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More "Vagrant" Quotes from Famous Books



... time they were holding "kangaroo" court in the New Orleans jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted. And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to "buy" every vagrant the officers could ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... employment in a human-hair factory, failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway. I was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did. But I remember well a basement ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... perfect understanding passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... Press, and by private correspondents whose position makes their approval of value, have confirmed the author in his purpose to write a series of stories intended to illustrate the life and experiences of the friendless and vagrant children to be found in all our cities, numbering in New ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... came nearer, the footsteps were now in front of the window. Even as Ranulph was about to knock and call the poor vagrant's name, the clac-clac stopped, and then there came a sniffing at the shutters as a dog sniffs at the door of a larder. Following the sniffing came a guttural noise of emptiness and desire. Now there was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Swarming. If the Apiarian perceives that his swarm instead of clustering begins to rise higher and higher in the air, and evidently means to depart, not a moment is to be lost: instead of empty noises, he must resort to means much more effective to stay their vagrant propensities. Handfulls of dirt cast into the air, or water thrown among them, will often so disorganize them as to compel them to alight. Of all devices for stopping them, the most original one that I have ever heard of, is to flash ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... Blangin went on, "that I did not feel quite reassured. It is a bad cell that in which M. de Boiscoran is staying. Since I have been at Sauveterre, one man has killed himself in it, and one man has tried to commit suicide. So I called Trumence, a poor vagrant who assists me in the jail; and we arranged it that one of us would always be on guard, never losing the prisoner out of sight for a moment. But it was a useless precaution. At night, when they carried M. de Boiscoran his supper, he ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau

... fool! The idiot! Will you heed him? I believe he's more likely to become a vagrant and have to beg his bread, than to become a burgomaster. Dear Antonius! you mustn't pay attention to him, and you mustn't lose the affection you have ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg

... amber varnish;—imagine the first consternation, and final wrath, of these cognoscenti, at being asked to contemplate, deliberately, and to the last rent of her ragged gown, and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at once to have been sent to the workhouse; and some really green grass and blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with the relentless Gulf Stream. Perhaps she reached New York in time; one would like to know, but there seems no good ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... haughty Frontenac, His great heart torn with pride and pain, His clear eye dimming as it swept The land he might not see again, This infant world, this strange New France Dropped down as by some vagrant wind Upon the New World's vast expanse, Threatened yet safe! Through storm and stress Time's challenge to ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... Exposure to the elements, social disorder and lawlessness, the tyranny of the powerful, and the inroads of enemies, are a stern discipline, allowing brief intervals, or awarding a sharp penance, to sloth and sensuality. The rude food, the scanty clothing, the violent exercise, the vagrant life, the military constraint, the imperfect pharmacy, which now are the trials of only particular classes of the community, were once the lot more or less of all. In the deep woods or the wild solitudes of the medieval era, feelings of religion or superstition ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... what it is to be vagrant born? A waif is only a waif. And so, For another idle hour I sit, In large content while the fire ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... father, hearing of this, gave her a terrible punishment with the whip he used in driving his horses. In terror of what would follow when the worst came to be known, she ran away; and, soon forsaken by her so-called lover, wandered about, a common vagrant, until her baby was born—under the stars, on a summer night, in ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... never see it. Another class will hail the prospect of emancipation, but will deprecate the length of time. They will feel that it gives too little to the now living slaves. But it really gives them much. It saves them from the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate emancipation in localities where their numbers are very great, and it gives the inspiring assurance that their posterity shall be free forever. The plan leaves to each State choosing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths, Whence a smokeless incense breathes. The air is full of whistlings bland; What was that I heard Out of the hazy land? Harp of the wind, or song of bird, Or vagrant booming of the air, Voice of a meteor lost in day? Such tidings of the starry sphere Can this elastic air convey. Or haply 'twas the cannonade Of the pent and darkened lake, Cooled by the pendent mountain's ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... girl herself, nervous at first and switching with her dainty whip at the crumbling sands and pacing restlessly to and fro, had yielded gradually to the drooping influences of the hour and, seated on a rock, had buried her chin in the palm of her hand, and, with eyes no longer vagrant and searching, had drifted away into maiden dreamland. Full thirty minutes had she been there waiting for something, or somebody, and it, or he, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... forget that Faith alone supports it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. The equilibrium is visibly delicate beyond the line of safety; danger lurks in every stone. The peril of the heavy tower, of the restless vault, of the vagrant buttress; the uncertainty of logic, the inequalities of the syllogism, the irregularities of the mental mirror,—all these haunting nightmares of the Church are expressed as strongly by the Gothic cathedral as though it had been the cry of human suffering, and ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... had occurred at Kirkburn, and why Logan needed his presence. 'The poor old gentleman has passed away suddenly, I suppose,' he reflected, 'and Logan may think that I know where he has deposited his will. It is in some place that the marquis called "the hidie hole," and that, from his vagrant remarks, appears to be a secret chamber, as his ancestor meant to keep James VI. there. I wish he had cut the throat of that prince, a bad fellow. But, of course, I don't know where the chamber is: ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... of the fisher lads, and brought clear to the front the sweet tenors of the schoolboys, on whom, he said, all his hopes depended. And how his own rich baritone ascended strongly and softly over all, blending into perfect harmony all discordance, and gently smothering the vagrant and rebellious tones that would sometimes break ambitiously through discipline, and try to assert their own individuality. He sang an Offertory solo, accompanying himself on the harmonium. Who will say it was not sweet? Who will say it ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... well-kept American city to European cities! There, ofttimes, we find narrow, crooked and dirty streets, and what is worse thousands of children who never knew the meaning of the word "home." Instead of filthy alleys filled with smoke and foul smelling gases and profanity and unclean jests from vagrant lips they should have, as the children here, the benefits of grassy lawns, running brooks and singing birds, the natural birthrights of every child. Oh! For more great hearted men who are more considerate ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... in the maize to catch the reaping songs; listening at spinning parties, at festivals, at death-beds, at taverns; taking the songs down from the lips of peasant women, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and all manner of humble folk who were the custodians of this vagrant community verse. We have passed so entirely out of the song-making period, and literature has become to us so exclusively the work of a professional class, that we find it difficult to imagine the intellectual and social ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards

... common to all classes, to all degrees of wealth and poverty, to every grade of education and ignorance. Here, for example, is her Majesty Queen Victoria in her palace, this present blessed night, and here is Winking Charley, a sturdy vagrant, in one of her Majesty's jails. Her Majesty has fallen, many thousands of times, from that same Tower, which I claim a right to tumble off now and then. So has Winking Charley. Her Majesty in her sleep has opened ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... secret; their doctrine was mysterious; their profession was a discipline, beginning in a formal initiation, manifested in an association, and exercised in privation and pain. They were from the nature of the case proselytizing societies, for they were rising into power; nor were they local, but vagrant, restless, intrusive, and encroaching. Their pretensions to supernatural knowledge brought them into easy connection with magic and astrology, which are as attractive to the wealthy and luxurious as the more vulgar ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... been more or less avoided. I never heard of its being open to the public and I shall speak to some one who will see that it is made secure. Even if it is not valued by the present owners, it should not be left for tramps or any chance vagrant to make use of." ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard

... who is trying to do something that he isn't fitted to, because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... the woodland pours Its wildly-warbling song, And balmy from the bank of flowers The Zephyr breathes along; Let no rude sound invade from far, No vagrant foot be nigh, No ray from Grandeur's gilded car Flash on the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... was allied one of the most favoured of his wife's hundred lovers, Henry Jermyn, whom James had lately created a peer by the title of Lord Dover. Jermyn had been distinguished more than twenty years before by his vagrant amours and his desperate duels. He was now ruined by play, and was eager to retrieve his fallen fortunes by means of lucrative posts from which the laws excluded him. [50] To the same party belonged an intriguing pushing Irishman named White, who had been much abroad, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... life, became a wandering pioneer, emigrated from Kentucky when the President was but seven years old, took up his residence for several years in the remote solitudes of Indiana, and drifted at a later day to Illinois. This vagrant life, by a shiftless father, and without a mother or female relative to keep alive and impress upon him the pedigree and traditions of his family, left the President without definite knowledge of his origin ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... an affair of pomp and ceremony held in Hastings's Theater, was not less than shocking. It had seemed so to the principal, but he knew Phil; and knowing Phil he laughed when the English teacher protested that it would compromise her professional dignity to allow a student to discuss the vagrant canines of Main Street in a commencement essay. She had expected Phil to prepare a thesis on "What the Poets Have Meant to Me," and for this "The Dogs of Main Street" was no proper substitute. The superintendent of schools, scanning ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... my life or anything like that, did you?" she adventured like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion—I shouldn't know how ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... far above the head of Sunrise Canon, a fire was burning, its thin smoke streamer riding on a vagrant breeze. Near by lay a dun-colored horse on its side, tied fast. A man was squatting by ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts

... parchment-white to very old oak. There was a capatas, or overseer, and seven or eight paid peones, the others being all agregados—that is, supernumeraries without pay, or, to put it plainly, vagabonds who attach themselves like vagrant dogs to establishments of this kind, lured by the abundance of flesh, and who occasionally assist the regular peones at their work, and also do a little gambling and stealing to keep themselves in small change. At break of ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... completed and not to be touched with perishable flesh. In novel after novel the characters come to grief from the American habit of extravagance, which, as Mr. Herrick represents it, seems a serious offense against integrity—springing from a failure to control vagrant desires and tying the spirit to the need of superfluous things until it ceases to be itself. And with never wearied iteration he comes back to the problem of how the individual can maintain his integrity in the face of the temptation ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... Which means that I don't like you none too well. Besides, who in thunder are you? A wanderin' vagrant you look to me, and we got a law agin' vagrants. You amble along on your trail pretty pronto, and no harm'll come to you. But if you're around town tomorrow—well, you've heard ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... He was in the city—the great Sodom of the West. He was an object of wonder to every curious eye. His wild appearance and gentle manner comported illy, and the thoughtless crowd followed him. Attired now as a civilized being, and feeling that the vagrant life of a savage must lead to grief, he called to mind the tear which stole from the rheumy eyes of the old trapper as he narrated his adventures in the wilderness, and cursed the hour he ever wandered from his home. His life had been a continual ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... SEASON.—A few days since the Justices of South Shields sentenced a vagrant verging upon seventy years of age, to fourteen days imprisonment with hard labour—a matter to which attention was called when the Coroner held an inquest in the gaol on the poor old fellow's body. It would be interesting to know the names of these "un-worthies," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various

... scarcely have chosen a more perfect day for their last frolic. The sky wore its most vivid blue dress, ornamented by little fluffy white clouds, and a jolly vagrant breeze played lightly about the picnickers, whispering in their ears the lively assurance that wind and sky and sun were all on their good behavior for that day at least. The party were to make the trip to "Picnic Hollow," as Arline had named their destination, in Elfreda's and Arline's automobiles. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... house one day. It was a vagrant old Scotchman, who, when he had been treated to bread and cheese and cider, sang some of the songs of Robert Burns, which Whittier then heard for the first time, and which he never forgot. Coming to him thus as songs reached ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various

... and pessimism; Literature and society; Gorki's youth; Hard times; A vagrant life; Journalist days; Rapid success; The new heroes; Creatures once ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... steady, plodding industry, witness Limus. Now the present demand for fish will not be permanent. After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the meanwhile they do not acquire a distaste for steady labor and get vagrant habits. I would talk this over with 'Siah and ask him in serious mood if he really thinks best to spend so much money in fishing-gear, when he could buy land with ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... over every roof, arose the leaden dome of St. Paul's. This vista was rather to M. Zola's liking. Close beside us, on the bridge, was one of the semi-circular embrasures garnished with stone seats. A pitiful-looking vagrant was lolling there; but this made no difference to M. Zola. He installed himself on the seat with Desmoulin on one hand and myself on the other, and there we remained for some little time looking about us ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... words his great hand closed firmly upon hers, and she had a curious, vagrant feeling of insecurity that she could not attempt to analyse. Then abruptly he let her go. An instant his eyes still held her, and then, before she could begin to thank him, he turned to the ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... are a vagrant, portends poverty and misery. To see vagrants is a sign of contagion invading your community. To give to a vagrant, denotes that your generosity ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... supreme source of authority.—"As the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do." Every soul must have a supreme source of authority in its life, if it is to have peace. Its own whim, the suggestion of passion, the vagrant impulse of the moment, are inconsistent with tranquillity. There must be for each of us one voice which is imperative, one command which is indisputable, one authority which admits of no gainsaying. If you will search your ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... The vagrant in him, that had been starved and denied, rose supreme. Now that he was sure that he was going to write, had a big theme, there was excuse for his desire to be free. He would return to his chink in the wall, as Manly explained, better fitted for it and with a wider vision. He had a theory that ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... save my life or anything like that, did you?" she adventured; like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She did not weigh her words. "I shouldn't like having my life saved. The necessity for feeling such a vast emotion—I shouldn't know ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... dream, no mirage of a vagrant brain like that sea-picture, or that wild vision at Beauseincourt, but sober, and sad, and strange reality. I understood my position from that moment, geographically as well as physically. I was a prisoner in the house of Basil Bainrothe (while he, perchance, reigned ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... conscripts had been enrolled. Lee's official reports and correspondence allude in the strongest terms to the indiscipline of his army. "The absent," he wrote on September 23, "are scattered broadcast over the land;" and in the dispatches of his subordinates are to be found many references to the vagrant tendencies of their commands.* (* General orders, September 4; Lee to Davis, September 7; Lee to Davis, September 13; special orders, September 21; circular order, September 22; Lee to Davis, September 23; Lee to Secretary of War, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it, Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the wire-grass. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day passed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of grass or a weed was allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh mould, black with fatness, was worked about the swelling ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... that they all but rested in its shadow, was one of those monster aircars, its tentacles moving to and fro as though wafted into motion by some vagrant breeze. But since neither Sarka nor Jaska could feel the breeze, Sarka knew that it was life which caused the waving motion of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... man, who shall find his way home before sunlight, has just staggered heavily along, roaring out the burden of the drinking song of the previous night: the last houseless vagrant whom penury and police have left in the streets, has coiled up his chilly limbs in some paved comer, to dream of food and warmth. The drunken, the dissipated, and the wretched have disappeared; the more sober and orderly part of the population have not yet awakened to the labours of the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... and adoring self. Without his basal firmness and strength, woman, in whom the centrifugal force is stronger, remains a weak, vacillating, impulsive creature, feebly swayed by the tides of emotion, lacking self-poise, and aimless and vagrant. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... valley, forest and meadow, till at last the great linden trees around the Mouse-trap were shaking their heads at us, and the tall chimneys pointed at us, and said, "look at those children! they have been out all night, which is shocking. That vagrant Moonman is teaching them the worst ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards

... Oh thoughtless woodman, Hew but what you need, They give balm to vagrant breezes, For their ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various

... looking back at him. "To suffer three elder gentlewomen to trudge in the mire, and never so much as offer to hand one of them! Those were not good manners, my master, when I was a young maid—but seeing how things be changed now o' days, maybe that has gone along with them. Come hither at once, thou vagrant, and give thine hand to thy mother, like a dutiful son as thou shouldest ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... age, And learning spreads her useful page; In vain! for giddy pleasure calls, And shows the marbles, tops, and balls, What's learning to the charms of play? The indulgent tutor must give way. A heedless, wilful dunce, and wild, The parents' fondness spoil'd the child; The youth in vagrant courses ran; Now abject, stooping, old, and wan, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... teaches us to say: 'Our Father which art in heaven.' Think you it concerns you little to know where and what that heaven is, and where your Heavenly Father is to be sought and found? I tell you that for vagrant minds it matters much not only to believe aright about heaven, but to procure to understand this matter by experience. It is one of those things that strongly bind the understanding and recollect the soul. You already know that God is in all ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte

... bad men were out, and took the opportunity of his absence from home to plunder his stables. We were told an anecdote concerning Simon the Cyrenian, which is not bad. A man was taken up in one of the villages as a vagrant, and desired by the justice to give an account of himself—to explain why he was always wandering about, and had no employment. The man, with the greatest indignation, replied, "No employment! I am substitute Cyrenian at Coyohuacan in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... The Vagrant: Being without money, and denied employment, I am compelled to obtain food, shelter and clothing in one of these ways, else I shall ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... particulars of our cargo as already detailed, we had sundry items of live freight in the shape of some pigs, which were stowed in the long- boat on top of the deck-house; three cats, two belonging to the Portuguese steward and messing in the cuddy, while the third was a vagrant Tom that had strayed on board in the docks, and making friends with the carpenter Gregory, or "old chips" as he was generally called, was allowed to take up his quarters in the forepeak, migrating to the cook's cabin at meal-times with unwavering sagacity; ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... the little vagrant by bringing him under the eyes of the great soldier Nobunaga, who was attracted by his wizened, monkeyish face and restless eyes and gave him occupation among his grooms. As he grew older his love of war became pronounced, he took part in the numerous ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... Justice, "I don't know who you are, or what right you have to interfere, but this is the sale of a vagrant nigger, with no visible means of suppo't. Perhaps, since you're interested, you'd like to bid on 'im. Are ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... and of his frame of mind, what shall be said? He, at all events, said as little to himself as was possible, but, in the circumstances, it was no more than could be expected that a lively fancy would not wholly be denied, and that occasional vagrant visions would present themselves uninvited. He pictured to himself a meeting with Christian, all in the clouds, of course; he told himself he had no wish to meet her, nor, if he did, was he at all likely to discuss the matter with her; still he thought that he would rather ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... out of the house they found a baby blizzard sending the first snow of the season, as light and dry as tiny particles of down, whirling and eddying through the broad street. As Rose stood in surprise at the top of the brownstone steps, a dry vagrant, left from one of the trees which was tossing its gaunt arms protestingly, came tumbling down to become stem-entangled in her hair. With a laugh, she dashed for the motor car and, when she had sprung inside it, she was panting a little, for the thieving wind had taken ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... Vacant neokupata. Vacate forlasi. Vacation libertempo. Vaccinate inokuli. Vacillate sxanceligxi. Vacillating sxanceligxa. Vacuous malplena. Vacuum malplenajxo. Vagabond sentauxgulo, vagisto. Vagary kaprico. Vagrant vagisto. Vague malpreciza. Vain (fruitless) vana. Vain (conceited) vanta. Vain, in vane. Vainly vane. Vale valeto. Valet lakeo, servisto. Valiant brava. Valid legxa. Valise valizo. Valley valo. Valorous brava. Valour braveco. Valse valso. Value (appraise) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... up by the waves, slowly, but constantly increase their horizontal diameter. Coconuts are frequently seen floating upon the sea in these regions, some of which are no doubt thrown upon the shores of the new created lands; from which accidental circumstance this fruit is there propagated. Vagrant birds unconsciously deposit the germs of various other productions of the vegetable kingdom, which in due season spring up and clothe their surfaces with verdure; and the natural accumulation of dead and putrid vegetation serves to assist in the formation of a rich and productive ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... Budlow?" asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale. But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course. The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... in favour of an obscure nobody (1751), can be shown to be wholly false. Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law. His father, who was an attorney of substance, had a distaste still stronger for so vagrant a profession as letters were in that day. He withdrew the annual allowance, and Burke set to work to win for himself by indefatigable industry and capability in the public interest that position of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... unstaid^, inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c v.; restless; agitated &c 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c 605; capricious &c 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c 111; wavering. Adv. seesaw &c (oscillation) 314; off and on. Phr. a rolling stone gathers no moss; pictra mossa non fa muschis [It]; honores ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... grey and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bath tubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water from heaven. The very cobblestones are ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... Passepartout's lively nature would agree with Mr. Fogg. It was impossible to tell whether the new servant would turn out as absolutely methodical as his master required; experience alone could solve the question. Passepartout had been a sort of vagrant in his early years, and now yearned for repose; but so far he had failed to find it, though he had already served in ten English houses. But he could not take root in any of these; with chagrin, he found his masters ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne

... herself about such things. But it looked as bright in her hair as a ruddy berry on a dark foliaged creeper, and she wore it with a pleasure, which was destined to be brief. For as she sat knitting with the quietly creeping fingers of an expert in that art, a vagrant gust maliciously whisked off her little gawd, and tossing it contumeliously on the ground, as if it were not worth carrying, began to puff it along, skimming over the heather and tussocks. Denis O'Meara all but rescued it for her, only that Hugh McInerney—the omadhawn—starting ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... "'Why vagrant thus, my sometime pride, Unloved, unloving, wilt thou roam? Sure home is best!' The son replied, 'I ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow

... neighbour, a retired captain of Uhlans, named Yaff, was at the root of Masha's desertion. He had taken her fancy, according to Panteley Eremyitch, simply by constantly curling his moustaches, pomading himself to excess, and sniggering significantly; but one must suppose that the vagrant gypsy blood in Masha's veins had more to do with it. However that may have been, one fine summer evening Masha tied up a few odds and ends in a small bundle, and walked ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... mislead him. Are you afraid of being made too amiable, or too plain? No, no! You are not vain. Whence comes this vagary?—well, we shall all know in good time. Were I to be with you, I should talk—perhaps maliciously—on purpose to see how your features would unsettle and shift themselves to the vagrant humour, that though one would know another from habit, and their old acquaintanceship, the painter would never be able to keep them steadily together. I should laugh to see every lineament "going ahead," and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... Some have vowed that it lived here—some there; some that, like a gentleman with several writs in pursuit of him, it continually changed its lodgings; whilst others have lustily sworn that the soul was a vagrant, with no claim to any place of settlement whatever. Nevertheless, a vulgar notion has obtained that the soul dwelt on a little knob of the brain; and that there, like a vainglorious bantam-cock on a dunghill, it now claps its wings ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... far as Miss Unity was concerned; she had seldom spent such an afternoon in her life. She had been taken out for a walk in the mud, with rain threatening; she had talked in the open High Street, under the very eye of the dean, with a little vagrant out of Anchor and Hope Alley; she had of her own accord, unadvised and unassisted, formed an original plan, and not only formed it, but taken the first step towards carrying it out. Miss Unity hardly ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton

... was permissible to say about Bertie had been said some dozens of times, and other topics began to come to the front—the extreme mustiness of the cow-house, the possibility of it catching fire, and the probability of it being a Rowton House for the vagrant rats of the neighbourhood. And still no sign of deliverance ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... more. Calamity! When I had seen you twice, I wanted to see you a thousand times, I wanted to see you always. Then—how stop myself on that slope of hell?—then I no longer belonged to myself. The other end of the thread which the demon had attached to my wings he had fastened to his foot. I became vagrant and wandering like yourself. I waited for you under porches, I stood on the lookout for you at the street corners, I watched for you from the summit of my tower. Every evening I returned to myself more charmed, more despairing, more ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... accept the terms, But dread th' event—the tale affirms. A Stag approach'd the Sheep, to treat For one good bushel of her wheat. "The honest Wolf will give his bond." At which, beginning to despond, "The Wolf (cries she) 's a vagrant bite. And you are quickly out of sight; Where shall I find or him or you Upon the day ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus

... however you still doubt me, bring me a dollar next time, make a secret mark on it, and I will give it you back turned into gold. But the matter must not go further. And then you will no longer question my chance of discovering the elixir of life. Only I should like to punish that beggarly vagrant, that rascally herb-culler, and pitiful conjuror, as he deserves. Let him only come for once into my quarters! With all his contemptible jugglery, I would astound him! I am so enraged with the fellow, the blood runs into my head at the very ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... calm! fear not this king of the buskin! 315 A king? Oh laughter! A king Bajazet! That from some vagrant actor's tiring-room, Hath stolen at once his speech ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... had made a nest in one of our lilac bushes and had laid an egg in it. With eggs at twenty cents a dozen and our family fond of custard, an industrious platypus is by no means an unwelcome visitor. When Mr. Robbins came looking for his vagrant pet I suggested that a flock of platypuses would be a decided improvement upon the poultry with which the average farmer stocks his farm. I was considerably surprised to learn from Mr. Robbins that the market price of platypuses is ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... the house was searched. In the bureau in my favourite study, which was left unlocked, the steel casket was discovered, and a large case-knife, on the blade of which the stains of blood were still perceptible. On this discovery I was apprehended; and on these evidences, and on the deposition of this vagrant stranger, I was not, indeed, committed to take my trial for murder, but placed in confinement, all bail for my appearance refused, and the examination adjourned to give time for further evidence and inquiries. I had requested the professional aid ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of a sudden a wretched bitch waddled out from the woods into his path. It was a vagrant bitch, as thin as a skeleton, and so big in the belly that she walked with difficulty. Her dugs dragged along the snow, for she was in pup. They came from opposite directions, two lonely creatures, who are paddling ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... Kenelm Digby Opened" is a cook book. It is due you to know this at once, otherwise your thoughts—if your nature be vagrant—would drift towards family skeletons. Or maybe the domestic traits prevail and you would think of dress-clothes hanging in camphorated bags and a row of winter boots upon ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... him in his position as "The O'Heynes" among the neighboring gentry, she wanders off into the Burren Hills with her old nurse Peg Inerny. Peg has fascinated Maeve O'Heynes with tales of "the other people," convincing Maeve, as she is convinced herself, that she changes from the old vagrant peasant whom the countryside half fears into Queen Maeve, the great Amazon of the Cuchulain legends. Maeve O'Heynes in her own dreams has seen great heroes and heroines of Ireland's legendary past, and she believes that they still live among the fairies as many a peasant to-day ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... birthday in Munich. A short time before he had gone to Bayreuth to hear the Wagnerian operas, and now in the capital of Bavaria he attended the theater of the Residence, where the Mozart festival was celebrated. Jaime was not a melomaniac, but his vagrant existence forced him with the crowd, and his accomplishment as an amateur pianist had led him to make his musical pilgrimage for two ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... instructions of his old friend, Miss Tidswell, of D'Egville, the dancing master, of Angelo, the fencing master, and of no less a person than Incledon, the celebrated singer, who seems to have taken the greatest interest in him. But the vagrant, half-gypsy disposition, which he inherited from his mother, could never be subdued, and he was constantly disappearing from his uncle's house for weeks together, which he would pass in going about from one ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving

... Pinal was one of those vagrant Western streams that appear and disappear at will. Where its course was sandy it sank from sight, creeping along on the bed-rock below; but where as at Pinal the bed-rock came to the surface, then the creek, perforce, ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge

... reflections, Glossin began to count up the chances in his favour. Meg Merrilies was dead. Gabriel Faa, besides being a gipsy, was a vagrant and a deserter. The other witnesses—he did not greatly fear them! If only Dirk Hatteraick could be induced to be steady, and to put another meaning upon the sums of money which had been paid to him on the day ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... Bussorah, had in his harem eighty consorts, free and servile. Coming closer to the Prophet's household, we find that Mohammed himself at one period had in his harem no fewer than nine wives and two slave-girls. Of his grandson Hasan we read that his vagrant passion gained for him the unenviable sobriquet of The Divorcer; for it was only by continually divorcing his consorts that he could harmonize his craving for fresh nuptials with the requirements of the divine law, ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir

... recognised in this man's dress and appearance the habit and the manners of those vagrants with whom he had nearly been confounded by the hasty proceedings of Trois Eschelles and Petit Andre, and he, too, entertained very natural apprehensions concerning the risk of reposing trust in one of that vagrant race. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... dimensions which were just about that square. It was a little improvement, though nothing to brag of. What fitful zephyrs there might be, caused no doubt by the rapid passage to and fro on the roof above and fence-tops below of vagrant felines on Cupid's contentious battles bent, to the disturbance of the still air, soughed softly through the meshes of my hammock and gave some measure of relief, grateful enough for which I ceased the perfervid language I had been using practically ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs

... arguing for fair play, and finally offering a substitute motion, asking that no contracts be given out and only routine business be transacted while the present crisis was on; but he might as well have talked to the vagrant wind. Not over half a dozen men present were in entire sympathy with him, and they were helpless. It soon became evident that the others had been primed for this meeting—as indeed was the case, every doubtful one having been called to a private confab with ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow

... and wealth, resulting in immense fortunes on the one hand, and terrible poverty on the other, has separated the two classes by a chasm as deep and wide as ever yawned between czar and moujik, kaiser and vagrant, prince and pauper, feudal baron and serf. The immensity of the power and wealth thus concentrated into the hands of the few, to be inherited by their sons and daughters, tends to establish this class division hereditarily. ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... people some are coarse 340 In the extreme, and it may chance that one, The basest there seeing us shall exclaim— What handsome stranger of athletic form Attends the Princess? Where had she the chance To find him? We shall see them wedded soon. Either she hath received some vagrant guest From distant lands, (for no land neighbours ours) Or by her pray'rs incessant won, some God Hath left the heav'ns to be for ever hers. 'Tis well if she have found, by her own search, 350 An husband ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... so great, The smell of stubble burnt, delights. Piled high The wagons silent standing take their nightly rest, On distant hills the silver birches I descry, Framed gold by fertile fields the sacred picture blest. Then with a joy unshared save by the vagrant, I see the threshing floor well filled and fragrant, The sloping straw-thatched cottage roofs again, The window panels carved, ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

