, my friend, I might easily prove who I am, still, as you know I might find the detention inconvenient, I shall therefore sail early in the speronara. Your letters may be addressed to me as before, but bear in mind that your information is generally too stale. Now I will get a little rest, if you will show me ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... said he, "are monotonous in voice, monotonous in action, but Mrs. Woffington's delivery has the compass and variety of nature, and her movements are free from the stale uniformity that distinguishes artifice from art. The others seem to me to have but two dreams of grace, a sort of crawling on stilts is their motion, and an angular stiffness their repose." He then cited the most famous statues of antiquity, and quoted situations in plays where, by her fine dramatic ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... how Danes had come and burnt Harwich town. But the people told him to sing less stale news than that, for Harwich was close at hand. Now it was Halfden's ship which had done that, and the fires we saw before the fog came had been the beacons lit because ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... degenerated into boarding houses for the indigent and struggling younger generation, and the wrecks of the past, embodied, in even the blank stare of their exteriors, stupid mediocrity. He fumbled nervously in his pocket for his latch-key, and opening the door climbed the three stale flights to his room. He lighted both gas-jets, but even then the gloom remained. He craved more light—the dazzling light of arc-lamps, the glare reflected from polished mirrors. Better absolute darkness than this. He turned out the gas and throwing open his window leaned far out over the sill. ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... keeper. "The man who runs the hotel, Mr. Brown, had a lot of trouble with him because he wouldn't pay his bill—said it was too high. Then he came here once and said the meat wasn't fresh and the bread was stale and sour. I came close to pitching him out. Don't let him walk over you—if he does ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... them to pieces with her fingers; and afterward fried the already over-roasted meat with onions, garlic, red pepper, and oil, which is always rancid in Portugal, from the custom of never pressing the olives until they are stale. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... which has acquired such a reputation since so many of the best people from town have taken villas here; is his Majesty to make the journey in one of these third-class carriages, with the chance of travelling in company with tradesman stinking of stale cheese?—with folk who, moreover—well, perhaps in common decency I ought not to go on, as ladies are present. (Laughter.) "Economy," I hear some one suggest. That word is in great favour nowadays. But I should like to know what economy there is getting your clothes soiled? ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... sadly in the way. She herself had lost almost all interest in life; she was deaf and infirm and cross. She was condemned to eat the plainest of food; and I used to see her mumbling little slices of stale bread, and looking with malignant envy at the children eating big hunches of heavy cake. It was impossible to give her any pleasure, and she had no sort of intention of pleasing anyone else. It was so difficult to see what kind of effect this dismal purgatory ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who are incapable of invention, are tempted at once by their indolence, and by the hope of not being discovered or minded in their borrowing from others, to give stale or hackneyed compositions, which having seen in one country, they flatter themselves they may palm for new and original upon the public in another. Thence it is that the audience is cloyed with repetitions of pantomime dances; perhaps some ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... wanted is a new Martin Chuzzlewit, told by a wiser Mark Tapley. It is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in the mood of Dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller. But if Dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been a truer meaning in Mark Tapley's happiness. For it ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... upstairs, two hours afterwards, and naps are not yet over in the kitchen. The hatchments in the dining-room look down on crumbs, dirty plates, spillings of wine, half-thawed ice, stale discoloured heel-taps, scraps of lobster, drumsticks of fowls, and pensive jellies, gradually resolving themselves into a lukewarm gummy soup. The marriage is, by this time, almost as denuded of its show and garnish ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... But, tell me, is it true, according to a rumor which has reached us in our seclusion, that these good Christians pro tem, are considering the advisability of having rat poison served to us in place of the delicious stale bread and flat water which now comprise our ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Roll slices of stale bread into fine crumbs. Brush small custard cups, or a border mold with melted butter, sprinkle over a few currants or raisins, or any fruit that you may have left over. Fill the cups with crumbs. Beat ...
— Made-Over Dishes • S. T. Rorer
... time Jacob started a fashion that "custom cannot stale," a fashion that while time lasts shall be as cheap as roses, laughter and sunshine, as thrilling as wine, as sweet as innocence and as new as love, a fashion that wealth, time or country cannot monopolize, and one that is as sweet to the beggar, and sweeter ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... satisfactorily treated by placing the affected birds in warm, dry, well ventilated quarters, admitting sunlight if possible, but excluding all drafts of air. Feed stale bread, middlings, etc. Also place the fowls in a moderately air tight coop and compel them to inhale steam from hot water and Turpentine. This is readily done by placing the water and Turpentine in a pan and then insert a hot stone or brick in the solution. Force them to inhale ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... bare and miserable and the air heavy with the smell of dirt and stale tobacco. Charity's heart sank. Old derided tales of the Mountain people came back to her, and the woman's stare was so disconcerting, and the face of the sleeping man so sodden and bestial, that her disgust was tinged with a vague dread. She was not afraid for herself; ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... England.—Having completed his St. Jerome, after Corregio's famous picture, he is elected an Honorary Member of the Academy of Parma, and invited to Court.—He proceeds by the way of Genoa towards France.—Reflections on the Stale of Italy.—Adventure on reaching the French ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... only half-smoked, half-full, and standing amid a pool of wet, which had evidently been spilt by a not very steady hand. The windows were closed, so that the smoke clung to what little furniture there was in the room, and the whole scent of the place was an abominable compound of stale tobacco ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... for orders. The butcher's boy came whistling down the lane to deliver the rump-steak or mutton-chop I had decided on for dinner; the greengrocer delivered his vegetables; the cheesemonger took solemn affidavit concerning the freshness of his stale eggs and the superior quality of a curious article which he called country butter, and declared came from a particular dairy famed for the excellence of its produce; the milkman's yahoo sounded cheerfully in the morning hours; and the letter-box was filled with cards from all ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... area is too remote from markets for poultry production. The locations around the big cities in this section are excellent for poultry farming, as they are so far removed from the great farm region that their bulk of imported eggs are of necessity somewhat stale. California is good chicken country. The Puget Sound country is rather too damp. In the interior western regions the chicken business has not done well, chiefly because the atmosphere is too dry for the methods ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... pig of a suitable size, clean it well, and rub the inside with pepper and salt. Make a stuffing of bread, butter, parsley, sage and thyme; if the bread is stale, pour a little boiling water on it; mix altogether; fill the pig, and sew it up with strong thread; put in the skewers and spit, and tie the feet with twine; have a pint and a half of water in the bottom of the tin kitchen, ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... addition of salt, pepper and other ingredients brought the initial cost up to twenty-nine cents. This made enough soup for ten or twelve liberal servings. The lean meat removed from the soup was minced and mixed with not more than ten cents' worth of diced potatoes, stale bread crumbs, milk, seasoning and herbs before being baked as a supper dish for five people, who by their bland smiles and "scotch plates" attested that the viands both looked "tony" ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... Pepperleighs' house, poet or no poet, and, what was more to the point, he carried with him three great bricks of Eliot's ice cream—in green, pink and brown layers. He struck the verandah just at the moment when Browning was getting too stale and dreary for words. His brain was all sizzling and jolly with the bromo-seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks and Zena ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with her to help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together, they were so ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... came to supper; a writer and two painters, with their wives. A grim evening—never more so than when the conversation turned on that perennial theme—the freedom, spiritual, mental, physical, requisite for those who practise Art. All the stale arguments were brought forth, and had to be joined in with unmoved faces. And for all their talk of freedom, Lennan could see the volte-face his friends would be making, if they only knew. It was not 'the thing' to seduce young girls—as if, forsooth, there were ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... befall people in real life. What do these tame ducks really know of the adventure of living? If the weather is bad, they are snugly housed. If it is cold, there is a furnace in the cellar. If they are hungry, the shops are near at hand. It is all as dull, flat, stale, and unprofitable as adding up a column of figures. They might as well be brought ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... fire,—coolie who rises out of the dim smoke like the evil genii in the Arabian tale. There is no chimney, there is no window, there is no drainage. We are in a cubic sink, where we can scarcely stand erect. From the small door pours a dense volume of smoke, some of it stale smoke, which our entry has forced out of the corners; the kitchen will only hold so much smoke, and we have made havoc among the cubic inches. Underfoot, the thin planks sag into standing pools, ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... sheltered dip; armourers at their benches busy with sick rifles; fatigue-parties for straw, rations, and ammunition; long processions of single blue figures turned sideways between the brown sunless walls. One understood after a while the nightmare that lays hold of trench-stale men, when the dreamer wanders for ever in those blind mazes till, after centuries of agonizing flight, he finds himself stumbling out again into the white blaze and horror of the mined front—he who thought he ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... complement of eggs in a nest, it throws out one and deposits its own instead. I revisited the nest a few days afterward and found an egg again cast out, but none had been put in its place. The nest had been abandoned by its owner and the eggs were stale. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... Teutonic writers have gone back to these fountains, flowing in these wild mythic wastes of the Past, and have drunk inspiration thence. Percy, Scott, and Carlyle, by so doing, have infused new sap from the old life-tree of their race into our modern English literature, which had grown effete and stale from having had its veins injected with too much cold, thin, watery Gallic fluid. Yes, Walter Scott heard the innumerous leafy sigh of Yggdrasil's branches, and modulated his harp thereby. Carlyle, too, has bathed in the three mystic fountains which flow fast by its roots. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... for you, my dear; I have finished it. Mrs. B. I humbly thank you for giving it to me when you have done with it. I hate stale news. Is there anything in the paper? for I can not be at ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Brevoort and Washington Irving and others one gets delightful little pictures—vignettes, as it were—of social life of that day. Mr. Emmet writes begging for some snuff "no matter how old. It may be stale and flat but cannot be unprofitable!" Brevoort asks a friend to dine "On Thursday next at half-past four o'clock." He paints us a quaint sketch of "a little, round old gentleman, returning heel taps into decanters," at a soiree, adding: "His heart smote ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... bottom of his jam tin. They had been served with a ration of war-bread, and several of the boys offered me a share of their scanty allowance, but the first mouthful was all I could take. It was sour, heavy, and stale. ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... parcel came; I had been in camp two months and I had failed eighteen pounds. One of the boys came into my hut and told me there were two parcels for me. I told him to stop fooling, that his joke was stale. But he said, "No, it's straight goods this time, here are the tickets"—so I rushed off to where the parcel office was and got in line. Pretty soon my turn came and I handed in my tickets. A big German brought ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... at Charlie's expense, and I resumed my work, grave as an owl. That furnished amusement until it grew stale, when Charlie came to ask me my name, and I told him it was ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Their dark eyes are vigilant; they know a lover when they see him. But there is no twilight in these parts, and the curtain of the dark falls upon the scene as suddenly as the screen of the theatre upon the denouement of the tragedy. Then comes a cup of truly infernal tea, the mastication of a stale roll, with butter, also stale,—then, more sitting on the piazza,—then, retirement, and a wild hunt after mosquitoes,—and so ends the first day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... contagious little ripple you ever heard. She seemed not to grieve over her defeat, but dimpled as though it were a huge joke, the thought of which rather pleased her than otherwise. Victory had grown stale for her, although ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... the sight of trickling water down amongst some stones suggested to him the fact that he had not broken his fast that morning, so sitting down upon a block of stone, he brought out the remains left in his wallet and ate them, stale as they were, as he looked round him, finding that he had climbed to higher ground than he expected; but though he looked eagerly toward the part where the ship must have lain in the middle of the wave-swept plain, everything was cut off by a dull, misty ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... churches. I believe your clergy know no more of the real doctrines of Christianity, those deep and mystical truths underlying the teachings of Christ, than the child at his mother's knee. I have been to your great cathedrals and churches. I saw only lip-service and routine. I heard only stale maxims, weak explanations of the allegories and parables that fill your Biblical records; flowing rhetoric and vague expressions of some undefinable joy and glory in an equally undefinable Hereafter, that was sometimes described as a place, and sometimes as a state. That was all. I ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... spontaneous impulses of his nature, the man devoid of genius who seeks to imitate him is not willing to consider his own nature a worse guide than that of the great poet. This accounts for the fact that masterpieces of simple poetry are commonly followed by a host of stale and unprofitable works in print, and masterpieces of the sentimental class by wild and fanciful effusions,—a fact that may be easily verified on questioning ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... extreme injustice, is now become a stale proverb in discourse.—CICERO: De Officiis, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Dustin and she forgot the beer growing stale on the counter, forgot the slot machines against the walls, forgot everything but this man who for this minute stood out from a world of men with this unhealed sorrow ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... At last, however, the mandarin cried out: "These tricks are very good of their kind, but how about those idle boasts of changing rivers into oceans and mice into elephants? Did you not say that you came from the land of dreams? These tricks you have done are stale and shopworn. Have you nothing new with which to regale my guests ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... dressed in a gay-coloured dressing-gown. Beckoning to me with his hand, he led me to his own room—I had almost said, to his lair. The room, dark and close, soaked through and through with the sour smell of stale tobacco, suggested a comparison with the lair of ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... And see—the sky is bluer! The world, so ancient yesterday, To-day seems strangely newer; All that was wearisome and stale Has wrapped itself in rosy veil— The wraith of winter, grown so pale That smiling spring peeps ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... mortification an instance of that strain of disillusionment which runs like a dark thread through the brilliant texture of the literature of the Grand Siecle. Racine had known to the full the uses of this world, and he had found them flat, stale, and unprofitable; he had found that even the triumphs of his art were all compact of worldliness; and he had turned away, in an agony of renunciation, to lose himself in the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... that earth would never do, unless a bit of Heaven it had. Men needed eyes divinely blue to toil by day and still be glad. A world where only men and boys made merry would in time grow stale, And so He shared His Heavenly joys that faith in Him should never fail. He sent us down a thousand charms, He decked our ways with golden curls And laughing eyes and dimpled arms. He let ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... However, even the man in athletic training needs less food than is customary for men in training to take. If the foot ball teams would eat somewhat less than they do and a smaller proportion of meat, they would be much less likely to "train stale." ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... abroad, forsooth, there's none so clean, Nothing so trim, so elegant, as they; Nor, when they sup with a gallant, so nice! To see these very creatures' gluttony, Filth, poverty, and meanness, when at home; So eager after food, that they devour From yesterday's stale broth the coarse black bread:— All this to know is safety ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... was the matter with my own ego? My conscience reported a clean bill of health, I had gone to bed early the previous night wishing to prepare for the ordeal. Evidently I was out of condition (critics are like prize-fighters, they must keep in constant training else they go "stale"). Or was the music to blame? Schoenberg is, I said to myself, the crudest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his victim's flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you receive another horrible ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... admirable mixture for salutary application which we know as art. Art deals with what we see, it must first contribute full-handed that ingredient; it plucks its material, otherwise expressed, in the garden of life—which material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable. But it has no sooner done this than it has to take account of a PROCESS—from which only when it's the basest of the servants of man, incurring ignominious dismissal with no "character," does it, and whether under some muddled pretext ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... discovered to be in effect living for the sake of their leisure and regarding their daily work as uninteresting drudgery, with the result that life as a whole comes to be for them dreary and profitless and stale. A Christian man's life-work ought not to have the character of drudgery, but of sheer ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... nutritive value of vegetables Exclusive diet of vegetables not desirable To select vegetables Poison in potato sprouts Stale vegetables a cause of illness Keeping vegetables To freshen withered vegetables Storing winter vegetables Preparation and cooking To clean vegetables for cooking Methods of cooking Time required for cooking various vegetables Irish potato, description of The chemistry ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... necessary," he began, "to discuss what has been done in Galavia. That is long since a stale story. Our governments, acting in concert, made it possible to remove Karyl and crown Louis." He smiled quietly. "You know how short a reign Louis enjoyed before death claimed him. Perhaps you do not know that his death was not unforeseen ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... who boarded with them last winter will give a month's rent because he knows the father of the family is out of work; the baker across the street who is fast being pushed to the wall by his downtown competitors, will send across three loaves of stale bread because he has seen the children looking longingly into his window and suspects they are hungry. There are also the families who, during times of business depression, are obliged to seek help from the county or some benevolent society, but who are themselves most ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... does our proud ignorance Learning call? We oddly Plato's paradox make good, Our knowledge is but mere remembrance all; Remembrance is our treasure and our food; Nature's fair table-book, our tender souls, We scrawl all o'er with old and empty rules, Stale memorandums of the schools: For learning's mighty treasures look Into that deep grave, a book; Think that she there does all her treasures hide, And that her troubled ghost still haunts there since she died; Confine her walks to colleges and schools; Her priests, her train, and followers, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... from the town for a while, without feeling at a loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a postchaise or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... causas humilium, to help them to their right, patrocinantur afflictis, [512]but all is for their own good, ut loculos pleniorom exhauriant, they plead for poor men gratis, but they are but as a stale to catch others. If there be no jar, [513]they can make a jar, out of the law itself find still some quirk or other, to set them at odds, and continue causes so long, lustra aliquot, I know not ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... a different face on the transaction, but it added spice to the operation; and Napoleon actually succeeded in getting for his stale home bread, goodly sized pieces of fresh chestnut bread, and enough of the much-loved broccio, and bunches of luscious grapes, "to boot," to provide him with a generous meal. But the next day the shepherd boys rebelled; they told Napoleon that his bread was stale, and ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... first indication I received of Mademoiselle Prefere's character, which I was able to see more of later on. A scared-looking servant took my card, and abandoned me without one word of hope at the door of a chilly parlour full of that stale odour peculiar to the dining- rooms of educational establishments. The floor of this parlour had been waxed with such pitiless energy, that I remained for awhile in distress upon the threshold. But happily observing that little strips of woollen carpet had been scattered over the floor in front ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official. On that score of the necessity or versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of "Guild Socialism" which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty and Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence of ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... powers and passions shall be considered in their place. But, whatever these powers are, or upon what principle soever they affect the mind, it is absolutely necessary that they should not be exerted in those things which a daily and vulgar use have brought into a stale unaffecting familiarity. Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... most suspicious account, in which, according to all appearances, she must have sunk at least ten good years; allowance, too, being made for the havoc which a long course of hackneyship and hot waters must have made of her constitution, and which had already brought on, upon the spur, that stale stage in which those of her profession are reduced to think of showing company, instead of ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... the city, changed its aspect according to the time and state of the atmosphere. On calm mornings it was a yellowish green and smelled slightly of stale water,—organic water, animal water. The oyster stands established on its wharfs appeared sprinkled with this water ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... air smelt! I told myself that it was worse even than the impenetrable darkness—and that was bad enough. I recalled to mind how I had gone through tunnels—this very one among others—in a comfortable lighted carriage, and had drawn up the window, sharply and suddenly, to keep out the stale, poisonous air; and this was the atmosphere I was to breathe for the next hour! I shuddered at the prospect. But it was not long before I was forced to acknowledge that it was the darkness quite as much as the stifling air which ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... him down upon at night, or when weary of sitting in the high-backed, creaking armchair. Uncleanness met the eye on every side—in the one greasy plate, on which lay a lump of repulsive-looking food; in the broken-mouthed jug, which reeked with the smell of stale beer; in the window, whose bemired and cobwebbed panes kept out more light than they admitted; in the ceiling, between whose smoke-grimed rafters large rents allowed many an abomination to drop down from the crowded room above; in the ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... speed, beating drums and clashing cymbals as an accompaniment, while others blew occasional blasts on the colossal silver horns or trumpets, which probably resemble those with which Jericho was encompassed. The music, the discordant and high-pitched monotones, and the revolting odours of stale smoke of juniper chips, of rancid butter, and of unwashed woollen clothes which drifted through the doorway, were over-powering. Attempted fights among the horses woke me often during the night, and the sound of worship was always borne over the ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... she had entered on its pleasures with eager zest, but of late she had begun to find them wearisome. They no longer satisfied her. If this were the result of a few years' experience, what would she feel when she had grown jaded with time and everything was stale? Then her glimpse of the simple, healthful western life had come as a revelation. It was real, a bracing struggle, in which no effort was wasted but produced tangible results: broad stretches of splendid wheat, ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... Those are the real unfortunates, who have sold themselves for a mess of potage, that for the most part they are never even allowed to eat, since before the bell rings it has probably been deposited by heaven knows what hand of Circumstance in someone else's plate, or gone stale and been thrown away. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... worthy reader, to show you the whimsical crowd of associations that are apt to beset my mind on mingling among English scenes. I hope they may, in some measure, plead my apology, should I be found harping upon stale and trivial themes, or indulging an over-fondness for any thing antique and obsolete. I know it is the humour, not to say cant of the day, to run riot about old times, old books, old customs, and old buildings; with ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... very quiet. It was so quiet that Mary V held her breath and was tempted to turn and run away. She waited for a minute, her nostrils widened to the pent odor of stale cigarette smoke that clings to a bachelor's cabin in warm weather. She tiptoed across the room to where Johnny's cot stood and timidly passed her hands above the covers. Emboldened by its flat emptiness, Mary V turned and felt along the window ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... be a familiar sight to see the saloons of Baxter, Mott and Mulberry streets filled with these boys. It was only a few years ago that they had their own theatre, yclept "The Grand Duke's Theatre," at 21 Baxter street, in the cellar under a stale beer dive, where really clever performances were given of an imitative character, by a company of boys; and which, by the way, was the only theatre which for years defied the efforts of the authorities to collect the license. The admission fee was ten cents, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... argyment; in fac', it's clean stale, if it's no' rotten. Doctor Grant wud hae sniffit at it. And what's mair, it's no' an argyment ava', for I hae mony a dinner o' the sermons that I gathered in thae far back days. I aye eat and sup off that when ye an' yir fowk's ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... affair to me, then or after. I don't think we spoke on the way to the ranch; I was busy wishing I'd been around in that part of the world thirty years before, and thinking what a lot of fun I had missed by not being as old as dad. A quarrel thirty years old is either mighty stale and unprofitable, or else, like wine, it improves with age. I meant to ride over to King's Highway some day, and see how he would have welcomed dad thirty ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... blot from the story of every-day life all reminders of the ordinary human relations, as commonplace and insignificant, and to mingle all society in one concourse of atoms, in which the only distinctions shall be those of rank; whereas the sole power to keep social intercourse from growing stale is the recognition of the immortal and true in all the simple human relations. Then we look upon all men with reverence, and find ourselves safe and at home in the midst of divine intents, which may be violated and striven with, but can never be escaped, because the will of God is the very life and ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... resolved that age should not wither nor custom stale the charms of the beloved volumes. And that he should love them to the end. His mother thought that he might grow tired of them some day and told ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... you said was the way to live. For you muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans, And your rooms at college was beastly — more like a whore's than a man's — Till you married that thin-flanked woman, as white and as stale as a bone, An' she gave you your social nonsense; but where's that kid o' your own? I've seen your carriages blocking the half o' the Cromwell Road, But never the doctor's brougham to help the missus unload. (So there isn't even a grandchild, an' the Gloster family's done.) Not like your ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... the parlor or the field. You think him a good dog, looking at him here: but I wisht you seen him on the side ov Sleeve-an-Eirin! Be my soul, you'd say the hill was running away from undher him. O, I wisht you had been wid me," says he, never letting on to see the dog stale, "one day, last Lent, that I was coming from mass. Spring was near a quarther ov a mile behind me, for the childher was delaying him wid bread and butther at the chapel door; when a lump ov a hare jumped out ov the plantations ov Grouse Lodge and ran acrass the road; so I gev the whilloo, ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... each spot a wound doth print, And each speck hath a sting within't; Till he but one new blister is, And swells his own periphrasis. Then fainting, sick, and yellow-pale, She baths him with her sulph'rous stale; Thus slacked is her Stygian fire, And she vouchsafes now to retire. Anon the toad begins to pant, Bethinks him of th' almighty plant, And lest he peece-meal should be sped, Wisely doth finish himself dead. Whilst the gay girl, as was her fate, Doth ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... in them which we who are poor and plain need at all envy, and that instead of the perennial smell of the grass and woods and shores, their typical redolence is of soaps and essences, very rare may be, but suggesting the barber shop—something that turns stale and musty ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... hear women about you gasp with mingled surprise and disgust, their sensibilities wholly outraged, but unwilling laughter in their minds when the Widow Quinn says to Christy, after his praise of Pegeen, "There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop." Such gasps are nothing, however, to those they utter when they hear Mary Doul tell Molly Byrne "when the skin shrinks on your chin, Molly Byrne, there ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... only hit them off when you were awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too, that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination bodies forth? It is indeed the verbum caro factum—the ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... seem that impatience was sometimes expressed at the poetic prologues and lengthy Inductions of the dramatists. The prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher's "Woman Hater," 1607, begins: "Gentlemen, Inductions are out of date, and a prologue in verse is as stale as a black velvet cloak and a bay garland; therefore you have it in plain prose, thus——." But the alteration did not please, apparently; at any rate, upon a subsequent production of the play, the authors furnished it with a prologue in verse ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the bit of stale news impressed him curiously. Why had Miss Margery interested herself in the details of the New Orleans bank robbery? Why—with no apparent special reason—should she have remembered it at all? or remembering it, have known where to look for the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... mind happens to be inactive, it sits up querulously and insists on attention. The man's mind is indeed rather like an unfortunate domestic servant who, though not always at work, is never off duty, never night or day free from the menace of a damnable electric bell; and it is as stale as that servant. His business is capable of ringing the bell when the man is eating his soup, when he is sitting alone with his wife on a warm summer evening, and especially when he wakes just before dawn ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... any more of that stale joke,' said Elizabeth; 'it is really only a poetical license to use a sea-flag for a land-flag, and Helen had the advantage of us, since we none of us knew that Pennant signified anything ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... even the "Black Brig," had not been failures, by any means. But I am sure that every man or woman who writes, or paints, or does creative work of any kind, will understand and sympathize with me. I had "gone stale," that is the technical name for my disease, and to "go stale" is no joke. If you doubt it ask the writer or painter of your acquaintance. Ask him if he ever has felt that he could write or paint no more, and then ask him how he liked the feeling. The fact that he has written or ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the old Goat, "I'll send the fox off, and come back in a few minutes to bring you some stale cabbage leaves." ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... "No, no! Nothing so stale as that! Why, it would hardly take in the juniors for more than a minute. I'm angling for bigger fish. I want ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... gloomy hall was not pleasant. The red wall-paper was soiled and torn, and weird shadows flickered from the small gas taper that blinked from the ceiling. There were suggestions of old dinners, stale fried potatoes and pork in all the corners, and one moving toward the stairs seemed to stir them up and set them going ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... to think that thou couldst so dull my sight at mid-day, that I should mistake a wolf for a sheep. But well sung is the proverb, 'The heart of a fool will conceive folly.' So this your device and counsel was stale and utterly senseless; but the work that thou hast accomplished is full of wisdom. Wherefore, rejoice, Nachor, and be exceeding glad. I render thee many thanks, that thou hast been to-day advocate of the truth, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... man's Despair, which runs Like subtle electric blood through all the hulls, And tips each masthead with a glimmering candle Blue pale and flickering like a ghost? For you Are too much lit to mark a corposant. Nor yours the stale smell of the unhealthful stream, Clotted with mud and sullen with its weeds, Who carry your own air with you, blest sweet And drencht with many scattered fragrances. You, sailing in golden ignorance, know not The anxious flow of life under ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... itself is a silly place, maybe, when a man's a fool and talker. OWEN — sharply. — Well, go, take your choice. Stay here and rot with Naisi or go to Conchubor in Emain. Conchubor's a wrinkled fool with a swelling belly on him, and eyes falling downward from his shining crown; Naisi should be stale and weary. Yet there are many roads, Deirdre, and I tell you I'd liefer be bleaching in a bog-hole than living on without a touch of kindness from your eyes and voice. It's a poor thing to be so lonesome you'd squeeze kisses ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... last clean copy. She had worked hard each afternoon, and conscientiously, only to be filled at the last with despair and despondence. She had read, re-read, written and re-written it, until she knew every word by heart, and all seemed stale, dull, and trivial. ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... imprisoned; a few arms were secured; and in the house of Mr. Standish, at Standish-hall, they found the draft of a declaration to be published by king James at his landing. As this prosecution seemed calculated to revive the honour of a stale conspiracy, and the evidences were persons of abandoned characters, the friends of those who were persecuted found no great difficulty in rendering the scheme odious to the nation. They even employed the pen of Ferguson, who ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the Tobacco Club and not of the State Council," said Pollnitz, in a fawning voice. "If your majesty designed to be angry, it was not necessary to light the pipes and fill the beer-mugs; for while you are neither smoking nor drinking, the pipe goes out, and the beer becomes stale." ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... now bring its brilliant bulletin to the Yankee nation. That nation does not regard the punctual rising of the sun as more lawfully due to it than a victory every morning. And those glorious achievements of SHERIDAN in the Valley were grown cold and stale, and even plainly hollow and rotten—insomuch that, after totally annihilating the army of EARLY at least three times, and so clearing the way to Lynchburg, instead of marching up to Lynchburg the heroick ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... not look towards him, but she was conscious that he was eying her intently. She put aside the bowl, and began to adjust Jigger's pillow with deft fingers, while the lad watched her with a worship worth any money to one attacked by ennui and stale with purchased pleasures. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... economy of a cook-shop. Endless are the jokes about sausages—roast and boiled beef are cut, and come to again, for a great variety of facetiae—in short, the entire stock of fun is cooked up from the bill of fare. The master gives his instructions to his "cutter" about "working up the stale gravy" with the utmost precision, and the "sarver out" undergoes a course of instruction highly edifying ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... door into a room so dark and so thick with stale tobacco smoke that at first Scott could ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... paid play-actor come here to conjure. I'm not here to do stale tricks; I'm here to see through 'em. I say it's an old ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... against the workers in their struggle for better conditions. By means of newspaper-made war hysteria the profiteers of Big Business entrenched themselves in public opinion. By posing as "100% Americans" (how stale and trite the phrase has become from their long misuse of it!) these social parasites sought to convince the nation that they, and not the truly American unionists whose backs they were trying to break, were working ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... not water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay, abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing was to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... is sometimes found disconnected and alone. It is occasionally caused by calculous concretions in the bladder,—which should be removed,—causing very acute abdominal pain to the animal. She makes frequent efforts to stale, passing but a few drops of urine at a time. The pulse is full and rapid; mouth clammy; nose dry; eyes bloodshot; appetite lost; moaning, and ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... as idle children feel when destroying for their own cruel sport the velvety wonder of a moth's wing, or the radiant rose and emerald pinions of a dragon-fly. I was a fool—so I was told with many a languid sneer and stale jest—to talk of hidden mysteries in the whisper of the wind and the dash of the waves—such sounds were but common cause and effect. The stars were merely conglomerated masses of heated vapor condensed by the work of ages into meteorites and from meteorites into worlds—and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... big room, only broken by the singing that floated up from below, made her yawn. The bronzes, the albums, and the pictures on the walls, representing a ship at sea, cows in a meadow, and views of the Rhine, were so absolutely stale that her eyes simply glided over them without observing them. The holiday mood was already growing tedious. As before, Anna Akimovna felt that she was beautiful, good-natured, and wonderful, but now it seemed to her that that was of no use to any one; it seemed to her that she did ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... only from your canteens. If the canteens fail, never fill them from flowing water unless the Indians also drink from the stream. There are always small pools to be found, and, though their water may be warm and stale, it is not likely to be poisoned, as ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... becoming unbearable—a stench of misery as when the human animal eschews all cleanliness to wallow in filth. And matters were made worse by the smell from a small, improvised market—the emanations of the rotting fruit, cooked and sour vegetables, and stale fried fish which a few poor women had set out on the ground amidst a ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... were alarmed at the evils of the reconstruction and were anxious to see the corrupt political leaders deprived of further influence over the race. To others the constantly recurring Southern problem was growing stale, and they desired to hear less of it. Within the Republican party in each Southern State, there were serious divisions over the spoils. First it was carpetbagger and Negro against the scalawag; later, when the black leaders insisted that those who furnished ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... new gravestones every day,— But, come, regale us with appropriate detail, Those disillusions weeping at the fountains, say, Those new disgusts, just like their brothers, littered stale, ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... meal); the fruits, excepting the oranges, were very indifferent, and he takes particular exception to the banana, which he had not tasted before, it was not at all to his liking. The water also was very bad, and the crew preferred what they had brought with them, though it was very stale. ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... Through her veil he could not tell what her expression was, but he was uneasily conscious of the black pools that lurked there, searching his scarred soul to its depths, and finding it evil. He was in no condition to meet her, half drugged with stale alcohol, shaken to his inmost being by reaction against the poisoning of weeks, jumpy, imaginative, broken of ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... soldier disguised in drink, a young Jew, and myself completed the company, which was allowed to make itself free of a flagged and whitewashed hall, absolutely devoid of furniture, and smelling at once sour and stale. I am sorry and ashamed to remember that the Jew was the only person of my four fellows in misfortune who kept up any semblance of manners or proper reserve. He differed, indeed, markedly from the others, not only in his behaviour, which was at least conformable, but in his appearance of alacrity ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... is old, lad, And all the trees are brown, And all the sport is stale, lad, And all the wheels run down; Creep home and take your place there, The spent and maimed among: God grant you find one face there You loved ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... out of hand. But a glance at them as they made free with the natives' provisions relieved him on this score, and when Smith explained that he had on board the aeroplane certain delectables in the shape of chicken patties (becoming rather stale), doughnuts, plumcake, a bottle of Australian burgundy, and sundry other remnants of the provisions furnished by the hospitable folk of Palmerston, he voted an immediate adjournment for lunch, and the ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... his love very seriously. He's got to be sad and despairing about it, even when he knows very well the girl is saying to herself: 'For heaven's sake, when will this windy bird get down to brass tacks and pop the question?' He droops like a stale eschscholtzia, only, unlike that flower he hasn't sense enough to shut ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... pivot of it was in certain events, political and even personal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the marriages of Henry VIII. and the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of Henry VIII. have long been a popular and even a stale joke; and there is a truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it is sufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. A jocular thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... and no favor to every newcomer. There it is not possible to keep in thraldom the fear less heart and the active intellect. There, no petty circle of society can fetter the energies or enfeeble the endeavors. No mocking, stale conventionalities can usurp the place of natural laws, and put genius and talent into the accursed strait-jacket of routine! Thither will I go. I remembered the late conference with my friend Kingsley, and the whole course of my reasoning on the subject of my removal was despatched ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... was by no means a clipper. She was built on lines which were fashionable forty years before, when the shipwright held that a ship's stability must be risked if she was one inch longer than five times her beam. She was an old vessel, but dry as a stale cheese; wallowed rather than rolled, yet was stiff; would sit upright with erect spars, like the cocked ears of a horse, in breezes which bowed passing vessels down to their wash-streaks. Her round bows bruised the sea, and when it entered her head ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... glorious privilege of handing her her nightgown. The town and castle were adorned with flags of all colors; walls were thrown down, yews were planted, walks were graveled, old speeches were furbished up, stale compliments were newly framed, and poems and sonnets that had done duty everywhere were patched up anew. There was but one idea in the kingdom—that of thankfulness to the prince for having chosen a ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... were looking at it rather inquisitively when a young lad came up out of the bakery in the cellar, and, in answer to our inquiries, said in a matter-of-course way that it was a mill for grinding old bread and stale crackers into flour, which was again baked into a cheaper class of bread. This grade of flour may make a very nourishing food, but the incident left a most unpleasant taste ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... a windfall for Jap—had been the means of adding many comforts to the cellar and several prisoners to the cages. It was now of the utmost importance to recapture her majesty. Stale meat-offal and other infallible lures were put out till Pussy, urged by the reestablished hunger-pinch, crept up to a large fish-head in a box-trap; the negro, in watching, pulled the string that dropped the lid, and, a minute later, the Analostan was once more among the prisoners ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for some hours—I mean those who ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... health. The dreary, never-changing tale Of mortal maladies is worn and stale. You cannot charm, or interest, or please, By harping on that minor chord, disease. Say you are well, or all is well with you. And God shall hear your words ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Marriage was good to her still. Not yet, though but a thing of this world, as she and her husband were agreed, had it begun to grow stale and wearisome. She was troubled. It was with no reaction against the opinions to which she had practically yielded; but not the less had the serpent of the truth bitten her, for it can bite through the gauze of whatever opinions or theories. Conscious, persistent ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... typewriter such a thing makes little difference. His abstention from bowling (to the playing of which Brassfield had been devoted), and his absolute failure at billiards, were discussed in sporting circles, and accounted for on the theory that he had "gone stale" since this love-affair had become the absorbing business of his life. No one understood, however, his sudden interest in photography, and his marvelous skill in it. He seemed to be ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... lights played full and flary upon his twitching, aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely worse—the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... of it flies here and there, if a mon lets all of it roost, 'twill stale his pace of mind like the thaving crows ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... the right of a metallic object that's at times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glare of our Missis's eye—you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take particular notice that he'll try to seem ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... these unsavory dishes, with a biscuit and a glass or two of Rhine wine, he cared not how sour, he called feasting sumptuously. Upon my observing he might as well have fresh fish and vegetables, instead of stale, he laughed and answered: ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... temporale. He was so far then from anything that had to do with his dream that it was not for some moments after he had turned into St. Mark's, obsessed of the sense of life unconquerable and pervading, that he began to take notice of what he saw there in the dim wonder. It was first of all the smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear gold ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... private, might watch the game. Its sole furniture consisted of a little table with a mirror, a seat for his Majesty, and a couple of stools, so that it offered small scope for investigation. True, the stale sherbet and the water were still there, the carafes standing on the table beside an empty comfit box, and a few toilet necessaries; and it will be believed that I lost no time in examining them. But I made no discovery, and when I had passed ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... the south, where lightning flickered in a bank of cloud, and there was no threat of storm. Yet in the air was a curious stagnation that had fallen within the hour and brooded over the city like a palpable thing. It was hot and close and lifeless; stale smells from the streets reeked into the nostrils, and from the Pasig came a heavy, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... are storming The Huns with iron hail; They've given Fritz a warning, And limburger is stale. ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... with tobacco-smoke and redolent of stale beer. At the far end a small stage with faded red hangings. The card read No. 7, and the programme informed me that the turn was "A Bouquet of Ballads." A slight, fair-haired girl appeared on the stage. Her cheeks were burning, and she kept her eyes ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol?... Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull time.... The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something," that is true, and that ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... got tired of quoting "Heureux en jeu; malheureux en amour." It seems one of the least true of all stale, stupid proverbs. Luck will run itself out in more ways than one; and sometimes you will never hold a trump, however often the suit changes. The ancients knew better than we when they called the double-sixes "Venus's ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... it's only her second. The idea of a child of that age informing me that she's had enough of the purely social phases of this planet! Did you ever hear anything like it? One season, if you please—and she finds it futile, stale, and unprofitable to fulfil the duties ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... seem'st to be a most venerable pimp, and, I doubt not, hast abundance of discretion. Here is this young whoremaster, a true chip of the old venereal block his father, and myself, come for a comfortable cast of thy function. I don't mean that stale pretence of conjuring—d— futurity; let us live for the present, old Haly. Conjure me up a couple of hale wenches, and I warrant we shall get into the magic circle in a twinkling. What says Galileo? What says the Reverend Brahe? Here is a purse, you pimp. Hark, how it chinks! This is sweeter than ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... self-mastery he owed his success. So determined was he to harden himself to the weather that he could not be induced to wear an overcoat in winter. "I will not give in to the cold," he said. For a year, on account of dyspepsia, he lived on buttermilk and stale bread, and wore a wet shirt next his body because his doctor advised it, although everybody else ridiculed the idea. This was while he was professor at the Virginia Military Institute. His doctor advised him to retire at nine o'clock; and, no matter where ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... stuck in the centre of a broad expanse of white shirt front. At the other end is the so-called stage, while scattered about indiscriminately are the tables and chairs. The air is filled—yea, reeking—with the fumes of bad whiskey, stale beer, and the odor of foul smelling cheap tobacco smoke, and through all this haze the would-be "show," goes on, and the applause is manifested by whistles, cat calls, the pounding of feet on the floor and glasses ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... courtesy could not withstand that. There was a roar of delight from the cowpunchers, and, instantly, the phrase became a part of the vocabulary of the Bad Lands. That day, and on many days thereafter when "Get a git on yuh!" grew stale and "Head off them cattle!" seemed done to death, he heard a cowpuncher shout, in a piping voice, ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... seeking the romance of Berlin's greying night amid the Turkish cigarette smoke and stale wine smells of the half-breed cabarets marshalled along the Jaegerstrasse, the Behrenstrasse and their tributaries. You will find them up a flight of stairs in one of the all-night Linden cafes, throwing celluloid balls at the ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... every passer-by of bursary dinners and passing suppers, was now soliciting a customer to take his choice of three lank cod-fish, ticketed at so much per lb. Billiard-rooms were silent, save where a solitary marker practised impossible strokes: print-shops exhibited a dull uniformity of stale engravings; and the innumerable horde of mongrel puppies of all varieties, that, particularly towards the end of term, are dragged about three or four in a string, and recommended as real Blenheims, genuine King Charles's, or "one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... now drew from the receptacle just named a dirty piece of folded paper, deeply impregnated with the perfume of stale and oft rechewed quids of coarse tobacco; and then, with the air of one conscious of having "rendered the state some service," hitched up his trowsers with one hand, while with the other ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... knew that they were written in Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of Blackstone's Commentaries, and argal (as the gravedigger in Hamlet says) he was not a person to be laughed at.' He attended the Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled. Even in the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre. 'If a CHARLIE should find him rather noisy at an ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the pane The charm makes blazin' logs so pleasant, But I can't hark to wut they 're say'n', With Grant or Sherman oilers present; The chimbleys shudder in the gale, Thet lulls, then suddin takes to flappin' Like a shot hawk, but all's ez stale To me ez ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... place from the first, with its stale air, its chink of louis d'or, its cry of the croupiers, its strained faces about the tables, and its general atmosphere of wasted hopes and fears and needless ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... the fluids of the egg and the atmosphere, which is a necessary agent in putrefaction. The preservation of eggs in this manner, has long been practised in all "braid Scotland;" but it is not so much as known in our own boasted land of stale eggs and bundle-wood. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... and gave up reading. He put the book down. "No, it isn't stale. The book does depress me, though." He pushed ...