... wrong; this vagrant taste is unnatural, and does not lead to happiness; your eager pursuit of pleasure defeats itself; love gives no true delight but where the heart is attach'd, and you do not give yours time to fix. Such is our unhappy frailty, that the tenderest passion may wear ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... courage sufficient to have taken such decided measures, after keeping on terms with the man so long. When he spoke of justices and warrants, you looked so overawed that I thought I felt the clutch of the parish-beadles on my shoulder, to drag me to prison as a vagrant." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... into the infra-oven as Ben walked through to crew quarters. Her coverall sleeves were rolled to the elbows as she worked and a vagrant strand of copper hair curled over her forehead. As Martin passed by, he caught a faint whisper of perfume and ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael

... the prostitute are excellently safeguarded under the administration of the law by the magistrates' courts, the business of her political protector the cadet is doubly secure. At most he is only subject to a six months penalty as a common vagrant, but practically speaking he can never be arrested at all because the only valid evidence against him must come from the woman who supports him, who neither desires nor dares to protest against him. There are thousands ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... heed thine oath,' said Eumaeus the swineherd. 'I do not listen to vagrant's tales about my master since a stranger came here and cheated us with a story. He told us that he had seen Odysseus in the land of the Cretans, in the house of the hero Idomeneus, mending his ships that had been broken by the storm, and that he would be here by summer or by ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum

... asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... her eyes, bent to kiss her hand, and after he had picked up his cane and his hat from the rack, toddled down the walk to the street, a sad, thoughtful, worried little man, white-clad and serene to outward view, who had not even a whistle nor a vagrant tune under his breath to ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... I had rebaited my hook and dropped in a third time; but as before the vagrant school had moved on. They had seemed alarmed for the moment by the commotion, and darted off with accelerated speed. But we now had more confidence that they would return and ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... as they talked on the fly-leaf of his note-book. Alive to that theological disturbance in the air all around him, he refused to be moved by it, as essentially a strife on small matters, anticipating a vagrant regret which may have visited many other minds since, the regret, namely, that the old, pensive, use-and-wont Catholicism, which had accompanied the nation's earlier struggle for existence, and consoled it therein, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater

... saw his old friend. It took him a full minute to realize that the gentle sportsman, the true Christian, the delicate man, the delightful companion, was there before him, a wreck—cast out from among his fellows, confined in a noisome cell, and hopelessly given over to his vagrant fancies and the tender mercies of Thomas Buffum. When the memory of what Paul Benedict had been to him, at one period of his life, came to Jim, with the full realization of his present misery and degradation, the strong man wept ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... balmy lips Let me, no vagrant insect, rove; O let me steal one liquid kiss, For Oh! my soul is ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... the hair receding from the temples, a high-bridged nose with wide-cut nostrils, lips thin and fine, moving flexibly as they muttered. It matched with what the voice had told Mark, was not the face of the brutalized hobo or low-bred vagrant, but beneath its hair and dirt showed as the mask of a man who might have fallen from high places. Even his curses went to prove it. They were not the dull profanities of the loafer, but were varied, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... proofs pointing as decidedly to the determination of this long-continued controversy in favour of Scotland, as the soil from which this vagrant child of the muses sprung. No evidence seems to have been hitherto sought from the most obvious source, his writings. The writer of the memoir in the Biographia Brittanica, (who certainly dealt a well-aimed, though by no means decisive, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt

... they please in their reports to their societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... that may be, I have thought it well to acquaint you with my way of thinking; and I venture to think—I venture to hope Mr. Kurnatovsky will be received a bras ouverts. He is no Montenegrin vagrant.' ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev

... went to the central police station Wednesday night and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy. He said he had been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that he was sure he must be a vagrant. In any event, he was so hungry he must be fed. Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety days' ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... West, or of profit from commercial enterprises which appealed to the cupidity of capitalists and led to investments that promised speedy and ample returns. A desire to improve social conditions and to solve the problem of the poor and the vagrant, which had become acute since the dissolution of the monasteries, was arousing the authorities to deal with the pauper and to dispose of the criminal in such a way as to yield a profitable service to the kingdom. England was full of resolute men, ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews

... the freedom of life in the woods has for them an undefinable charm. Then as the frigid season approaches they permit themselves to be caught, and go back to their labor or confinement with hearts lightened by the enjoyment of their vagrant summer wanderings. There is in some cases another advantage to be gained. A twenty years' convict who has escaped and lets himself be caught again may give a false name, and avoid all incriminating answers through a convenient failure of memory. If not detected, he may in this way ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... had been a reckless vagrant creature, wandering through the woods at night like a half-deranged person; but she had wit enough to see that there was safety in confession. She pretended to have committed, by witchcraft, crimes enough to have hanged her a dozen times. If she had stood to her confession, we ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... previous errors of example and education—or whether he fell into mischief because he had nothing else to do in these Black Islands; certain it is, that from the operation of some or all of these causes conjointly, he deteriorated sadly. He took to "vagrant courses," in which the muse forbears to ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... objects sprang into view with almost magic suddenness. Yet he saw little of anything beyond a girl's look of horror, heard nothing but her outraged words. Scarcely knowing it he hurdled prostrate figures, stumbled into craters, tripped on vagrant ends of wire entanglements, till at last, through sheer exhaustion, he fell face down amidst a small group of ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... is, sir," he said, "I've come to ask you about something. But am I disturbing you? If so, I'll go and 'pursue vagrant pieces of leather again,' as Mr Stokes says when he wants to dismiss us ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... Harley's vagrant fancy was caught. He was impressed by Lucia's tall beauty, her silence, her self-possession, and the mystery of her presence. He wished to discover more about her, who she was, whence she came, and believing Prescott to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... thoughtful and imaginative, John Appleman decided that he, at least, should drink better liquor than did tipplers in general. He would not be seen a weakly vagrant, buying his jugful at the corner store; neither would he drink raw liquor. He would buy it in quantity and let it age upon his farm, and so with each replenishing of the jug from his private store would come an increase in quality derived ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... back to the window, brooding over Dwindle's transformation. "Maybe so," he sighed, watching the newly-arrested vagrant pointing an accusing finger toward one of ...
— Master of None • Lloyd Neil Goble

... have not accepted wealth without accepting the personal responsibility for it. Sick men and women in more than one hospital lie in wards provided by Martin Renard and myself; and I am not dishonoured in my Institution at Poplar. Those vagrant wanderings with Andriaovsky have enabled me to know the poor and those who help the poor. My personal labours in the administration of the Institute are great, for outside the necessary routine I leave little to subordinates. I have ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

... think his name is, although I am not sure, and my poor old memory cannot hold names long. He is a sailor who has been shipwrecked, and he became a vagrant here and was sent to Bilibid Prison. Much of my work is in prisons, and I took charge of him when he got out and sent him to the Sailors' Home, sure that he would be able to get a ship again. That was a couple of months ago, and ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... vagabond users of 'flash' language get hold of this word? It is probable enough that it was brought home by the sailors from the West Indies, and picked up at the docks by the waifs and strays of our vast vagrant population. On the other hand, it is just as likely that the West Indian negroes picked up 'Duffy' from our own sailors; and that, in fact, Duffy is just the nigger contraction of Davy Jones. There is certainly ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor

... Vagrant Acts included "minstrels" in their definition of rogues and vagabonds, it is evident that the suitors of the Minstrelsy Court would have run the risk of commitment to the House of Correction and a whipping, if the acts had not specially excepted the franchise of the Dutton family from their operation. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various

... was known to all the vagrant train; He chid their wand'rings, but relieved their pain; The long-remembered beggar was his guest, Whose beard descending swept ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... Beauty's Fairy World, in classic calm Or rich romantic colour. Bagdat's shrine By sheeny Tigris, Syrian pool and palm, Avilion's bowery hollows, Ida's peak, The lily-laden Lotos land, the fields Of amaranth! What may vagrant Fancy seek More than thy rich song yields, Of Orient odour, Faery wizardry, Or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various

... Yes. Is it, do you think chronic unemployment with a vagrant tendency? Or would it be nearer ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... King—the sort of King one loves to imagine, not concerned in such petty matters as wars and parliaments and taxes, but a mellow and moderate despot who is a true patron of genius—a mild old chap who has in his court the greatest men and women in the world—and all of them vying to please the most vagrant of his moods! Invite any one of them to talk, and if your highness is not pleased with him you have only to put him back in his corner—and bring some jester to sharpen the laughter of your highness, or some poet to set ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... was only 1,475. This enormous decrease in the course of two years is not due to a diminution of the offence, but to a change in the attitude of the police. Again, in the year 1887, the Metropolitan police arrested 4,556 persons under the provisions of the Vagrant and Poor Law Acts; but in the year 1888, the number arrested by the same body under the same acts amounted to 7,052. It is perfectly obvious that this vast increase of apprehensions was not owing to a corresponding increase in the number of rogues, beggars, and vagrants; ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... called the Hercules is now preparing and almost in a readiness with necessary provisions to make a supply to the Lord Governor and the Colony in Virginia, it is thought meet, for the avoiding of such vagrant and unnecessary persons as do commonly proffer themselves being altogether unserviceable, that none but honest sufficient artificers, as carpenters, smiths, coopers, fishermen, brickmen, and such like, shall be entertained into this voyage. Of whom so many as will in due time repair to the ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton

... Volgha on the Westside, the Emperour hath some fewe Castels with garisons in them. This happeneth by meanes of the Crimme Tartar, that will neither himselfe plant Townes to dwel there, (liuing a wild and vagrant life) nor suffer the Russe (that is farre off with the strength of his Countrey) to people those parts. From Vologda (whieh lieth almost 1700. verst from the port of S. Nicholas) downe towards Mosco, and so towards the South part that ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt

... student. But the journey to Rome is costly, and the student is often poor. With a will resolute to overcome difficulties, Rome may however at last be reached. Thus Francois Perrier, an early French painter, in his eager desire to visit the Eternal City, consented to act as guide to a blind vagrant. After long wanderings he reached the Vatican, studied and became famous. Not less enthusiasm was displayed by Jacques Callot in his determination to visit Rome. Though opposed by his father in his wish to be an artist, the boy would not be baulked, but fled from home to make his way to Italy. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... arc of sky The great stone box is cruelly displayed. The street becomes more dreary from its shade, And vagrant breezes touch its walls and die. Here sullen convicts in their chains might lie, Or slaves toil dumbly at some dreary trade. How worse than folly is their labor made Who cleft the rocks that this ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer

... (Queen Anne) Hatton describes Bridewell "as a house of correction for idle, vagrant, loose, and disorderly persons, and 'night walkers,' who are there set to hard labour, but receive clothes and diet." It was also a hospital for indigent persons. Twenty art-masters (decayed traders) were also lodged, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... it wad hae been ill following him wi' the beast, and I cam back to Charlies-hope to tell the gudewife, for I was uncertain what to do. It wad look unco-like, I thought, just to be sent out on a hunt-the-gowk errand wi' a land-louper [*Vagrant] like that. But, Lord! as the gudewife set up her throat about it, and said what a shame it wad be if ye was to come to ony wrang, an I could help ye; and then in cam your letter that confirmed it. So I took to the kist, and out wi' the, pickle [*A supply.] notes in case they should be needed, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... Cameron's vagrant mind, suddenly recalled, responded with a quick assent. Opportunity? Endowment? Yes, surely. His mind flashed back over the years of his education at the Academy and the University, long lazy years. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... hours in the discussion of philosophy! Do you remember it? But that is now far away. Will that happy time ever return? Shall we one day meet again? Here my life is restless, uncertain, precarious, and, what is worse, indolent, illiterate, and vagrant. I do no work, I live in idleness, I ramble about; I do not read, I no longer study; my books are forsaken; now and then I glance over a few metaphysical works, and after a days walk through dirty, filthy, crowded streets. I lie ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... years Lite had lain aside the mystery of the footprints on the kitchen floor on the night after the inquest, as a puzzle he would probably never solve. He had come to remember them as a vagrant incident that carried no especial meaning. But now they seemed to carry a new significance,—if only he could get at the key. For three years he had gone along quietly, working and saving all he could, and looking after Jean in an ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... social disorder and lawlessness, the tyranny of the powerful, and the inroads of enemies, are a stern discipline, allowing brief intervals, or awarding a sharp penance, to sloth and sensuality. The rude food, the scanty clothing, the violent exercise, the vagrant life, the military constraint, the imperfect pharmacy, which now are the trials of only particular classes of the community, were once the lot more or less of all. In the deep woods or the wild solitudes of the medieval era, feelings of religion or superstition were naturally present to the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... luck would have it, a vagrant gust of wind, perhaps an advance courier of the prospective storm, swooped down across the road. Before the boy who was stooping over could touch the paper that had attracted his attention it ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster

... Yes—that is, almost woods. And more than that they failed to elicit. Nearly every day she started away by herself, and after awhile they noticed that she went in the same direction. She went briskly, alertly, like one with a definite end in view. Now, where did Billy go? Their vagrant curiosity was aroused, but not yet to ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... not new to the frontier, had not been long in the army. He and Cumnor had enlisted in a happy-go-lucky manner together at Grant, in Arizona, when the General was elsewhere. Discipline was galling to his vagrant spirit, and after each pay-day he had generally slept off the effects in the guard-house, going there for other offences between-whiles; but he was not of the stuff that deserts; also, he was excellent tempered, and his captain liked him for the way in ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... auction. At one of the sales in 1821 a Negro bought a white man and ordered him to follow his master, and the order was obeyed. But the benevolent black took his servant to the steamboat, paid his passage and restored him his freedom, making himself satisfied with sending the white vagrant out of the territory.—Niles Register, XXI, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... to get away once more and pick up the old and ever fresh business of the vagrant, loafing through new towns, learned in the manners of dogs, babies, and perambulators half the world over, and tracking the seasons by the up-growth of flowers in stranger-people's gardens. St. Paul, standing at the barn-door of the Dakota and Minnesota granaries, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d. in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... avoided. I never heard of its being open to the public and I shall speak to some one who will see that it is made secure. Even if it is not valued by the present owners, it should not be left for tramps or any chance vagrant to ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard

... of the warm days that fell at the end of the apple harvest, when such vagrant labourers as had collected to help the farmers were loitering at liberty, Smith held his first and last public meeting in the place where his boyhood had been passed. It was near the cross-roads on the old highroad to Palmyra, where a small wooden ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... upward to wrap themself soothingly about his brain. But the sense of flight, unbelievably swift, was present and recognizable, though all else eluded him. He had the impression, however, that it was intended that all save the most vagrant, most widely differentiated, impressions elude him—that he should acquire only half pictures, which would therefore be all the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... clear instantaneous impression of a group of faces in the window opposite. There were a couple of men in front, stout city personages no doubt, with crimson faces and open mouths cursing the traitorous Papist and the crafty vagrant fox trapped at last; but between them, looking over their shoulders, was a woman's face in which Anthony saw the most intense struggle of emotions. The face was quite white, the lips parted, the eyes straining, and sorrow and compassion were in every line, as she watched the cheerful priest ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... a formal initiation, manifested in an association, and exercised in privation and pain. They were from the nature of the case proselytizing societies, for they were rising into power; nor were they local, but vagrant, restless, intrusive, and encroaching. Their pretensions to supernatural knowledge brought them into easy connection with magic and astrology, which are as attractive to the wealthy and luxurious as the more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... his governance, and roamed like a vagrant on a long, white road. Everything that he saw below him in the calm radiance of the morning pushed it from thought to thought. Yet none of these thoughts were valuable. None seemed fully formed. They resembled henids, things seen so ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... caused by a rebellion of a portion of the Hottentots of the Kat River settlement, at Fort Beaufort, and the Theopolis Missionary establishment, in Albany. It is supposed to have originated because of the application of stringent vagrant laws, and from apprehensions of being again forced into slavery. It is carried on on the eastern frontier of the country. The above are the surmised causes, but there are thought to have been other motives. A representative ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... insincerity, cant, and hypocrisy." And so on ad nauseam. To call Mr. Watkinson a liar would be to descend to his level. Let us simply look at the facts. George Eliot lived with George Henry Lewes as his wife. She had no vagrant attachments. Her connection with Lewes only terminated with his death. Why then did they not marry? Because Lewes's wife was still living, and the pious English law would not allow a divorce unless all the household secrets were dragged before a gaping public. George Eliot consulted her ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... chase, the lambkin ran, As only woolly vagrant can, Who never felt a crook; But stay'd at length, as 'twere disposed To drink, where tawny sands disclosed The ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker

... abest!—Donec virenti canities abest! Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call. And as for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation with which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these, that ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... submitting them to Jesus, and we feed on Him when we not only say 'Lord! Lord!' but when we do the things that He says. We feed on Christ, when we let His great, sacred, all-wise, all-giving, all satisfying love flow into our restless hearts and make them still, enter into our vagrant affections and fix them on Himself. Thus when mind and conscience and will and heart all turn to Jesus, and in Him find their sustenance, we shall be filled with the feast of fat things which He has prepared for all people. With that bread we shall be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... Sea Otter had never had such an experience— he, happily, having been raised in a country where, with the exception of waiters, only a pronounced vagrant expects or accepts a gratuity from a woman. He took the bill and fingered it curiously; then his white blood asserted itself and he handed the bill ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne

... The French sculptor has not to consider Mrs. Grundy. Maybe, the lady, raising her eyes, had been confused; perhaps for a moment angry—some little milliner or governess, one supposes. In France the jeune fille of good family does not meet her lover unattended. What had happened? Or was it but the vagrant fancy of a middle-aged bourgeois seeking in imagination the romance that reality so rarely gives us, weaving his love ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome

... other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from .. the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... who also denounced the stage. The sentiment was, in fact, that of the respectable middle classes in general. The effect was to strengthen the prejudice which held that playgoing was immoral in itself, and that an actor deserved to be treated as a 'vagrant'—the class to which he legally belonged. During the next half-century, at least, that was the prevailing opinion among the solid ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... multiplicamini," and she would willingly allow the glittering stranger Knight to brise le sceau de ses petites solitudes, as the Vicar of Diane-Artemis phrases it. The landscapes of these tales are fantastically beautiful, and scattered through the narrative are fragments of verse, vagrant and witty, that light up the stories ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... be kind," said the man, "I think it would be easier. You ought to give me up, you know, and let me go to jail. I'm no good. I'm a vagrant and a drunkard, and worse. But you won't, I know that; so now let me go. I'm not fit to stay in Arthur's room or lie on his bed. Give me a little money, my dear old friend—yes, the parrot ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards

... Threading the mazes of the stream Like one who wanders in a dream. Long miles he ran, the stream beside, Which this way, that way, turned and sped, And called and sang, a noisy guide. At last its vagrant dances led To where the thick mimosas' shade Circled and fringed an open glade; There the wild streamlet danced away, The moon was shining strangely white, And by its fitful, gleaming ray The shepherd saw a wondrous sight; In the glade's midst, each on his ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge

... the Life of Milton, Johnson records his own experience. 'Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.' Johnson's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... wall from the door to the garden gate is only one small high window. But time and nature have done much to beautify the spot. In the cracks of the roof, thatched or tiled, whichever it may be, many a vagrant seed has found lodgment. The weeds have grown up in profusion to cover the bare little place with leaf and flower. Indeed, there is here a genuine roof garden of the prettiest sort, and it extends along the ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll

... towards you. Inspired by breathless attention, you try ardently to do your very best. It seems to you that you could never endure a total failure, and you hardly see how you could bear, with any sort of equanimity, even the vacant gaze or restless movement that would bespeak a vagrant interest. If you are a novice, perhaps the frightful idea crosses your mind, "What if one of these children should slip out of the room?" Or, still more tragic possibility, suppose they should look ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin

... their faith, got ashamed of their minister, and turned him adrift. He disappeared in the great whirl of men and other circumstances which fills this wonderful country. From time to time, during five years, I had made inquiries concerning him of mineralogists, botanists, and other vagrant characters, without getting the smallest hint as to his whereabouts. At last he had turned up as the private prophet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... food and rest. He gazed earnestly at the house. Nothing stirred there save the open doors swinging idly in every vagrant wind. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... convivial glass; and Dan Loftus, that simple, meek, semi-barbarous young scholar, his head in a state of chronic dishevelment, his harmless little round light-blue eyes, pinkish from late night reading, generally betraying the absence of his vagrant thoughts, and I know not what of goodness, as well as queerness, in ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... conditions, at once charming and insidious, Damaris Verity, resting in a wicker deck-chair in the shade of the great ilex trees, found herself alone, free to follow her own vagrant thoughts, perceptions, imaginations without human let or hindrance. Free to dream undisturbed and interrogate both Nature and her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... made arrangements with the landlady about meals and linen, and I was to take possession in two days; during which time I saw Aunt Betsey safely started on her homeward journey towards Dover, dreading to leave me, but exulting in the coming discomfiture of the vagrant donkeys. ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... verse were incoherently mixed up with ribald slang, addressed to imaginary companions. In his dreams he was evidently living over again his late revel, with episodical diversions into the poet-world, of which he was rather a vagrant nomad than a settled cultivator. Then she would silently bathe his feverish temples with the perfumed water she found on his dressing-table. And so she watched till, in the middle of the night, he woke up, and recovered the possession of his reason with a quickness that surprised Madame Rameau. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... intention, Ma'am, I assure you, of being a vagrant all my days. And if there is nothing else to keep me at home, it is highly probable that I shall be thrown on the shelf before long by Uncle Sam. When a man has served his apprenticeship, and is fully qualified to fill his office creditably, he may prepare to be turned out; and, very likely, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... shortcomings as vagrant and rowdy found easy excuse in sina Tona's eyes, when she would see him of a holiday—and what days were not holidays for that rascal?—with that fluffy flat silk cap of his topping off a brown face with just the suggestion of a mustache showing, a blue denim coat fitting close ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... fierce sigh. "I suppose," said he, after an unquiet pause, "that the vagrant and the outlaw are strong in me, for I long to run back to my old existence, which was all action, and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... going to add, "vagrant rogues," but she stopped short and looked at Florent. The scornful pout of her lips and the expression of her bright eyes plainly signified that in her belief only villains made such prolonged fasts. It seemed to her that a man able to remain without food for three days ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... vagrant or a stroller, sir," said Jeanie, a little roused by the supposition. "I am a decent Scots lass, travelling through the land on my own business and my own expenses and I was so unhappy as to fall in with bad company, and was stopped a' night on my journey. And ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... successful required first of all to command the confidence of the community in his honesty. The ballot and the jury-box were regarded as sacred as the sacrament itself, and the criminal courts had usually little to do beyond the cases of vagrant offenders. Business was conducted as a rule without the formality of contracts, and those whose lives justly provoked scandal were shunned on every side. This community possessed the only real wealth the world can give—content; and the local newspaper of that day, even under the direction of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... means that kings have chosen to live with dancers. While such conduct is not, perhaps, strictly laudable, we can disregard it if it be accompanied by a certain measure of decorum. Still, a combination of ruler-ship and dalliance with a vagrant charmer is a phenomenon that is as much out of place as is an attempt to govern ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... the world; that she should enrol herself in the brotherhood of nations, and perform her part in the great drama of life. It is upon this principle that England, France, and the United States, are requiring the same thing of China; and it is upon this principle that the vagrant is arrested in your streets and sent to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... ten to one thou wert A Jew's possession, got in honest barter; Next, John the ostler's; last of all, past doubt A vagrant's hat; the equitable purchase Of an ill-sung song. Till quite worn out With rain, and wind, and sleet, and other 'ills Thy race is heir to,' the beggar cast thee From his plebeian ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... over the threshold John Pearse saw little save a dim, cool hall, vast and full of vagrant shadows; then, when Milo had arranged the lights so that they gradually grew in power, flooding the chamber with mellow radiance, his soul seemed to burst from his throat ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... you are not without your grievances; we sympathize with you in your distress, and we are pleased to find that the design of subjugating us has persuaded the administration to dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. Even the tender mercies of the government have long been cruel to you. In the rich pastures of Ireland many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... shirt, tight white moleskins, cabbage-tree hat, flash riding-boots with glittering spurs. A bullock driver, when his costume would be more subdued, but when he would be fully equipped, even to the chirpy phrases in which working bullocks are accustomed to be addressed. Then as a vagrant black, when his attire would be nothing at all in camp, and little more than a frowsy blanket when visiting the town. But in all of his characters he had an unconstrained contempt for Chinese, and delighted in ridiculing and frightening them. In the part of a bullock-driver ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... footing in the word for that kind of service we have treated about above, and knowing that error and human inventions in religion will not offer themselves, but with wiped lips, and a countenance as demure as may be, and also being persuaded that this opinion of Mr. K. is vagrant, yea a mere alien as to the scriptures, I being an officer, have apprehended it, and put it in the stocks, and there will keep it, till I see by what authority it has leave to pass and repass as it lists, among ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... and he had been his younger brother, he might have guessed that John might have been found beside the newest mound in the churchyard, had one sought him there. But that idea did not come to William, and after staring into the blackness for a long time, he reluctantly closed the door. Perhaps the vagrant could be found ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... a tamarack swamp brought us to the inlet of Unknown Pond, upon which we embarked our fleet, and paddled down its vagrant waters. They were at first sluggish, winding among triste fir-trees, but gradually developed a strong current. At the end of three miles a loud roar ahead warned us that we were approaching rapids, falls, and cascades. We paused. The danger was unknown. We had our choice ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... the way of reading after the boating and the cricket began, than while we continued in a state of vagrant idleness, without a fixed amusement of any kind. In the first place, it was necessary to conciliate Hanmer by some show of industry in the morning, in order to keep him in good humour for the cricket ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... the time when 'neath the stairs the pages their heads raise! The term of "pure brightness" is the meetest time this thing to make! The vagrant silk it snaps, and slack, without tension it strays! The East wind don't begrudge because ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... retrospect; the happy situation he had been in, and the almost assured hopes of being continued in for life, made his present one appear yet worse, than in reality it was: he now looked on himself as doomed to be a vagrant all his days, driven from his native country for ever, and the society of all his friends, and torn beyond even a possibility of recovering, from a lady, to whom he was so near being united for ever, whom he loved, and whose fortune and kindred had given him just expectation ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... tell himself this again and again, as he lay in the hot darkness with his hands clasped across his eyes. He used it as a whip with which to scourge any vagrant hopes that dared creep into his heart. Hadn't Miss Nell told him that she didn't care what he said or did, just so he left her alone? Hadn't she let him come away without expressing a regret for the past or ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... purposes within easy reach, which was also frequently used for camp-meeting purposes. Gnarly old live-oaks spread their branches like a canopy over everything, while the sea-green moss hung from every limb and twig, excluding the light and lazily waving with every vagrant breeze. The fact that these grounds were also used for camp-meetings only proved the broad toleration of the people. On this occasion I distinctly remember that Miss Jean introduced a lady to me, who was the wife of an Episcopal minister, then visiting on a ranch near Oakville, and I danced ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... be damn'd; (your father's fault.) Go, purify'd by flames, ascend the sky, My better and more Christian progeny! Unstain'd, untouch'd, and yet in maiden sheets, While all your smutty sisters walk the streets. Ye shall not beg, like gratis-given Bland, Sent with a pass and vagrant through the land; Nor sail with Ward, to Ape-and-monkey climes, Where vile Mundungus trucks for viler rhymes. Not sulphur-tipt, emblaze an ale-house fire! Not wrap up oranges, to pelt your sire! O! pass more innocent, in infant state, To the mild limbo of our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... rare lark on my way home. I went to uncle's, and finding aunt in the garden, slouched my hat over my face, and began my story. She ordered me off the premises instantly as a vagrant. I went round to the back door and got a penny a-piece from the servants, who were quite delighted. Then I met uncle, and telling him that I had a wonderful box of antiques to exhibit, he gave me sixpence, and with great curiosity poked his proboscis against ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale

... I understand you, Brother Henry. You begin afar off; but I know what you are coming to. You want to bring up that odious Denims again,—a man whom I hate, and whom you yourself would show out of doors, like a vagrant, if it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... the real estate agent, the business man cannot afford to be without automobiles. No more can the burglar, the hold-up man, the bank robber, if he would keep up to date. The automobile has raised the robbery of country banks from a vagrant crime, infrequent and dangerous, to a steady occupation coupled with a great deal of excitement and some chance for profit. So far no one has ever suggested anything to counteract or lessen the evil effects except to increase penalties. ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... the poor man are the patrimony of God; and it taught them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals unawares. It was a faith, too, which was more than words with them; for we hear of no vagrant acts or alien acts, and it was sacrilege to turn away from the gate whoever asked its hospitality. Times are changed. The world was not so crowded as it is now, and perhaps rogues were less abundant; ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... Kirkburn, and why Logan needed his presence. 'The poor old gentleman has passed away suddenly, I suppose,' he reflected, 'and Logan may think that I know where he has deposited his will. It is in some place that the marquis called "the hidie hole," and that, from his vagrant remarks, appears to be a secret chamber, as his ancestor meant to keep James VI. there. I wish he had cut the throat of that prince, a bad fellow. But, of course, I don't know where the chamber is: probably some of the people about the place know, or the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... the Major-Generals was coming into operation, he had been apprehended, on his way to Newark, by the vigilance of Major-General Haynes, and committed to prison in Yarmouth, There seems to have been no definite charge, other than that he was "the poet Cleveland" and was a questionable kind of vagrant. He had been in prison for some months when it occurred to him to address a letter to the Protector himself. "May it please your Highness," it began, "Rulers within the circle of their government have a claim to that which is said of the Deity: they have their ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... which I count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly on my bench ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... road is lined with giant pines and you lift your face gratefully to catch the cool balsam breath of the forest. Coming from out this splendid shade, this silence too deep to be disturbed by light breezes or vagrant winds, you find yourself on the brow of a descending hill. The first thing that strikes the eye is a lake that might be a great blue sapphire dropped into the verdant hollow where it lies. When the eye reluctantly leaves the lake on the left, it turns to rest upon ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... dropping in from different corners of the globe to spread their infection among the more recent crowd of curio-hunters, gentlemen of commerce, nautical wrecks, decayed missionaries, painters, authors and other vagrant riff-raff who frequented the premises. There were rows going on all the time—insignificant rows, mostly about newspapers and gambling debts. Mr. Samuel got his eye blacked over a harmless game of ecarte; Mr. White, one of the steadiest ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... The vagrant winds and the far heaving main Breathed in thy chastened rhyme, Their latent music to the soul again, Above the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... Miss Viner's vagrant trunk had finally found its way to its owner; and, clad in such modest splendour as it furnished, she shone at Darrow across their restaurant table. In the reaction of his wounded vanity he found her prettier ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... English Member of Parliament, the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling). Despite his influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital "within twenty-four hours," like an itinerant vagrant. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... morning while Tess was doing the simple chores around the shack, she had the door open to admit the vagrant breezes of the summer day. Andy, as his custom was on such occasions, lay quietly upon the attic floor, secure from the observation of any chance passer-by. Stepping to the door to shake her dust rag, Tess saw Jake ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... the faithful, but only at saving individual souls, which in the act of being saved are removed beyond all activity and all contact with the world. Buddhism, therefore, is not a power which makes actively for civilisation. It is a powerful agent for the taming of passion and the prevention of vagrant and lawless desires, it tends, therefore, towards peace. But it offers no stimulus to the realisation of the riches which are given to man in his own nature: it checks rather than fosters enterprise, it favours a dull ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... for them in the sewers, with hook and line, precisely as they had done a century ago in Paris, during the great German siege. A dog," he added, "was a great treat. When the authorities killed the vagrant hounds there was a big scramble among the poor ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... seemed to have second sight in regard to the invisible, latent good points in all horses and dogs, had picked him up in the pound for a mere nothing; and to him there was granted the vision of a brilliant future for the vagrant puppy. "Mark my words," he had said decisively when Spot's fate hung in the balance, "you can't go wrong on him; he'll be a credit to us all some day." And so Spot was rescued from death, or at least from a life of poverty and ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling

... poetical and political, and if Robert and I had but a little less modesty we are assured that we should find access to him easy. But we can't make up our minds to go to his door and introduce ourselves as vagrant minstrels, when he may probably not know our names. We never could follow the fashion of certain authors who send their books about without intimations of their being likely to be acceptable or not, of which practice poor Tennyson knows too much for his peace. If, indeed, a letter of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... catches when they're old; Rude country-minstrels, men who doctor kine, Or graft, and, out of scions ten, save nine; 400 Creatures of genius they, but never meant To keep step with the civic regiment, These Ezra welcomed, feeling in his mind Perhaps some motions of the vagrant kind; These paid no money, yet for them he drew Special Jamaica from a tap they knew, And, for their feelings, chalked behind the door With solemn face a visionary score. This thawed to life in Uncle Reuben's throat A torpid shoal of jest and anecdote, 410 Like those queer fish that doze the droughts ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... show children, who are put through excruciating practices to please a British public, and they would have done well at the same time if they had taken steps to prevent the warping influence of a vagrant's life having its full force upon the tribes of little Gipsy children, dwelling in calico tents, within the sound of church bells—if living under the body of an old cart, protected by patched coverlets, can be called living in tents—on the roadside in the midst of grass, sticks, stones, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... money saved they could invest As vagrant fancy might suggest, And each could then ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various

... wealth, resulting in immense fortunes on the one hand, and terrible poverty on the other, has separated the two classes by a chasm as deep and wide as ever yawned between czar and moujik, kaiser and vagrant, prince and pauper, feudal baron and serf. The immensity of the power and wealth thus concentrated into the hands of the few, to be inherited by their sons and daughters, tends to establish this class division hereditarily. Heretofore, passage ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo

... constable was questioned by the magistrates about the strange state of affairs in the district, and reported that the encampment was a little way from the highway, and that, therefore, the lady could not be apprehended under the Vagrant Act! A summons, however, had been taken out by the local surveyor, and would be followed by a warrant. On that summons the so-called countess was convicted; but appealed to the Court ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... of his outer cloak and remains in a sleeveless jacket. He carries an axe in his belt] A vagrant may sweat where a bear will freeze. I am hot. [Puts his axe on the floor and takes off his jacket] You get rid of a pailful of sweat while you drag one leg out of the mud. And while you are dragging it out, the other one ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov

... allowance after a while came to be unclaimed. The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of their blind sweep and played sad tricks with him. In a period extending over nearly three years Francis Thompson led the life of a vagrant in the streets and alleys. He made one or two brave essays at regular work of the most commonplace character, but without success. The worn copies of Aeschylus and Blake in the pockets of this ragged and gaunt roustabout contained no useful ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson

... quite the wrong thing under a perverse appearance of attempting good works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an old man of rather doubtful antecedents to be dying from ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... first chapter has been dealt with; firstly, because in this are enunciated those radical conceptions which he afterwards argues not to, but from; and secondly, because it has been the writer's desire, avoiding all vagrant and indecisive criticism, to have a fair grapple, and come to some clear result,—like that of a wrestler, who frankly proffers himself to throw or be thrown. It only remains to indicate, so far as may be, a comprehensive estimate of Mr. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the watch, marching from the Marienthurn to the Frauenthor, gave her vagrant thoughts a new turn. The city guard was soon followed by a troop of horse, which probably belonged ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... one day, looking in at a shop window where I could see myself, that I was a most disreputable-looking object, quite eligible to be apprehended as an able-bodied vagrant.' ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan

... who left his wife and little children to fight against King George. He could think of but one thing to protect them against vagrant soldiers of either side, and that was to carve upon certain boards (which he nailed to the trees here and there along the boundaries ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... Arapahoe, with bands of Dog Indians and outlaws from every tribe, contested, foot by foot, for supremacy against the out-reaching civilization of the dominant Anglo-American. The lonely trails were measured off by white men's graves. The vagrant winds that bear the odor of alfalfa, and of orchard bloom to-day, were laden often with the smoke of burning homes, and often, too, they bore that sickening smell of human flesh, once caught, never to be forgotten. The story of that struggle for supremacy is a tragic drama of heroism ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... no servile passions Seek to charm thy vagrant mind; Well I know thy inclinations, Wav'ring as ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson

... time of Fateh Ali Shah, the mendicant dervishes, who were then as numerous and profligate in Persia as vagrant monks used to be in Spain and Italy, became such a pest that one of the first acts of his successor, Mahomed Shah, was to direct that no beggars should be tolerated except the lame, the sick, and the blind, and that all able-bodied men appearing in dervish garb were to be seized for military service. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon

... knew she must be made aware of his presence, then he hoped for an opportunity to explain, but he would not seek it yet. So he made his way to the village, stopped to give pennies to small white-haired children, patted the shaggy dusty heads of vagrant dogs, and finally came to anchor on the seat beside ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper

... all those formulas which in the past were supposed to have served the turns of those seeking adventure in a great city. There was the trick of bestowing a thousand-dollar bill upon a chance vagrant and then trailing after the recipient to note what happened to him, in his efforts to change the bill. Heretofore, in fiction at least, the following of this plan had invariably brought forth most beautiful results. Accordingly, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... appalled. Evidently I had been wasting my time, for I could have no doubt that the gallant six hundred would include a sample of every kind of pundit, stationary or vagrant, encompassed within the seven seas; and against such competition I felt my chances ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland

... on the positive pole, B, commences to phosphoresce, increasing in intensity until the tube refuses to conduct, its greatest brilliancy being just short of this degree of exhaustion. The probable explanation is that the vagrant molecules I introduce in the next experiment, happening to come within the sphere of influence of the positive pole, rush violently to it, and excite phosphorescence in the yttria, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various

... the Batlaping by the marauders, determined Mothibi and his people to leave their present place of settlement and remove to the eastward. For a considerable time, however, they remained in an unsettled state, suffering from attacks, and leading a vagrant life. ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane

... the unsettled vagrant civilisation which existed in the North of Africa up to 1830—which in 1860 was beginning to pass away, and the traces of which still survived in the nineties— resembled very much the border forays for which Northumberland is still famous; and, walking through the palm-groves towards the ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... more nor less. Beyond these, the personal belongings of Battersleigh of the Rile Irish were at best few and humble. In the big city, busy with reviving commerce, there were few who cared how Battersleigh lived. It was a vagrant wind of March that one day blew aside the cloak of Battersleigh as he raised his hat in salutation to a friend—a vagrant wind, cynical and merciless, which showed somewhat of the poverty with which Battersleigh had struggled like a soldier and a gentleman. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... stairway, there flashed the gleam of some rich stained glass, spots of color that were repeated, with quite a different lustre, in the dappled haunches of rows of sturdy Percherons munching their meal in the adjacent stalls. Add to such an ensemble a vagrant multitude of rose, honeysuckle, clematis, and wistaria vines, all blooming in full rivalry of perfume and color; insert in some of the corners and beneath some of the older casements archaic bits of sculpture—strange ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... night. To stay their stomachs against a protracted search, for their colloquies sat late, they ordered a plentiful dinner to be placed before them. Also, on the happy chance that success might crown the night, a row of stout Tobies was set upon the board. If the prodigal lurked without and his vagrant nose were seen at last upon the window, then musty liquor, from a Toby's three-cornered hat, would be a fitting ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... Gerardstown, Berkeley County, in the extreme northerly part of Virginia. His route lay directly over the road which David had traversed. The man's name was Adam Myers. He was a jovial fellow, and at once won the heart of the vagrant boy. David soon entered into a bargain with Myers, and turned back with him. The state of mind in which the boy was may be inferred from the following extract taken from his autobiography. I omit the profanity, which was ever sprinkled through ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... perform, shows likewise how much society is to be desired. Though the perseverance and address of the Indian excite our admiration, they nevertheless cannot procure him the conveniences which are enjoyed by the vagrant beggar of a civilized country: he hunts like a wild beast to satisfy his hunger; and when he lies down to rest after a successful chase, cannot pronounce himself secure against the danger of perishing in a few days: he is, perhaps, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... those creatures of the night—a people whose deeds were of darkness, and whose eyes shunned the light. Here the gipsies had pitched their tent; and though the place was often, in part, deserted by the vagrant horde, yet certain of the tribe, who had grown into years—over whom Barbara Lovel held queenly sway—made it their haunt, and were suffered by the authorities of the neighborhood to remain unmolested—a lenient piece of policy, which, in our infinite regard ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... spectans — Secondly, concerning the personal resentment of Mr Justice Lismahago, I may say, non flocci facio — I would not willingly vilipend any Christian, if, peradventure, he deserveth that epithet: albeit, I am much surprised that more care is not taken to exclude from the commission all such vagrant foreigners as may be justly suspected of disaffection to our happy constitution, in church and state — God forbid that I should be so uncharitable, as to affirm, positively, that the said Lismahago ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... the apartment, but the shyer boy dared not seat himself upon any of those handsome satin-covered chairs. He slunk behind Molly, casting his eyes down and nervously twirling his cap. For, little vagrant though he was, his street life had already taught him that it was the correct thing for lads and men to bare the head in the presence of ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond

... difficult. She was without a cent, a shelter, a job, a friend, or the prospect of a meal. It was probable that there was not at that minute in New York a human being so destitute. Before nightfall she would have to find some nominal motive for living or be arrested as a vagrant. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... ideas would have more apparent connection if they could be made to correspond to 'vibratiuncles' or physical processes of some kind. But this part of Hartley's hypothesis had been dropped: and all reality is therefore reduced to the whirl of vagrant and accidentally cohering ideas in brains and clusters. His one main aim is to get rid of everything that can be called mystical and to trace all mental processes to 'experience,' as he understands experience—to show that we are never entitled to assert that two ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... figure of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant character ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... what they please in their reports to their societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... had replied: "They always are, when you haven't got 'em." But had fallen into contemplation, and presently said—out of the blue—"Because I'm an unsettled sort of party—a vagrant. I shouldn't do for a G.P.'s wife, thank you, Jeremiah! I should like to live in a caravan, and go about the country, and wood fires out of doors." Was it, Fenwick wondered, the gipsies they had seen to-day that had made her think of this? and then he recalled how ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... ruinous arbor. Hepzibah—stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as justifying a princess-like condescension—exhibited a not ungraceful hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage counsel—lady as she was—with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner, who had studied the world at street-corners, and other posts equally well adapted for ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to Lancaster County he had a vagrant idea of what the South Carolina mountains are like. He would have told you that the trees there all murmur the name of Amanda, that the birds sing her name, the waterfalls cry it aloud! During his two weeks of absence ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers

... that occurrence gory My history would be faithless here Did "Happy Jimmy" not appear, An innocent good natured soul As ever loved the flowing bowl— An institution of the day That like himself hath passed away, Was "Happy Jimmy," he who made A vagrant's life a merry trade. ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett

... universally understood, they would be dispersed, because never, in no instance, rising to be a people, sui juris, a nation, a distinct community, known to the public law of Europe as having the rights of peace and war, but always a mere accident and vagrant excess amongst nations, not having the bare rights of citizenship; so far from being a nation, not being an acknowledged member of any nation. This exquisite dispersion—not ethnographic only, but political—is that half of the Scriptural malediction which the Boulanger answer ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... hung wavering in the opening, the broad strait before them, and their quarry fast diminishing to small specks upon the distant horizon, a vagrant land breeze suddenly bellied the flapping sail. The prahu swung quickly about with nose pointed toward the sea, the sail filled, and the long, narrow craft shot out of the harbor and sped on over the dancing waters in ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... him who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You came to me stripped of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name was the common property of the winds; it, as it were, floated naked over the waters about the equator. I wrapped round its unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics, and have essayed to put into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity—feats ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... talked, and the end was that I am to try to put an end to these tracasseries. She was mighty glorious about her sortie upon Lambton, whom she dislikes, but she is vexed at the hornets' nest she has brought round her head. All this comes of talking. The wisest man mentioned in history was the vagrant in the Tuileries Gardens some years ago, who walked about with a gag on, and when taken up by the police and questioned why he went about in that guise, he said he was imprudent, and that he might not say anything ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... Europe, in all the islands of the Mediterranean, and in Madeira and the Azores. And then he says—(now notice the puzzle of this),—"In many parts of the Continent it is a migrant, and, contrary to what obtains with us, is there treated as a vagrant, for there is scarcely a country across the water in which it is ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... of beef from a butcher's shop, and rub your wart with it, then throw it down the necessary house, or bury it, and as the beef rots, your warts will decay."[161] Some have great faith in having a vagrant count them, mark the number on the inside of his hat, and then when he leaves the neighborhood he takes the warts with him. Coffin water was ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... over the side of the good Cunard ship 'Russia' (whom prosperity attend through all her voyages!) and surveyed the outer hull of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So, perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that held the busier voice from which my vagrant fancy ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... never in his life lived as a vagrant, but has always had a settled home, has always pursued an honest and visible means of getting his living, has always been, and is ready to prove that he always has been an industrious, a peaceable, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt

... denouncing the consequences which would ensue were he absolved, saying:—"Let neither God nor man be held in reverence; let the orders of captains and the Divine auspices be alike disregarded; let a vagrant soldiery range without leave through the country of friend or foe; reckless of their military oath, let them disband at their pleasure; let them forsake their deserted standards, and neither rally nor disperse at the ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... must have two qualities, mind and soul. Literature will have mind when it has that architectural sense of structure which foresees the end in the beginning and keeps all the parts related in a harmonious unity. It will have soul when it has that "vagrant sympathy" which makes it come home to us and which makes it suggest what it does not say. Test the Tale of Cinderella by this standard. As to mind, it makes one think of a bridge in which the very keystone of the structure is the condition that Cinderella ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... ease. Decidedly I find it does not agree with me to prosecute the search of the picturesque in a carriage; a waggon, a spring-cart, even a post-chaise might do, but the carriage upsets everything. I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales. Erratic and vagrant instincts tormented me, and these I was obliged to control, or rather, suppress, for fear of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention to the "lioness," the authoress, the artist. Sir J. K. Shuttleworth ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... of the period, embraced such facts as flying through the air to witch gatherings, partaking of witch sacraments, signing a book presented by the devil, and submitting to Satanic baptism. The possessed had begun with charging their possession upon poor and vagrant old women, but ere long, emboldened by their success, they attacked higher game, struck at some of the foremost people of the region, and did not cease until several of these were condemned to death, and every ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... lay eggs and hatch them out, You seek the flowers most sweet and fragrant; And, sipping honey, stroll about, At best a good for nothing vagrant." ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth

... slender and slightly above the middle height. A distracting dimple dented the velvet of her right cheek, and above her small mouth and perfectly formed nose a pair of hazel eyes looked frankly out upon the world. Her oval face was surmounted by a dainty toque, from under which a vagrant tendril of hair had escaped. This blew about her ears, glistening like ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes

... grove and it was between there and the boxwood that touched the side porch of Lenox that this hidden thing must be. Jane was by no means as brave as her carefree manner indicated, and every time she held a bush from brushing Dozia's face she took occasion to listen intently for vagrant noises. ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... like Sunday shoes,— How vast the heap, how quickly must we choose! A few small scraps from out his mountain mass We snatch in haste, and let the vagrant pass. This shrunken CRUST that Cerberus could not bite, Stamped (in one corner) "Pickwick copyright," Kneaded by youngsters, raised by flattery's yeast, Was once a loaf, and helped to make a feast. He for whose sake the glittering show appears Has sown ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... in my mind, set me wishing to go aboard one of these ideal houses of lounging, I had plenty to choose from, as I coasted one after another, and the dogs bayed at me for a vagrant. At last I saw a nice old man and his wife looking at me with some interest, so I gave them good-day and pulled up alongside. I began with a remark upon their dog, which had somewhat the look of a pointer; thence I slid into a compliment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a vagrant commit me for vagrancy! I expect no mercy here! I expect no justice! You punish me first, and try me afterward, and now you can punish me again; but you ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... Ireland. Forty-two years old. Single. Had two sisters in Brooklyn who were poor. In this country eighteen years. Had no regular trade but worked in hotels as porter. Out of work five months. Worked on a farm a good deal in Ireland. Looked like a vagrant. ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb

... better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles. The ancient lawyers used to quote at the bar till they had stagnated their own cause. "Retournons a nos moutons," was the cry of the client. But these vagrant prowlers must be consigned to the beadles of criticism. Such do not always understand the authors whose names adorn their barren pages, and which are taken, too, from the third or the thirtieth hand. Those who trust to such false quoters will often learn how contrary this transmission ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... Gorki's predecessors; Reaction and pessimism; Literature and society; Gorki's youth; Hard times; A vagrant life; Journalist days; Rapid success; The new heroes; Creatures once men; Vagabond philosophy; ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... kiss her hand, and after he had picked up his cane and his hat from the rack, toddled down the walk to the street, a sad, thoughtful, worried little man, white-clad and serene to outward view, who had not even a whistle nor a vagrant tune under his breath ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... cross the Tuileries Garden I run my eyes over the groups scattered among the chestnut-trees. I see children playing and falling about; nursemaids who leave them crying; mothers who pick them up again; a vagrant guardsman. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... on Our vagrant pointer, christen'd Don; When, rising o'er a gentle slope, That gave his view a better scope, He spied, some dozen furrows distant, But in a spot as inconsistent, A second dog across his track, Without a master to his back; As if for wages, workman-like, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... to the mind of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... "Zounds!" he stormed. "I have had enough impudence to contend with to-night. Begone; or up you go for a vagrant." ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... What an exuberant, vagrant life it was! The blood warms and the nerves tingle after the tensions and heats of a quarter of a century as those days of sublime vagabondage come back. The melodious morning calls that waked the sleepy, lusty young bodies; the echoing bugle and the abrupt drum! ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... Idler who hath no particular calling, or vagrant Person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in Families, to or for the same: Seeing persons tainted with errours or aiming at division, may be ready (after that manner) to creep into houses and lead captive silly ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland

... modest wants, sober habits, and of a studious disposition which his friendship with Horatio Bakkus had both awakened and stimulated. Homeless from birth he never knew the nostalgia which grips even the most deliberately vagrant of men. As his ultimate goal he had indeed a vague dream of a home with wife and children—one of these days in the future, when he had put by enough money to justify such luxuries. And then there was the wife to find. In a wife sewing by lamp-light ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... Jennet blush'd, how Alfred with a stride Bore off his prize, and fancied every charm, And clipp'd against his ribs her trembling arm; How mute we seniors stood, our power all gone? Completely conquer'd, Love the day had won, And the young vagrant triumph'd in our plight, And shook his roguish plumes, and laugh'd outright. Yet, by my life and hopes, I would not part With this sweet recollection from my heart; I would not now forget that tender scene To wear a crown, or make my girl a queen. Why need be told how pass'd the months along, ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield

... respectable young man, with a trade,—that he's got a decent house for a young woman to live in, and a decent table for her to sit at. And he's always been brought up decent, having been a regular 'prentice to his uncle, and all that sort of thing. He's never been wandering about like a vagrant, getting his money nobody knows how. William Brisket's as well known in Aldersgate Street as the Post Office. And moreover," she added, after a pause, speaking these last words in a somewhat milder breath—"And moreover, it was my sainted ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope

... diamond pencil, produced one miracle of dulness; it might well be feared that Kinglake's volatile pen, when linked with forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, might lose the charm of casual epigram, easy luxuriance, playful egotism, vagrant allusion, which established "Eothen" as a classic. On the other hand, he had been for twenty years conversant with Eastern history, geography, politics; was, more than most professional soldiers, an adept in military science; had sate in the centre of the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and ended with a ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... of anxious elders, such vagrant ways naturally take on the colours of idleness and a love of low company. Stevenson was, however, in his own fashion an eager student of books as well as of man and nature. He read precociously and omnivorously in the belles-lettres, including a very wide range of English ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... so," said I, "and, I believe, of all habits, those of a vagrant are the most difficult to overcome. You used to laugh at me the first few months that I was here. I presume that I am a little improved, as I have ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat

... to sleep. Turning at full length upon his back, his arms above his head, he stared steadily up into the darkness until his brain, freed of all lesser problems, all vagrant thoughts, was concentrated upon the great problem which now ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... to any amount, are to be had for the catching; and the opportunity is well improved. See that sombre, ashen-colored pewee on yonder branch. A true sportsman he, who never takes his game at rest, but always on the wing. You vagrant fly, you purblind moth, beware how you come within his range! Observe his attitude, the curious movement of his head, his "eye in a fine frenzy rolling, glancing from heaven to earth, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... was also frequently used for camp-meeting purposes. Gnarly old live-oaks spread their branches like a canopy over everything, while the sea-green moss hung from every limb and twig, excluding the light and lazily waving with every vagrant breeze. The fact that these grounds were also used for camp-meetings only proved the broad toleration of the people. On this occasion I distinctly remember that Miss Jean introduced a lady to me, ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... books, as a resource against a rainy day, he goes to some wild spot—the wilder the better—where he roves at will from point to point of interest and beauty, and spends his time in reading, sketching, and—alas, for human imperfection!—shooting. These vagrant habits first brought him into the neighborhood of Donaldson Manor, and he had for two successive summers hunted with the Colonel and sketched with the young ladies, when he was invited to join their Christmas party in 18—. Here I was introduced ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... the warm days that fell at the end of the apple harvest, when such vagrant labourers as had collected to help the farmers were loitering at liberty, Smith held his first and last public meeting in the place where his boyhood had been passed. It was near the cross-roads on the old ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... became a Vagus Quidam—a wandering student, like the Goliardi of the Middle Ages. From Noli he passed to Savona; from Savona to Turin; from Turin to Venice. There his feet might perhaps have found rest; for Venice was the harbor of all vagrant spirits in that age. But the city was laid waste with plague. Bruno wrote a little book, now lost, on 'The Signs of the Times,' and lived upon the sale of it for some two months. Then he removed to Padua. Here friends persuaded him to reassume the cowl. There were more than 40,000 monks ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... Lankadomb the dogs were baying restlessly, but the hounds of the castle watchman did not answer them. They were sleeping. Some vagrant gypsy woman had fed them well ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... expression of tractability, he drew her gently with him until they reached the hotel, which—in her newer aspect of a guest whose board was secured by responsible parties—had forgivingly opened its hospitable doors to the vagrant child. Here the master lingered a moment to assure her that she might count upon his assistance tomorrow; and having satisfied his conscience by this anticipated duty, bade her good- night. In the darkness ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... they have meantime played more or less agreeably on the senses. The music we make automatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation may even modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side. The expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, in proportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automatic performer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection and criticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to be consecutive, impressive, agreeable; he begins to compare his improvisation with its ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... too, there are some who might, probably with more reason, boast their proficiency in mysterious lore—fellows of smooth aspect and polite demeanour, whom at first you imagine to have become casual spectators from mere lack of better pastime, but whose furtive glances and vagrant attention betray the familiars of the police—that complex and mighty engine of modern structure, which, far more surely than the "ear of Dionysius," conveys to the tympanum of power each echoed sigh and reverberated whisper. It is a chilling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various

... secret in his heart out of dread of hearing it mocked or of finding it something common to all men. While, then, the words "Premier of Russia" still echoed through his head, there rose upon his inner ear a sudden note of melody, vagrant, sweet and melancholy as the songs of the Steppes. Known song it was not, however; but something unique, as were all the airs that came to him unbidden. Under its influence it was natural that his face should change, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... club where many things were to be studied and planned. His system of debit and credit records of facts known and needed, was one which brought finite results. As he smoked and pondered at his ease, a tapping on the study door aroused him from his vagrant speculations. At his call, a respectful Japanese servant presented a note, just left by a messenger-boy. He tore ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... admiring gaze roved over the apartment, but the shyer boy dared not seat himself upon any of those handsome satin-covered chairs. He slunk behind Molly, casting his eyes down and nervously twirling his cap. For, little vagrant though he was, his street life had already taught him that it was the correct thing for lads and men to bare the head in ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond

... But night was at hand; the last train to Troyes, the nearest town, had gone, no other would pass through Arcis-sur-Aube until the small hours of the morning. Unless I could procure a room, therefore, I should be in the position of a homeless vagrant. Well, not to be dismayed, I set out making inquiries right and left, to my astonishment being rebuffed rather surlily and with looks of suspicion. The fact is, during these manoeuvres, a lady arriving at head-quarters alone is apt to be looked upon with no favourable eye. ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... fear not this king of the buskin! 315 A king? Oh laughter! A king Bajazet! That from some vagrant actor's tiring-room, Hath stolen at once his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... "Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write half an hour without the ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes

... schoolteacher and of the immobile Swede, the shaking, quavering terror of Mrs. Ducharme, mumbling to herself the words of the service. Why should the old woman be so upset, he wondered. But his vagrant thoughts always came back to the woman near the coffin, the woman he loved. How could she summon up such peace! Was hers one of those mighty souls that never doubted? That steadfast gaze ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... say what they please in their reports to their societies, they make no converts to their faith, except the pretended ones of vagrant and vagabond drunkards, who are outcasts from ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... poets should, Thou hast built up thy hardihood With wondrous-varying food, Drawn in select proportion fair From solid mould and vagrant air; From terrors of the dreadful night, And joyful light; From antique ashes, whose departed flame In thee has finer life and longer fame; From wounds and balms, From storms and calms, From potsherds and dry bones, And ruin-stones. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... repeat and aggravate his grief, But they repulse him, give him no relief. He begs, they say, Begone; he will not hear, But coughs, sighs, and makes signs he still is there; They disregard him, he repeats his groans; They still say nay, and he himself bemoans. They grow more rugged, they call him vagrant; He cries the shriller, trumpets out his want. At last, when they perceive he'll take no nay, An alms they give him without ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... now—became one of our chief amusements. Meanwhile Gypsy was not forgotten. Every clear morning I was in the saddle before breakfast, and there are few roads or lanes within ten miles of Rivermouth that have not borne the print of her vagrant hoof. ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... jesuits, monks, and friars; that many new and pompous mass-houses had been erected in some of the most conspicuous parts of their great cities, where there had not been any before; and that such swarms of vagrant, immoral Romish priests had appeared, that the very papists themselves considered them ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... barking howl of a mad dog. Poor Swindle had gone mad; and I had had a narrow escape from being bitten. We lassoed him from opposite directions and dragged him outside and shot him. Swindle was a plucky little dog, and so was Crib; one day they chased a vagrant cat up on to the roof; driven to desperation, the cat made a wild leap down into the court-yard, a distance of perhaps twenty feet; without a moment's hesitation, both dogs sprang boldly after her, recking little ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... stubble burnt, delights. Piled high The wagons silent standing take their nightly rest, On distant hills the silver birches I descry, Framed gold by fertile fields the sacred picture blest. Then with a joy unshared save by the vagrant, I see the threshing floor well filled and fragrant, The sloping straw-thatched cottage roofs again, The window panels carved, ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