— All Day Wednesday • Richard Olin
... man, with unlimited means and no particular occupation, the pleasures of a life of fashionable amusement are apt to grow "weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable," after a certain time. Douglas Dale was beginning to be very tired of balls and dinner parties, flower-shows and morning concerts, when he happened to meet his cousin, Reginald Eversleigh, at a club to ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... patron, and misquote Latin over their cups! They are pleased to welcome me at their board, because the Roman doctors call me learned, and because Nature gave me a wild wit, which to them is pleasanter than the stale jests of a hired buffoon. Yes, they would advance my fortunes—but how? by some place in the public offices, which would fill a dishonoured coffer, by wringing, yet more sternly, the hard-earned coins from our famishing citizens! If there be a vile thing ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... long, hot hours. There was a lure, of course; a picturesque, intangible attraction that calls to the wild blood of youth. But not as calls this other life which he had tasted. There was no gainsaying the fact—ranch life had grown too tame, too stale for Johnny Jewel. And there was no gainsaying that other fact—that Mary V would have to reconcile herself to being an aviator's wife, if she ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... this only is education. With this you have full command of all your resources; without this they avail but little. The great motive power of the world is thought. Information without thought is simply a peddler burdened with stale wares on a dead market. It is not what one knows, but what he can produce, that makes the world feel his power. Hence one must be a producer as well as a receiver. The world's thought must be regenerated in his own mind. He should turn the world's dead facts ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... to go on with this kind of thing? You might become a sort of interpreter of the two nations to each other. An original idea. The everyday thing is to exasperate Briton against Russ, and Russ against Briton, with every sort of cheap joke and stale falsehood. All the same Mr. Otway, I'm bound to confess to you that I don't ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... not hell with Eve to tell Again the ancient tale, But Eden's grassy ways and bowers Deprived of Eve to ease the hours Would very soon grow stale! Red cherry lips that leap to laugh, And chic and flick and flair Can make black white for any one— The task of Sisyphus good fun! So ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... the little room on the right, whose walls were decorated with various sporting prints chiefly illustrative of steeple-chases, with here and there a stunted fox-brush, tossing about as a duster. The ill-ventilated room reeked with the effluvia of stale smoke, and the faded green baize of a little round table in the centre was covered with filbert-shells and empty ale-glasses. The whole furniture of the room wasn't ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... running through it. It sounds like one of the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. Nor do I like his description; he evidently is writing for effect. Besides, his style is vicious; it is too stilted. Finally, he has recourse to the stale device ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... that of Specimen Jones under the shed. After a moment he came with his saddle to where the men stood talking by his pony, slung it on, and tightened the cinches; but the chain was now in the saddle-bag of Specimen Jones, mixed up with some tobacco, stale bread, a box of matches, and a hunk of fat bacon. The men at Twenty Mile said good-day to the tenderfoot, with monosyllables and indifference, and watched him depart into the heated desert. Wishing for a last look at Jones, he turned once, and saw the ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... pasture on the margin of the river. After breakfast, which was but a sorry meal, we determined to make our first attempt at baking. Simon, a man of dauntless resolution, undertook the task, using a piece of stale bread as leaven. It was a serious business, and we all helped or looked on; but the result, notwithstanding the multitude of councillors, was a lamentable failure. Better success, fortunately, attended the labours ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... to lovers, and they need not expect it; but those great thick walls were no way taken by surprise: they had not been confidants of this kind of thing off and on for four or five hundred years to be taken by surprise now. Whether after such long familiarity with the old story they felt it any way stale, you will readily believe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... is supposed to have the key, and his people are the children. They are looking to him to bring forth the things new and old for their good. But as far as I can find, he generally brings forth the same old things Sunday after Sunday which have become so stale that people do ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... have the narrative gift—that great and rare endowment—have with it the defect of telling their choice things over the same way every time, and this injures them and causes them to sound stale and wearisome after several repetitions; but it was not so with the Paladin, whose art was of a finer sort; it was more stirring and interesting to hear him tell about a battle the tenth time than it was the first time, because he did not tell it twice the same way, but always made ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... was held at a table in the Buffet. I was sorry, for my soul's sake, to be sitting there. Britannia owns nothing more crudely and inalienably Britannic than her Buffets. The barmaids are but incarnations of her own self, thinly disguised. The stale buns and the stale sponge-cakes must have been baked, one fancies, by her own heavy hand. Of her everything is redolent. She it is that has cut the thick stale sandwiches, bottled the bitter beer, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... great deal of work to do together. In the end, how well we do that work will depend on the spirit in which we approach it. We must seek fresh answers, unhindered by the stale prescriptions of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... from the porch roof in faded gilt on black the name of "C. E. Trench, Prop." He could see the swing-doors of the bar, and hear the click of balls from the poolroom advertising the second of the town's distractions. He could smell the composite odor of varnish, stale air, and boots, which made the overheated station waiting-room hideous. Heavy farmers in ear-mitts, peaked caps, and fur collars spat upon the hissing stove round which their great hide boots sprawled. They were his last memory of his ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... their clothes for weeks at a time and grew rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance, they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... usually imagined; if you would enjoy you must transform it; and this transformation is frequently attended with inconvenience; you must bargain, purchase, pay dear, be badly served, and often duped. I buy an egg, am assured it is new-laid —I find it stale; fruit in its utmost perfection—'tis absolutely green. I love good wine, but where shall I get it? Not at my wine merchant's —he will poison me to a certainty. I wish to be universally respected; how shall ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... such a triumph. Its rapidity, I must admit, perplexes me still. But in those old days we studied Arnold Toynbee overmuch and neglected the civilising influences of the card-table. By the time the Seely-Hardwickes took their house near Hyde Park Corner, philanthropy was beginning to stale and our leaders to perceive that the rejuvenation of society must be effected (if at all) not by bestowing money on the poor, but by losing it to the rich. Seely-Hardwicke himself was understood to spend most of his time in the City, looking after the interests of canned fruits and making small ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... simpler compounds of which flavors are composed may exist in entirely different form or combination in food products; as for example, pineapple flavoring is ethyl butrate. This can be prepared by combination of butyric acid from stale butter with alcohol which supplies the ethyl radical. The chemical union of the two produces the new compound, ethyl butrate, the distinctive flavoring substance of the pineapple. Banana flavor can be made from stale butter, caustic soda, and chloroform. None of these materials, ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... with a ring and chimed: their host's ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive genius—these were reviewed in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and now they were tearing themselves to pieces with more than madness through grief and remorse. Below this was a charnel vault where some of the apothecaries had been ground down and stuffed into earthenware pots with Album graecum, dung, and many a stale ointment. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... Air, and Exercise. At the same time, the system must be kept well supplied through the stomach with the raw material both for doing this work and for building up this new muscle. When anyone, in training for an event, gets "stale," or overtrained, and loses his appetite and his sleep, he had better stop at once, for that is a sign that he is using more energy than his food is able to give him through his stomach; and the stomach has consequently "gone on ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... through her time. Hugging this melody of Marcia. Through the knife-edged nervous evenings in the theater. Bawlings. Purple lips with loose muscles crawling under the rouge. Fetidness of scent on stale bodies. Round faces that could hook into the look of vultures when the smell of success became as the smell of red meat. All the petty soiled vanities, like the disordered boudoir of a cocotte. The perpetual ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... was still young, far younger in her capacity to enjoy than Julia, who was her junior by some months. She was in good health, with fine animal spirits, and had not tasted half the pleasures which had already grown stale to her cousin. The boating, the chatter, the strolls, the music on the pier, the glorious sunsets, the very stones and shells upon the beach, the fresh breezes and the ever-changing sea, all contributed to afford her such pleasure as it would ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... Cut in small pieces stale sponge cake or lady fingers, a few macaroons, some French cherries and apricots (glace), and mix all together. Make a custard of 1 quart milk and 6 eggs, and when cooked, reserve 1 cupful for a ...
— The Cookery Blue Book • Society for Christian Work of the First Unitarian Church, San
... monosyllables of his unsanctified vocabulary. He sees in imagination a thousand readers, smiling or yawning as they say to themselves, "We have had all that before," and turn to another writer's performance for something not quite so stale and superfluous. This is what the writer says ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Germans having Italian names when they were painters, as cockneys sometimes have when they are hair-dressers. They suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were Teutonic. One Teutonist I read actually explained the fresh energy of the French Revolution and the stale privileges of its German enemies by saying that the Germanic soul awoke in France and attacked the Latin influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell: if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English prize-fighter, you have only to say that ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... with blue letters. That blue tint was the first indication I received of Mademoiselle Prefere's character, which I was able to see more of later on. A scared-looking servant took my card, and abandoned me without one word of hope at the door of a chilly parlour full of that stale odour peculiar to the dining- rooms of educational establishments. The floor of this parlour had been waxed with such pitiless energy, that I remained for awhile in distress upon the threshold. But happily observing that little strips of woollen carpet had ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... eggs for the rest of his life. How often have I thought how deplorable it was to see a man issuing a series of books, every one of which is feebler than its predecessor, dishing up the old characters, the stale ideas, the used-up backgrounds. I have always hoped that some one would be kind and brave enough to tell me when I did that. But now that the end seems to have come to me naturally and spontaneously, I cannot accept my defeat. I am like the monkey of whom Frank Buckland ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... solid Flesh, would melt, [Sidenote: sallied flesh[3]] Thaw, and resolue it selfe into a Dew: [Sidenote: 125,247,260] Or that the Euerlasting had not fixt [Sidenote: 121 bis] His Cannon 'gainst Selfe-slaughter. O God, O God! [Sidenote: seale slaughter, o God, God,] How weary, stale, flat, and vnprofitable [Sidenote: wary] Seemes to me all the vses of this world? [Sidenote: seeme] Fie on't? Oh fie, fie, 'tis an vnweeded Garden [Sidenote: ah fie,] That growes to Seed: Things rank, and grosse ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... she found her husband already at table, looking preoccupied and almost grumpy. In the ordinary way 'the Master' came to his meals with a smiling serenity as regular as his appetite, and with teeth which, sound as a foxhound's, were not to be discouraged by stale bread or leathery meat, or by the miscellaneous disagreeables which are the everyday flavouring ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... so, too, Florence, for he's a good boy, is Dodger. Did I tell you how he served the rapscallion that tried to stale my apples the ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... Take your time between," admonished Lieutenant Lawrence, who knew how easily a pitcher out of training might wrench his muscles and go stale for several days. ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... meanwhile, and whilst this was going on at the king's palace, I went with Grant, by appointment, to see the queen. As usual, she kept us waiting some time, then appeared sitting by an open gate, and invited us, together with many Wakungu and Wasumbua to approach. Very lavish with stale sour pombe, she gave us all some, saving the Wasumbua, whom she addressed very angrily, asking what they wanted, as they have been months in the country. These poor creatures, in a desponding mood, defended ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... going to offer his services to the king, Louis XVIII. I had much interesting public news from M. d'Argy : but I pass by all now except personal detail, as I write but for my nearest friends; and all that was then known of public occurrence has long been stale. . . . ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... fast, O Emir, not so fast, I pray you! Better a double mouthful of stale porpoise fat, with a fin bone in it, than so many questions ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... offering both his hands, and saying that he hoped I would fulfill the expectations of General Grant in the new command I was about to undertake, adding that thus far the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac had not done all it might have done, and wound up our short conversation by quoting that stale interrogation so prevalent during the early years of the war, "Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?" His manner did not impress me, however, that in asking the question he had meant anything beyond a jest, and I parted from the President convinced ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... decades; where the dominant price-system and its commercial standards of truth and beauty have over-ruled all inclination to cultural sanity and put it definitively in abeyance. The cultural, or perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is not properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character, conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the American ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... dug trenches of a year ago have given way to the peaked mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. Where there were vast stretches of mud, scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with stale, ill-smelling straw, the carcasses of oxen and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a smiling landscape, with miles of growing grain, green ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... was so dark that at first I could not distinguish anything. I paused, arrested by that moldy and stale odor peculiar to deserted and condemned rooms, of dead rooms. Then gradually my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and I saw rather clearly a great room in disorder, a bed without sheets having still its mattresses and pillows, one of which bore the deep print of an elbow or ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... honourable and noble lords, under fictitious names; but the people did not even obtain this doubtful information till after the discussion was over, and the matter in debate settled. The public, however, were now becoming more enlightened, and withal more curious, and these garbled and stale speeches did not satisfy them;—they longed for a full reporting newspaper, and the printers were encouraged by the general feeling to venture upon giving the proceedings in parliament from week to week, or from day to day, as they occurred. They were the more ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely worse—the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him out of shadows. But now, thank ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... breakfast as could be prepared hastily over a spirit lamp, filled their pockets with stale bread, cake, and small tins of food, and then carried a narrow wire mattress from one of the smaller bedrooms to the front room ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the sun of high heaven has crowned our structure with the flower of brain, like him to scatter mists, and penetrate darkness, and shoot from end to end of earth; and must we still be grinning subserviently to ancient usages and stale forms, because of a baggage that it is, woe to us! too true, we cannot cut ourselves loose from? Lydiard might say we are compelling the priests to fight, and that they are compact foemen, not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was but stale ale in taste, and milk and water in colour, after drinking a small glassful I passed it to the delighted soldiers and pagazis. At my request the Sultan brought a fine fat bullock, for which he accepted ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... widths), cuttings of many different materials, one button-hook, one tin-opener and corkscrew combined, one silver thimble, one ditto (horn), one Chinese pipe; one packet of tea, one ditto sugar, one tin condensed milk (unopened), half a loaf of bread (very stale), two empty medicine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... contrived to learn a few of his tricks. My only capital was the change for half-a-guinea, which he had once let fall, and which I picked up, which was all I could ever get from him: for it was impossible to stale any money from him, he was so awake, being up to all the tricks of thaives, having followed the diving trade, as he called it, for a considerable time. My wish was to make enough by my table to enable me to return with credit to ould Ireland, where I had ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... sure," said the restaurant keeper. "The man who runs the hotel, Mr. Brown, had a lot of trouble with him because he wouldn't pay his bill—said it was too high. Then he came here once and said the meat wasn't fresh and the bread was stale and sour. I came close to pitching him out. Don't let him walk over you—if he does ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... remained the tried and practical methods there on the Ridge with its overpowering drama, any act of which almost any day was greater than Spionkop or Magersfontein which thrilled a world that was not then war-stale; and ever its supreme feature was that determination which was like a kind of fate in its progress of chipping, chipping at a stone foundation that ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... was plainly eager to test the virtues of his new tea, for he put a kettle of cold water on the stove, thereby proving that he was an adept at the art of brewing the fragrant herb, since it requires fresh water, brought to a boil, and not stale stuff, to extract ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... engraved there, before I could distinguish more distant objects. An "untamable fly" buzzed at my elbow with the same nonchalance as on a molasses hogshead at the end of Long Wharf. Even there I must attend to his stale humdrum. But now I come to the pith of this long digression.—As the light increased I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... apparently quite insensible of her presence. For the first time she was conscious of a distressful faintness, which, as she had come suddenly out of the stinging frost into the little overheated room, which reeked with tobacco smoke and a stale smell of cooking, was not astonishing. She mastered it, however, and presently, seeing that Hawtrey did not move; glanced about her with some curiosity, for this was the first time ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... conservatory, and thence to the garden. The apartment itself was given up entirely to weapons or instruments of sport. Guns, fishing-rods, hunting-stocks, golf-clubs, tennis-rackets, were stored in various racks and stands. A smell of stale cigar-smoke pervaded it. Colonel de Vigne was wont to retire hither at night in preference to the less ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... I see clearly that any satisfaction which Pan may give will depend on the constitution of each man's mind. If you have arrived already at any similar conclusion, the whole will of course appear stale to you. I heard yesterday from Wallace, who says (excuse horrid vanity), "I can hardly tell you how much I admire the chapter on 'Pangenesis.' It is a POSITIVE COMFORT to me to have any feasible explanation of a difficulty that has always been haunting me, and I shall never be able to give ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... world in which Gerty lived, and the old familiar atmosphere through which she herself had moved so tranquilly was troubled suddenly as if by an approaching storm. The things which she had once loved now showed stale and profitless to her eyes, while those external objects of fortune, to which she had always believed herself to be indifferent, were endowed at the moment with an extraordinary and unreal value. It was as if her whole nature had undergone some powerful ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage—but as ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... perfectly healthy and very clean, for the first thing they do is to plunge into the sea water. Besides this, they take baths in warm springs that abound everywhere, and which keep their skins in good order. As to their breakfast, I am afraid that often they have some very unpleasant things to eat—stale shark, for instance, and sour corn bread—so sour that you could not swallow it, and boiled fern root, or the pulp of fern stems, ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... pretensions of the Americans. The moon served as a pretext for a thousand stale puns and a score of ballads, in which bad taste contested the palm with ignorance. But as formerly the French paid before singing, so now they paid after having had their laugh, and they subscribed for a sum of 1,253,930 ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... his eyes to the interior of the smoker, which, except for two or three dozing commuters and a noisy euchre-party, had been empty of everything but the fumes and stale odors of tobacco, and found it swarming with visions, the eidolons of everything he remembered from his past life. Whatever had once strongly impressed itself upon his nerves was reported there again as instantly as he thought of it. It was largely a whirling ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... drive of much consequence to two of the party. In that second buckboard the fates laid plans, spun yarns, and rearranged many things. Hartigan opened his heart and life. He told of his mother, of his happy childhood; of his losses; of his flat, stale, unprofitable boyhood; of Bill Kenna and his "word as a man"; of his own vow of abstinence, kept unbroken till he was eighteen. He gave it all with the joyous side alone in view, and when a pathetic incident intruded, the pathos was in the things, not in the words of the narrator. The ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... his theme; and the story of the Argonauts, on which his choice lighted, possessed one inestimable advantage. Well-worn and hackneyed as it was, it possessed the secret of eternal youth. 'Age could not wither it nor custom stale its infinite variety.' The poorest of imitative poetasters could never have made it wholly dull, and Valerius Flaccus was more ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... and went by the path trodden by the gods. Thereupon what happened to Rudra, learn from me, O Yudhishthira! Influenced by the dread of Rudra, the gods set apart for evermore, the best allotment out of all shares, such as was fresh and not stale (to be appropriated by the god). Whosoever performs his ablutions at this spot, while reciting this ancient story, beholds with his mortal eyes the path that leads to the region of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... least, my troubles straight, (Let women have their boast;) Homed well with chance, and passing where The gods kept house would take a chair, Perchance at ease, with naught ado, With Jove would toss a quip or two; The nectar stale, A mug of ale On goodly earth would ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... wide and handsome. His wing-spread, so to speak, is much larger than that of either Mr. Stokowski or Mr. Toscanini, and he has a greater repertoire of unpredictable motions than both of them put together. Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, the infinite variety ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... other times her mother's humor made her vaguely uncomfortable, usually after wine or other drinks that left the elder's breath thick and oppressive. Linda failed completely to grasp the allusions of this wit but a sharp uneasiness always responded like the lingering stale memory of a ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... stepped eagerly up to the railing that divided the spectators from the dancers, and drew a deep breath of satisfaction. Here, at last, was something different from the everlasting hospital barracks: glowing lights, holiday decorations, the scent of flowers instead of the stale fumes of ether and disinfectants; soul-stirring music in place of the wheezy old phonograph grinding out the same old tunes; and, above all, girls, hundreds of them, circling in a bewildering rainbow of loveliness ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... season, too, and it's only her second. The idea of a child of that age informing me that she's had enough of the purely social phases of this planet! Did you ever hear anything like it? One season, if you please—and she finds it futile, stale, and unprofitable to fulfil ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... to witness our departure, and, as I never missed an opportunity to spread the light, I distributed among them some hand-bills entitled "What is Anarchy?" regardless of their decidedly hostile attitude. The London loafer has little wit or imagination, and their comments did not rise above the stale inquiry as to where we kept our bombs, and the equally original advice bestowed upon Kosinksi to get 'is 'air cut. A half-hour's walk brought us to our destination, but our Odyssey was not so soon to end. The man who accompanied the carriage-builder ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her—it almost consoled her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... shouted, swinging the halter stale to the shining flank. 'G'lang there!' and he went by, like a flash, the tail of Black Hawk straight out behind him, its end feathering in the wind. It was a splendid thing to see—that white-haired man, sitting erect on ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... soft blanket; then take some stale breadcrumbs, and mix with them a little powder-blue. Rub this thoroughly and carefully over the whole surface with the hand or a piece of clean linen; shake it off and wipe with soft cloths. Satin may be brushed the way of the nap with a clean, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... words either whistled the air or improvised an impossible ditty. Whenever there was a pause to recall some new song, the interval was occupied with "Rule, Britannia!" This was a prime favourite, and repetition did not stale its forceful rendition, especial stress being laid upon the words, "Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!" to which was roared the eternal enquiry, "Are we down-hearted?" The welkin-smashing negative, crashing through the night, and not entirely free from ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... dinners and passing suppers, was now soliciting a customer to take his choice of three lank cod-fish, ticketed at so much per lb. Billiard-rooms were silent, save where a solitary marker practised impossible strokes: print-shops exhibited a dull uniformity of stale engravings; and the innumerable horde of mongrel puppies of all varieties, that, particularly towards the end of term, are dragged about three or four in a string, and recommended as real Blenheims, genuine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... work Shakespeare has more faults than any other poet of England. He is in turn careless, extravagant, profuse, tedious, sensational; his wit grows stale or coarse; his patriotism turns to bombast; he mars even such pathetic scenes as the burial of Ophelia by buffoonery and brawling; and all to please a public that was given ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 1870. Everybody knows the story of how, as a little boy, he cherished the idea of one day living in this house, and how that idea was gratified in after-life. It is from the Uncommercial Traveller, in the chapter on "Travelling Abroad," and the repetition is never stale. He says:— ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... moneye, chargynge them that if the Gentilman came agayne, they shold entreate him better not beyng knowen al this while that she was his wyfe, but fayued her to be her sister. Not long after her husband stale thether againe, he sawe the howse otherwyse decked, and better fare then he was wounte to haue. He asked, frome whence commeth al this goodly gere? They sayde that an honeste matrone, a kynsewoman of hys hadde broughte it ...
— A Merry Dialogue Declaringe the Properties of Shrowde Shrews and Honest Wives • Desiderius Erasmus
... shall be counted Ancient Without so much ado. What you do grant, I'm very free To use now at my pleasure: Another Month, or Year, d' ye see I'll bate, as I have leasure; So Hair by Hair, from the Mare's Tail I'll pull, as well I may. So what is good, is quickly stale, Though ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... even African barbarities had charms for the odd Englishman; but he was chiefly won by the dolce far niente of the natives, and the Oriental license of polygamy. In a word, Joseph had the same taste for a full-blooded cuffee, that an epicure has for the haut gout of a stale partridge, and was in ecstasies at my extrication. He neglected his siestas and his accounts; he wandered from house to house with the rapture of an impatient bridegroom; and, till every thing was ready for the nuptial rites, no one at the factory ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... picturesque, and he is down the long slope on one side and up the gigantic hump on the other before he has time to feel hot. But the second is greeted with that tempered empressement with which you bow in the street to an acquaintance with whom you have met half an hour before; the third is a stale repetition; the fourth is decidedly one too many, and the fifth is sensibly exasperating. The fonds, in a word, are very tiresome. It was, if I remember rightly, in the bottom of the last and widest of the series that I discovered ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... play on the strings of other people's hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say "I am misunderstood," or "I have become second-rate," because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... telegraph. From that point he sent it over the wire to Washington. It was successfully received at the Washington end, and never were human beings more surprised than were the train passengers on alighting at the capital city to find that they brought stale news, and that Clay's nomination was already known throughout Washington. It was the first public proof in America of the powers of the telegraph, and certainly a ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and therefore every little peculiarity, every minute feature of men, women, or things, that suggested themselves to my aimless scrutiny were carefully reviewed and criticized. I went placidly on now casting a passing glance on exhibitions of stale confectionery, now on a display of attractive millinery, again it was a "ten cent" establishment, offering such bargains as might puzzle the most economical house-wife, and finally my attention was caught ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... had made serious inroads upon his health, from which he never entirely recovered. It was hoped that his life in the East would be beneficial, but it proved otherwise. Meanwhile, the Civil War was raging in the United States, but the news concerning it was very stale long before it reached us. We did not receive the particulars of the battle of Bull Run, for example, until three months after its occurrence. In view of the turbulent state of affairs at home, the government thought ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... no object, and at last they solved the problem. At first Tom backed up to the jug and held it, though clumsily, for Sam to drink, and then the youngest Rover did the same for his brother. The water was warm and somewhat stale, yet both could remember nothing which had ever tasted sweeter to them. They drank about half of what the jug contained, then set the rest carefully away for ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... because it was one of the first teas of the fall. It brought people together in their autumnal freshness before the winter had begun to wither their resolutions to be amiable to one another, to dull their wits, to stale their stories, or to give so wide a currency to their sayings that they could not freely risk them with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... rhythm needs an obstacle to make the structure felt, so melody needs some variation from the obvious set of relations already won and possessed. If that possession is too complete, the melody becomes as stale and uninteresting as would a 3-4 rhythm without a change ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... may have a scientific value, but are utterly useless to a stomach not trained in Germany. Of this sort, for the most part, is the famous Lebkuchen, a sort of gingerbread manufactured in Nurnberg, and sent all over Germany: "age does not [seem to] impair, nor custom stale its infinite variety." It is very different from our simple cake of that name, although it is usually baked in flat cards. It may contain nuts or fruit, and is spoiled by a flavor of conflicting spices. I should think it might be sold by the cord, it is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... solemnly, "burned incense upon any and all occasions—red letter days, labor days, celebrating Columbus Day and the morning after, I presume. But we moderns burn gasoline. And, phew! I believe I should prefer the stale smoke of incense in the unventilated pyramids of Egypt to this odor of gas. O-o-o-o, Tommy, do let ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... and I magnify mine office," he said, as he took up his hat to go forth. "One branch of my duty is to fettle your horse; and in Flamborough they fettle them on stale fish." Mr. Mordacks strode with a military tramp, and a loud shout for the landlord, who had finished his joke by this time, and was paying the penalties of reaction. "Gil Beilby, thoo'st nobbut a fondhead," he was saying to himself. "Thoo mun ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... after hard begging, thrown him pence, many had warned him off harshly, but this man had looked straight into his eyes, and had at once stopped and questioned him, had singled out the one true statement from a mass of lies, and had given him—not a stale loaf with the top cut off, a suspicious sort of charity which always angered the waif—but his own food, bought for his own consumption. Most wonderful of all, too, this man knew what it was to be hungry, and had even the insight and shrewdness to ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... good hotels in Servia and Montenegro and Sofia, they were being overdone. Everybody went to the Balkans and came back with a pet nationality. She loathed pet nationalities. She believed most people loathed them nowadays. It was stale: it was GLADSTONIAN. She was all for specialization in social reform. She thought Benham ought to join the Fabian Society and consult the Webbs. Quite a number of able young men had been placed with the assistance of the Webbs. They were, she said, "a perfect fount...." ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... scolded you! But to return to your wife—as I understand she shares the fate I endure. We poor women have nothing to expect from our husbands, but the stale leavings that remain after business has absorbed the rest! But your story—go ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of Valentia Almonds, blanched and beaten with Rosewater till it come to perfect Paste, then take stale white bread, grate it and sift it, and dry it by the fire, then put that to your Almonds with the weight of all in fine Sugar, beat them very well, and put in some Spice beaten and searced, then when it is a little cool, roul it out, dust your Moulds ...
— The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet • Hannah Wolley
... most of the men who have attracted me have been great smokers, there is doubtless a direct association of ideas. It has only once occurred to me that an indifferent unpleasant smell became attractive in connection with some particular person. In this case it was the scent of stale tobacco, such as comes from the end of a cold cigar or cigarette. It was, and is now, very disagreeable to me, but, for the time and in connection with a particular person, it seemed to me more delightful and exciting than the most delicious perfume. I think, however, only a very strong attraction ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... looking at the British ship. The sailors took their stations near the torpedoes. The interior of the boat was now lighted with two small electric bulbs. They made the darkness visible, but gave no light outside. Everywhere was the stale smell of oil. The boys found it impossible to speak to each other because of the noise of the engine and the water. ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... sleeps upstairs, two hours afterwards, and naps are not yet over in the kitchen. The hatchments in the dining-room look down on crumbs, dirty plates, spillings of wine, half-thawed ice, stale discoloured heel-taps, scraps of lobster, drumsticks of fowls, and pensive jellies, gradually resolving themselves into a lukewarm gummy soup. The marriage is, by this time, almost as denuded of its ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... is like learning to sleep with your window open. What could be more stupefying than to shut yourself up in a closet and swallow your own gas? But is it any less stupefying to shut yourself up within the last few thousand years of the history of your own corner of the world, and suck in the stale atmosphere of its own self-generated prejudices? Or, to vary the metaphor, anthropology is like travel. Every one starts by thinking that there is nothing so perfect as his own parish. But let a man go aboard ship to visit foreign parts, and, when he returns home, he will cause that parish ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... school work is broken by "recesses." Recreation is necessary as a means of providing for physical, mental, and social wants; for the pleasure that it affords. But it is also important in its relation to work, for without it body and mind become "fagged," people grow "stale" at their work, producing power and power of service ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... interposed Henry, addressing Gertie, "at any new subject that my sister-in-law mentions. I haven't heard her speak of this before; and it's only fair to her to say that when she takes up anything fresh, she drops it long before it has the chance of becoming stale. Another cup?" ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... career by these chimerical, socialistic notions you have taken up, and which you mistake for Christianity. As a practical man I can tell you, positively, that St. John's will run downhill until you are bankrupt. The people who come to you now are in search of a new sensation, and when that grows stale they will fall away. Even if a respectable number remain in your congregation, after this excitement and publicity have died down, I have reason to know that it is impossible to support a large city church on contributions. It has been tried again and again, and failed. You have ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the lives and operations of some of us, who have made names in this country during the last few years," he said, "would make the modern romance seem stale. Even odd scraps of news or surmises are fought for by the Press. The journalists know well enough where to come for their sensation. Our guests at last, I believe. Don't forget what I have been ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are going to win at the next election? I devoutly hope you may—we're all as stale as ditch-water—and as for places, anybody's welcome to mine!" And so saying, Ashe lounged away, attracted by the bow and smile of a pretty Frenchwoman, with whom it was ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... resumed his good nature: "Go on, Captain. I'm so stale with dolce far niente, after the Black Pearl affair last month, that I act like an amateur myself. Make it short, though, for I'm going ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... watching them. "Bucket Lane" was the street's title to fame. Windows showed dim candles, in the distance a sharp cry broke the silence and then fell away again. The street was very narrow and from the running gutters there stole into the air the odour of stale cabbage. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... How are we going to take care of the news? It is not a magazine of stories and fiction; it is a magazine of news, and the news of the period between August 15th and September 15th, for instance, will become stale if it is not used in the September 15th issue and runs over until the October 15th issue. It is the American Nut Journal. I think your idea can be carried out very fully by featuring the convention as the main thing, but not to use ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... and I marvel how it seemed thee good to act this play, and to think that thou couldst so dull my sight at mid-day, that I should mistake a wolf for a sheep. But well sung is the proverb, 'The heart of a fool will conceive folly.' So this your device and counsel was stale and utterly senseless; but the work that thou hast accomplished is full of wisdom. Wherefore, rejoice, Nachor, and be exceeding glad. I render thee many thanks, that thou hast been to-day advocate of the truth, and hast not polluted thy lips with foul words ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... room he sat for a while on the edge of the bed, gazing at the curtained window. Life had gone stale. He was sick of hunting men and of being hunted. Pedro Salazar was now a member of the Sonora police through Donovan's efforts. Eventually Salazar would find an excuse to shoot Waring. And the gunman had made up his mind to do ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... ne'er longed to be a bride; Boiled with her sighs, in giving up the ghost, That for her late deceased husband died; Into the same then let a woman breathe, That being chid did never word reply; With one thrice married's prayers, that did bequeath A legacy to stale virginity. If this receipt have not the power to win me, Little I'll say, but think the devil's ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... Europe come to us so late, and so suspiciously, that observations on them would certainly be stale, and possibly wide of their actual state. From their general aspect, however, I collect that your Majesty's interposition in them has been disinterested and generous, and having in view only the general good of the great European family. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and a pair of fur-topped boots. All his garments were new and well fitting, and contrasted greatly with the greasy and long used coats of the Cossacks on the boat. Sheepskin garments can look more repulsive than cloth ones with equal wearing. Age can wither and custom stale their infinite variety. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... to be the children of a respectable artisan or small tradesman; but what chiefly attracted my attention was the very great pleasure the elder girl appeared to take in the birds. She had come well provided with stale bread to feed them, and after giving moderately of her store to the wood-pigeons and sparrows, she went on to the others, native and exotic, that were disporting themselves in the water, or sunning themselves on the green bank. ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... terrible effect upon the minds of persons not sufficiently well balanced to stand the disclosure. Moreover, they know that if the average person knew the principal details of his future life on earth, then he would lose interest in it—it would become stale and would lose the attraction of the unknown. In such a case, the pleasant things to come would lose their attractiveness by reason of having been dwelt on so long that their flavor was lost; and the unpleasant things would become unbearable by reason ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... bolt it shot him, thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She would go with him; more than that, she should. It was her right, won by years of actual want and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale, meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... schemes had not yet reached Paris. As for the British Ministry, it was trembling from the attacks of the Grenvilles and Windhams on the one side, and from the equally vigorous onslaughts of Fox, who, when the Government proposed an addition to the armed forces, brought forward the stale platitude that a large standing army "was a dangerous instrument of influence in the hands of the Crown." When England's greatest orator thus impaired the unity of national feeling, and her only statesman, Pitt, remained ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... dusty papers. There were two or three shelves of uninteresting-looking books, and a desk which extended into a counter. The upper panes of the window were ragged with cobwebs, and the air of the place was redolent of stale publications. A thick-set little man in spectacles sat at the desk. It was not ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Food, Air, and Exercise. At the same time, the system must be kept well supplied through the stomach with the raw material both for doing this work and for building up this new muscle. When anyone, in training for an event, gets "stale," or overtrained, and loses his appetite and his sleep, he had better stop at once, for that is a sign that he is using more energy than his food is able to give him through his stomach; and the stomach has consequently "gone ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... weeks before this black shadow of war had loomed up with its deadly menace a great party of German editors had returned our visit and once again I had listened to speeches about the blood- brotherhood of the two nations, a little bored by the stale phrases, but glad to sit between these friendly Germans whom I had met in their own country. We clinked glasses again, sang "God Save the King" and the "Wacht am Rhein," compared the character of German and English literature, of German and English women, clasped hands, and ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... song, while he gave himself afresh to the faithful Master he served. God's blessings were to him always new and fresh. Answered prayers never lost the charm of novelty; like flowers plucked fresh every hour from the gardens of God, they never got stale, losing none of their beauty ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... the year Is old and stale now ye are gone. No friendly songs the children hear Among the bushes on the lawn. When babies wander out a-Maying Will ye, their bards, afar be straying? Unhymned by ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... deal. Look here, Cyprienne, I am not to be put off with stale, second-hand gossip—the echoes of the Clubs; vague, empty rumours that are on everybody's tongue long before they come to me. I must have fresh, brand-new intelligence, straight from the fountain-head. You must get ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... song, that's stale here, will be new there a twelvemonth hence; and if a man of the town by chance come amongst them, he's reverenced for teaching them ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... older boys were playing craps in Dennahan's lot and the smaller boys were watching them. One lonely sentinel was perched on the fence scanning the horizon for cops. For this he received the regular union pay of a stale apple-core. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... neighbourhood remonstrance roars, He's naughty still, and naughty out of doors. 'Tis well enough that he should tell Mamma Her sons are tired of being what they are, But to give friendly bears, expecting buns, A paper full of stale unwholesome Huns— One might be led to think, from all this work, That little master's growing quite ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... Indian Empire occupied the larger part of one wall. The grate was empty, for the weather was extremely warm, and a green-shaded lamp on the littered writing-table afforded the only light. The air was stale, for both windows were closed ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... a thin kind of cake, made of rye and corn together, something like Scotch oatcake, with a hole in the middle, so that it may be strung up in rows like onions on a stick in the kitchen. When thin and fresh it is excellent, but when thick and stale a dog biscuit ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... discretion of the judge. It is this which has blighted the countries of the East as much as cruel laws or despotic executives. Thus the legislature has seen fit in certain cases to assign a limit to the period within which actions shall be brought; in order to urge men to vigilance, and to prevent stale claims from being suddenly revived against men whose vouchers are destroyed or whose witnesses are dead. It is true, in foro conscientiae, a defendant, who knows that he honestly owes the debt sued ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... (Myrmecophaga jubata), was not uncommon here. After the first few weeks of residence, I ran short of fresh provisions. The people of the neighbourhood had sold me all the fowls they could spare; I had not yet learned to eat the stale and stringy salt-fish which is the staple food in these places, and for several days I had lived on rice-porridge, roasted bananas, and farinha. Florinda asked me whether I could eat Tamandua. I told her almost anything in the shape of flesh would be acceptable; ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... morning ready to tell. Now, though, he thought he faced a different situation. He was sure that the Danger Mountain hike had been blocked—not for today alone, but for all the days of the future. To bring it up again would be like trying to re-heat a stale pie. ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... I confess I don't know," he continued. "At present it seems to be stale mate. For to-night, any way, we are safe, I think, for I shall take turns in keeping guard with Jesse and Ezra. I have the idea that to-morrow, when they realize something has happened to the Marquis we shall ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... position, as old Wattles declared one day. We're all living wonders, Major," he went on, turning to Thomson, "but if I don't get a Sole Colbert and a grill at the Savoy, and a front seat at the Alhambra, before many weeks have passed, I shall get stale—that's what'll happen ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
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