... the right, so they are as seldom to be convinced that they are in the wrong; it being all one to go about to draw those men out of their mistakes who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a vagrant of his habitation who has no settled abode. This I guess to be so; and every one may observe in himself and others whether it be ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... idiot! Will you heed him? I believe he's more likely to become a vagrant and have to beg his bread, than to become a burgomaster. Dear Antonius! you mustn't pay attention to him, and you mustn't lose the affection you ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg

... eternal humorist The eternal enemy of the absolute, Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist With your air indifferent and imperious At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—" And—"Are we then ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot

... is it, mother; you have not told us?" Annie urged; while Mrs. Millar sank down in a low wicker chair, and her daughter Dora instinctively stooped over her, and began to set her vagrant cap right. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... among the shifting yellow sand-dunes, he had worked six weeks along the docks as roustabout for money to take him back into the hills whence came the big fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes. For six years he worked over the gravelly benches of the California creeks for vagrant particles of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he was drawn back by the wonder-tales of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... as far as Miss Unity was concerned; she had seldom spent such an afternoon in her life. She had been taken out for a walk in the mud, with rain threatening; she had talked in the open High Street, under the very eye of the dean, with a little vagrant out of Anchor and Hope Alley; she had of her own accord, unadvised and unassisted, formed an original plan, and not only formed it, but taken the first step towards carrying it out. Miss Unity hardly ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton

... "'Vagrant, your Honor,' the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, 'Ten days,' and Chi Slim ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... crime the saint—was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural, womanly and saintly was ever made than Pompilia, the daughter of a vagrant impurity, the child of crime, the girl who grew to womanhood in mean ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway toward the village burying-ground. The wheel track leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... full of gaps." The state of an agricultural people appears in such proverbs as "You must not count your yearlings till May-day:" and their proverbial sentence for old age is, "An old man's end is to keep sheep?" Turn from the vagrant Arab and the agricultural Briton to a nation existing in a high state of artificial civilization: the Chinese proverbs frequently allude to magnificent buildings. Affecting a more solemn exterior ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... fisherman—were all known to Him. He considered the lilies of the field, and the grass in meadow and upland, the birds which sowed not nor gathered into barns but lived on the bounty of their Maker, the foxes in their holes, the petted house dog and the vagrant cur, the hen sheltering her brood beneath protecting wings—all these had contributed to the wisdom in which He grew, as had also the moods of the weather, the recurrence of the seasons, and all the phenomena of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... works. There is nothing annoys a woman of Mrs. Carteret's stamp so much as good done in the wrong way. She had known for so many years exactly how to do good to the labourer, his family, and his widow, or to the vagrant passing by. It was really very tiresome to find that Molly, while walking in one of the lanes, had slipped off a new flannel petticoat in order to wrap up a gypsy's baby. And it might be allowed to be trying that when believing an old man of rather doubtful ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... could scarcely keep my seat on horseback. Before we left the fort we hired another man, a long-haired Canadian, with a face like an owl's, contrasting oddly enough with Delorier's mercurial countenance. This was not the only re-enforcement to our party. A vagrant Indian trader, named Reynal, joined us, together with his squaw Margot, and her two nephews, our dandy friend, The Horse, and his younger brother, The Hail Storm. Thus accompanied, we betook ourselves to the prairie, leaving the beaten trail, and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... waking moments when she seemed to be aware that Martha was bringing in her breakfast, or sitting beside her while she ate her dinner, but the intervening spaces, when "Ma" or Cora served, were dim, indistinct adumbrations of no more substantial quality than the vagrant dreams that ranged mistily ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann

... the bosom of maternal tenderness, was probably passed by Schiller; and his first awaking to the world of strife and perplexity happened in his fourteenth year. Up to that period his life had been vagrant, agreeably to the shifting necessities of the ducal service, and his education desultory and domestic. But in the year 1773 he was solemnly entered as a member of a new academical institution, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... witness Limus. Now the present demand for fish will not be permanent. After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the meanwhile they do not acquire a distaste for steady labor and get vagrant habits. I would talk this over with 'Siah and ask him in serious mood if he really thinks best to spend so much money in fishing-gear, when he could buy land ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... trying to do something that he isn't fitted to, because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that blew ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... to the large and friendly manner in which he rakes up, out of brothel, out of gutter, out of tenement, out of sweat-shop, out of circus-tent, out of wharf shanty, out of barge cabin, every kind and species of human derelict to immortalise their vagrant humanity in the amber of his ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... charms devised for their removal. Grose gives directions to "Steal a piece of beef from a butcher's shop, and rub your wart with it, then throw it down the necessary house, or bury it, and as the beef rots, your warts will decay."[161] Some have great faith in having a vagrant count them, mark the number on the inside of his hat, and then when he leaves the neighborhood he takes the warts with him. Coffin water was ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... as becomes you, over the run and drift of your thoughts. I said that many of us had minds like cities broken down. Put a guard at the gate, as they do in some Continental countries, and let in no vagrant that cannot show his passport, and a clear bill of health. Now, that is a lesson that some of you ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... slowly by, and the man who lay in bed there counted interminable hours and prayed for the coming of night with its merciful oblivion of sleep. His inaction was made bitterer by the fact that the days were days of green and gold, of breeze-stirred tree-tops without his windows, of vagrant sweet airs that stole in upon his solitude, bringing him all the warm fragrance of summer and of ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... first attack of a depressing illness I cease to be a gentleman, I am rude to ladies who do their best and kindest to serve me, and I talk to the friend who comes to cheer and comfort me as if he were an idle vagrant who wanted to sell me a worthless book with the recommendation of the pretence that he wrote it himself. Now that I am in my right mind, I am ashamed of myself, ashamed that it should be possible for me to behave so, and humiliated yet besides that I have no ground of assurance that, should my ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... the roadside. The wind had lowered until it came like the breath of spring, bud-scented, caressing, provocative. Even Gabriel, whose optimism lay in his blood and bone rather than in his intellect, yielded for a moment to this call of the spring as one might yield to the delicious melancholy of a vagrant mood. The long straight road, without bend or fork, had warmed in the paling sunlight to the colour of old ivory; in a neighbouring field a young maple tree rose in a flame of buds from the ridged earth ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... failure and the beating he had received at the island, and now to be made the object of such abuse in the presence of his townsmen, and that on account of a person whom he looked down upon as a sort of vagrant, was more than his philosophy could bear. For Basset, with that kind of logic which is so common with a certain class of people, could not avoid regarding the Recluse as the culpable cause of his misfortune in both instances. "If he hadn't gone agin the law," he said to himself, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... hearing is as painfully acute as that of the giant fabled to watch 'Bifrost,' and who 'heard the grass growing in the fields, and the wool on the backs of young lambs.' Last night, just as I was lapsing into a preliminary doze, two vagrant nightingales undertook an opera that brought them to the large myrtle under my window, where I hoped they had reached the finale. But one of them—the female, I warrant you, from the clatter of her small tongue (if ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... must be trim, Must not indulge in vagrant whim, Of voice or vesture. Boudoir decorum will allow No gleaming eye, no glowing brow, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various

... made for the provision of the poor, and for punishing idle vagrant persons, be repealed, and one law made to continue such parts as are found useful, and to add such other restrictions, penalties, and provisions, as may effectually attain the end of this ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty

... Scottish minstrel who flourished in the 15th century; the few particulars of his life which have come down to us represent him as a blind and vagrant poet, living by reciting poems "before princes and peers"; to him is attributed the celebrated poem, "The Life of that Noble Champion of Scotland, Sir William Wallace, Knight," completed about 1488, a spirited, if partly apocryphal, account of Wallace, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... tartan." But the reason for the outburst was different. It was not because the occupation suggested was peaceful labor, for we were taught that idleness was disgraceful; but because the suggested occupation was somewhat vagrant in character and not entirely respectable in her eyes. Better death. Yes, mother would have taken her two boys, one under each arm, and perished with them rather than they should mingle with low company ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... right day, and might generally be seen on the Monday pondering over essays which every one else had sent in on the Friday night." These traits, however, as it proved later, were the index not of a vagrant mind, but of independence of thought and of preoccupation with weightier matters. To quote again from the tribute of a fellow-student: "On everything he said or wrote there was stamped the impress of a forcible individuality, a mind that thought for itself, and whose thoughts had the rugged ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green

... with the love Of the fair daughter of a count. A lace from Na Raymbauda's hand I value more than all the land Of Richard, with his Poctou, His rich Touraine and famed Anjou. When loup-garou the rabble call me, When vagrant shepherds hoot, Pursue, and buffet me to boot, It doth not for a moment gall me; I seek not palaces or halls, Or refuge when the winter falls; Exposed to winds and frosts at night, My soul is ravished with delight. Me ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... (A vagrant woman has wandered in their direction, one whom the shrill winds of life have lashed and bled; here and there ragged graces still cling to her, and unruly passion smoulders, but she, once a dear, fierce rebel, with eyes of storm, is now first of all a whimperer. ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie

... I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds of hell, and dared to run wild in many a dark love passage.... In the time of my youth I took my fill passionately among the wild beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I was loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to the shores ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... my encounter with the red-headed vagrant, the following paragraph appeared in one of the local papers: "Pocklingham. In the casual ward of the Union house for this district a tramp, name unknown, died last night. He had been admitted on the previous evening, but, for some unexplained reason, it was not noticed until the next morning ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard

... their election unawares, and infallibly choosing the worse by the very act of lazily or weakly allowing accident to determine their lives. Not consciously and strongly to will the right, not resolutely and with coercion of the vagrant self to will to take God for our aim, is to choose the low, the wrong. Perhaps none, or very few of us, would deliberately say 'I choose Mammon, having carefully compared the claims of the opposite systems of life that solicit me, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... exercise and were enervated in the ease so propitious to vices. At last the eldest of those who shared the name of Grep, wishing to regulate and steady his promiscuous wantonness, ventured to seek a haven for his vagrant amours in the love of the king's sister. Yet he did amiss. For though it was right that his vagabond and straying delights should be bridled by modesty, yet it was audacious for a man of the people to covet the child of a king. She, much fearing the impudence of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... enough, let me instance further the attitude toward "Fashion" of that class of women who live most openly and directly upon the favor of men. These know their business. To continually attract the vagrant fancy of the male, nature's born "variant," they must not only pile on artificial charms, but change them constantly. They do. From the leaders of this profession comes a steady stream of changing fashions; the more extreme ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... the act you are a vagrant, and the justice may commit ye; (aside to the officer) lookye, Mr. Officer—you're in the wrong box here. Can't you see plain enough, by his having lost an arm, that he earns a livelihood by the work of his hands; so lest he should be riotous for being detained, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... the fashion of the French provinces, and very low. In the long wall from the door to the garden gate is only one small high window. But time and nature have done much to beautify the spot. In the cracks of the roof, thatched or tiled, whichever it may be, many a vagrant seed has found lodgment. The weeds have grown up in profusion to cover the bare little place with leaf and flower. Indeed, there is here a genuine roof garden of the prettiest sort, and it extends along the stone wall ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll

... I,—but among us trod A man in blue, with legal baton, And scoffed the vagrant demigod, And pushed him from the step I sat on. Doubting, I mused upon the cry, "Great Pan is dead!"—and all the people Went on their ways:—and clear and high The quarter ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... at the Charterhouse and at Oxford; but circumstances had then, for a time, separated them widely. Steele had left college without taking a degree, had been disinherited by a rich relation, had led a vagrant life, had served in the army, had tried to find the philosopher's stone, and had written a religious treatise and several comedies. He was one of those people whom it is impossible either to hate or to respect. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... nought, to be pitied if the truth were known, at any rate to be skirted. Her hair, which seemed to be of a dusty gold tinge, was knotted up in a red handkerchief; her gown was of blue faded to green, her feet were bare. If a gipsy, she was to be trusted to take care of herself; if but a sunburnt vagrant she could be let to shift; and yet he watched her curiously, while she sat as impassive as a young Sphinx, and wondered to himself ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett

... nights had grown perceptibly colder, but the days were still warm and dry and radiant, though with a tang in the air that stirred the blood. And a thousand perfumes, known and unknown, distilled from meadow and field and forest, scented every vagrant breeze. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... understanding. For a long time she watched him in silence as he paced to and fro like a caged lion. Twice she heard him mutter: "An American girl—good Lord," and she found herself smiling to herself—the strange, vagrant smile that comes of ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... a trade. There are men who habitually set aside a portion of money which they are annually to apply to what are called "charitable purposes"—that is to say, so far as I understand it, to support some vagrant lecturer, whose purpose is agitation and mischief wherever he goes. This constitutes, therefore, a trade; a class of people are thus employed—employed for mischief, for incendiary purposes, perhaps not always understood by those who furnish ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... being an educated musician, had become by turns attached to an orchestra, director of a theatre, Kapellmeister, and wandering player—never remaining long in one position, for he was essentially vagrant and desultory in character. Whatever Karl Maria had to suffer from his father's folly and eccentricity, he was indebted to him for an excellent training in the art of which he was to become so brilliant an ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... at Coton Manor would have been trying to anyone; to Durant they were intolerable. For limbs that had roamed the world to be tucked up under the Colonel's whist table, for a mind equally vigorous and vagrant to be tied to the apron-strings of the Colonel's intellect, was really a refinement of torture. Thrice Durant had tried to find an exit into the surrounding landscape, and thrice the Colonel had been too quick for him. He hovered ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... wrote unceasingly. Many fragments he covered and deposited, an irregular heap, at his right hand. At his left an adolescent mound of cigarette stumps grew steadily larger. A cloud of tobacco smoke over his head, driven here and there by vagrant currents of ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... bit, just a bit, of something akin to pleasure in the ardor of her ministrations. Besides, he was fighting a moral fight of his own. Great bursts of dissatisfaction swept through him every day now; and it was only by a constant vigilance that he kept his vagrant ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

... room beyond he continued the conversation in his own odd manner, passing to antipodal subjects by paths of association beyond the guess of an imagination less vagrant than his own. With Cardington conversation was a fine art. He loved the adequate or picturesque word as a miner loves an ingot of gold, yet he was able to display his linguistic stores without incurring the charge of pedantry, much as certain women can carry without offence clothes ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... Tuyn happened to see this action, and a vagrant thought slipped through her mind. "Then ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... twelvemonth. My husband had two sisters, who were married, and lived very well, and some other near relations that I knew of, and I hoped would do something for me; and I frequently sent to these, to know if they could give me any account of my vagrant creature. But they all declared to me in answer, that they knew nothing about him; and, after frequent sending, began to think me troublesome, and to let me know they thought so too, by their treating my maid with very slight and unhandsome returns ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe

... to an almost vagrant mood. Her smile was delicate enough, yet her eyes held a gentle taunt as she responded: "Not a bit of ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... these, the personal belongings of Battersleigh of the Rile Irish were at best few and humble. In the big city, busy with reviving commerce, there were few who cared how Battersleigh lived. It was a vagrant wind of March that one day blew aside the cloak of Battersleigh as he raised his hat in salutation to a friend—a vagrant wind, cynical and merciless, which showed somewhat of the poverty with which Battersleigh had struggled like a ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... invention? Who urged him forward from modest to magnificent lies? Who fed and flattered him? What ladies bestowed their soft caresses on Sludge? And now and again in his course of fraud did he not turn a wistful eye towards any reckless tatterdemalion, if only the vagrant lived ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... Herald-Post by writing feature articles for other papers, but his efforts had met with small success. In vain he arranged his article after the exact plan laid down by Cropsie Decker. He clipped, pasted and pinned, looked up statistics, verified statements and ruthlessly weeded out every little vagrant fancy that dared intrude on the solemn company of facts. But his efforts when finished bore the same relation to Cropsie's that a pile of bricks ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... completely hidden from the intrusive glance of any casual wayfarer. The prattle of the little stream as it wound upon its sleepless journey, contributed still more to strengthen the musings of those vagrant fancies that ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... feather in his hand, arm-in-arm with an impoverished "banquet beagle," or "feast hound;" there passed a jack in green, a bladder under his arm and a tankard at his belt, with which latter he begged that sort of alms that flows from a spigot. As vagrant followers hover on the verge of a camp, or watchful vultures circle around their prey, so these lower parasites (distinct from the other well-born, more aristocratic genus of smell-feast) prowled vigilantly without ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... Jupiter is from Mars. It was the world of his soul's origin—a place of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts. It was a place where birds sang divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the blue or waited by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where dark-eyed women heard, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... shapes, beneath the moon's pale eye, People the clouds that sail the midnight sky, Dance thro the grove and flit along the glade, And cast their grisly phantoms on the shade; So move the hordes, in thickets half conceal'd, Or vagrant stalking thro the fenceless field, Here tribes untamed, who scorn to fix their home, O'er shadowy streams and trackless deserts roam; While others there in settled hamlets rest, And corn-clad vales ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... incontestable that my talents are not appreciated at their right value; and I must be content with such slender encouragement as I receive. In vain do I purchase choice brands of cigars and cigarettes, and load my side-table with the best Scotch whisky. Not eyen with that solace will the vagrant undergraduate consent to be douched under the stream of ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the long driveway that led to Tutors' Lane, Tom slowed his pace. Overhead, Betelgeuse was making the most of its recent publicity, unobstructed by vagrant clouds. Tom gazed up at it with a certain air of proprietorship. He had known Betelgeuse years ago and personally had always preferred its neighbour Rigel, which had received no publicity at all. As a small boy some one had given ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis

... facetious and jocular companion. Though he loved good cheer, and frequented the houses of the rich or more hospitable people of America, yet he was an enemy to all manner of excess and intemperance. While his vagrant temper led him from place to place, his natural discernment enabled him to form no bad judgment of the characters and manners of men wherever he went. Though he appeared a friend to no established church, yet good policy winked at all his irregularities, as he every ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt

... Had she not seen me pilloried as a shameful vagrant? Had she not seen me persecuted, tormented—the byeword, the laughing-stock for the offals of Falmouth town? Had I not been pelted by refuse? Was I not made hideous by disfigurement? How could I win her love? Then I hated the Tresidder tribe more than ever. They had robbed me of my home, ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking

... he knew she must be made aware of his presence, then he hoped for an opportunity to explain, but he would not seek it yet. So he made his way to the village, stopped to give pennies to small white-haired children, patted the shaggy dusty heads of vagrant dogs, and finally came to anchor on the seat beside ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper

... and crowning quality, his receptiveness and his expression of humanity,—that is to say, of all the humanity he then knew. At first he expressed what he could discern with the limited, inexperienced vision of the ignorant son of a wretched vagrant pioneer; later he gave expression to the humanity of a people engaged in a purpose physically and morally as vast and as grand as any enterprise which the world has seen. Thus, with perfect fairness, without wrenching or misrepresentation ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... private correspondents whose position makes their approval of value, have confirmed the author in his purpose to write a series of stories intended to illustrate the life and experiences of the friendless and vagrant children to be found in all our cities, numbering in New York alone ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... big clouds slowly sail; A faint breeze lingers in the rustling beech; Atop the withered oak with vagrant speech The brawling crows call down the sleepy vale; Unseen the glad cicadas trill their tale Of deep content in changeless vibrant screech, And where the old fence rambles out of reach, The drowsy lizard ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove

... approach, and, without bidding, help to empty the capacious bread-basket. Further up the street they go, picking up more crumbs at rich mansions, whose owners occasionally vary their entertainment by providing for their vagrant visitors a little ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... Sir Kenelm Digby Opened" is a cook book. It is due you to know this at once, otherwise your thoughts—if your nature be vagrant—would drift towards family skeletons. Or maybe the domestic traits prevail and you would think of dress-clothes hanging in camphorated bags and a row of ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks

... never warmed a human breast, than that which lies in Dinah Troffater's; and whoever were in fault regarding her strange looks, they cannot criminate her as accessary. She milks the cow, and yonder come leaping like vagrant foxes, her half-wild children, with a few dry sticks ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... his outer cloak and remains in a sleeveless jacket. He carries an axe in his belt] A vagrant may sweat where a bear will freeze. I am hot. [Puts his axe on the floor and takes off his jacket] You get rid of a pailful of sweat while you drag one leg out of the mud. And while you are dragging it out, the other one ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov

... traditions of Irish fortune-hunters, and in Ireland of English. The fact is, it was the vagrant class of each country that chiefly visited the other in old times; and a handsome vagabond, whether at home or abroad, I suppose, made the most of his face, which was ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu

... trees, Oh thoughtless woodman, Hew but what you need, They give balm to vagrant breezes, For their ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various

... command the confidence of the community in his honesty. The ballot and the jury-box were regarded as sacred as the sacrament itself, and the criminal courts had usually little to do beyond the cases of vagrant offenders. Business was conducted as a rule without the formality of contracts, and those whose lives justly provoked scandal were shunned on every side. This community possessed the only real wealth the world can give—content; and the local newspaper of that day, even under ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... us trod A man in blue, with legal baton, And scoffed the vagrant demigod, And pushed him from the step I sat on. Doubting I mused upon the cry, "Great Pan is dead!"—and all the people Went on their ways:—and clear and high The quarter ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... for those who have risen high in popular favour—or, during Wagner's boyhood, the favour of kings or their mistresses—it is an uncertain life, with engagements terminable, and very often terminated, after a few years; and thus a hand-to-mouth way of grubbing along is generated, and a vagrant spirit developed: and in the majority, the huge majority, of cases lives spent in squalor, mean squabblings, spells of mechanical work alternating with enforced idleness, end in destitution and utter misery. Uncle Adolph was quite right: he knew how close the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... is drawing nearer. Old traditions, race instincts, are telling upon him. He is too true a Trevlyn not to become a member of the true fold. His vagrant fancy is straying here and there. He is tasting the bitter-sweet fruit of knowledge and restless search after the wisdom of this world. But already he begins to turn with loathing from the cold, lifeless Puritan code. Anon he ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green

... passed like a vagrant breeze across the faces of the elders, and the levites were ordered to lead the prisoner to ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... the seeing and interpreting eye that usually goes with it; its object is to find spirit under form, to discover what the logos expresses. For this the imagination is the chief requisite. It is not a vagrant and irresponsible faculty, but an inner eye whose vision is to be trusted like that of the outer; it has in itself the quality of thought, and is not a mere picture-making gift. Dr. Bushnell trained his imagination to work on certain definite lines, and for a definite ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... in a vagrant life, among infidels, Turks, pagans, and such sort of people. I had no minister, no Christian to converse with but poor William. He was my ghostly father or confessor, and he was all the comfort I had. As for my knowledge of religion, ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe

... in revolt in the autumn of 1733 to the New Haymarket where they played without a license until March of the 1733-1734 season, at which time they returned to Drury Lane under the new management of Fleetwood. The actors at least partially won this battle, and although Highmore tried to have the vagrant act enforced, the players returned to Drury Lane unscathed. With Highmore gone, a period of uneasy peace obtained. The players, however, were not to win so easily the next dispute, the one that took place after the passage of ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive

... being a crime. Only a few years ago to be honest, at least in the expression of your ideas, was a felony. To do right was a capital offense; and in those days chains and whips were the incentives to labor, and the preventives of thought. Honesty was a vagrant, justice a fugitive, and liberty in chains. Only a few years ago men were denounced because they doubted the inspiration of the bible—because they denied miracles and laughed at the wonders ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll

... traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace—all these walk with "Our Lady of Sighs." She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... reassured. It is a bad cell that in which M. de Boiscoran is staying. Since I have been at Sauveterre, one man has killed himself in it, and one man has tried to commit suicide. So I called Trumence, a poor vagrant who assists me in the jail; and we arranged it that one of us would always be on guard, never losing the prisoner out of sight for a moment. But it was a useless precaution. At night, when they carried M. ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau

... castes, and there is no reason to doubt their general origin from the non-Aryan tribes, which in a few instances can be directly traced. Thus it seems likely that the Kanjars, Berias, Sansias and other gipsy groups, as well as the Mirasis, the vagrant bards and genealogists of the lower classes of Hindus, are derived from the Dom caste or tribe of Bengal, who are largely employed as sweepers and scavengers as well as on ordinary labour. The evidence for the origin ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... like you wood say and think two. well i kep my temper and tride to smooth him down but the more i tride the mader he got and finally he told me i was a defaimer of innosent persens and that he wood maik me proove it in coart. then i got mad and sed look hear you longnosed old vagrant, sue and be damned, but i have heard enuf of your chin musick and if you say 2 words moar i will smash that sankit monious old snout of yours so flat that they wont be able to see your ears. then i told him to go to ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute

... done—when we had renovated our fire, collected our horses, and got our dead into position—we sat down to talk it over. As we sat there, cutting up our clothing for bandages, digging the poisoned arrow-heads out of our limbs, readjusting our scalps, or swapping them for such vagrant ones as there was nobody to identify, we could not help smiling to think how we had frightened Old Nick. Dan Golby, who was sinking rapidly, whispered that "it was the one sweet memory he had to sustain and cheer him in crossing the dark river into everlasting f——." It is uncertain how ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... She had charged herself with the maintenance of two former nuns, noble and well educated, who, at the fall of their community, had been recommended, or had procured a recommendation, to her. Mesdames de Brinon and du Basque were these two vagrant nuns. Madame de Maintenon, instinctively attracted to this sort of persons, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced into ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... of the house they found a baby blizzard sending the first snow of the season, as light and dry as tiny particles of down, whirling and eddying through the broad street. As Rose stood in surprise at the top of the brownstone steps, a dry vagrant, left from one of the trees which was tossing its gaunt arms protestingly, came tumbling down to become stem-entangled in her hair. With a laugh, she dashed for the motor car and, when she had sprung inside it, she was panting a little, for the thieving wind had taken advantage of her lips being ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... so everything that it was permissible to say about Bertie had been said some dozens of times, and other topics began to come to the front—the extreme mustiness of the cow-house, the possibility of it catching fire, and the probability of it being a Rowton House for the vagrant rats of the neighbourhood. And still no sign of deliverance came to the ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... and give the Maker praise. I like the lad who, when his father thought To clip his morning nap by hackneyed phrase Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, Cried, "Served him right!—it's not at all surprising; The worm was punished, sir, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... which Caesar was a favorable specimen is becoming very rare. The old family servant who, born and reared in the dwelling of his master, identified himself with the welfare of those whom it was his lot to serve, is giving place in every direction to that vagrant class which has sprung up within the last thirty years, and whose members roam through the country unfettered by principles, and uninfluenced by attachments. For it is one of the curses of slavery, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... All at once she set to work to win back her self-control. It might not yet be too late to help. She gripped herself, dispelling at once all hysteria, all her vagrant thoughts. He would have been hard at work long since. His face was still warm—perhaps life had not ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall

... And restless fingers vainly sought To soothe the silkworm's stubborn toil. But only did its candour soil, And suffered none the less from it. For all my neck, and head no less, Owned to a vague unquietness, As when the vagrant spiderlet Has spread at large her filmy net To catch the moonbeams, wavering white, At the front ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various

... Hopkins, new fire-eaters, new cranks, new sots, were always dropping in from different corners of the globe to spread their infection among the more recent crowd of curio-hunters, gentlemen of commerce, nautical wrecks, decayed missionaries, painters, authors and other vagrant riff-raff who frequented the premises. There were rows going on all the time—insignificant rows, mostly about newspapers and gambling debts. Mr. Samuel got his eye blacked over a harmless game of ecarte; Mr. White, one of the steadiest members, threatened ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... in the agony of their vagueness, haunt my mind, like vagrant clouds hovering over hills, waiting for some chance wind to relieve them of ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore

... let us sleep, and give the Maker praise. I like the lad, who, when his father thought To clip his morning nap by hackneyed praise Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, Cried, "Served him right!—it's not at all surprising; The worm was ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... superstitions mountaineer this suggested that the old woman had died since he had left her house, and here was her ghost already vagrant in the woods! ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... scattered clumps of silver birch which shaded the trail, chanting in a loud, sonorous voice a part of the service of the Greek Church, suspending this devotional exercise, occasionally, to curse his vagrant horses in a style which would have excited the envy and admiration of the most profane trooper of the army ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... such a mistake again! if you do I will make you suffer severely for it! And you, shameless girl! if you presume to set foot on these premises but once again, I will have you sent to the work-house as a troublesome vagrant." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... of the most parsimonious frugality, to which the English are strangers, work at an under price; so as not only to share, but even in a manner to exclude them from all employment; that such an adoption of vagrant Jews into the community, from all parts of the world, would rob the real subjects of their birthright, disgrace the character of the nation, expose themselves to the most dishonourable participation and intrusion, endanger the constitution ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... man who left his wife and little children to fight against King George. He could think of but one thing to protect them against vagrant soldiers of either side, and that was to carve upon certain boards (which he nailed to the trees here and there along the boundaries ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... canker into my means, now menace me with a dungeon—a threat which they dared not mutter, far less attempt to execute, were it not that they see me an outcast, unprotected by the natural head of my family, and regard me rather as they would some unfriended vagrant, than as a descendant of the ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire The hermit ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge

... seemed to seize Pauline. She crossed the floor towards me, and I made room for her at the piano. With a master hand she played brilliantly the prelude of the song of which I had struck a few vagrant notes. I waited breathlessly, expecting her to sing. Suddenly she started wildly to her feet and, uttering a wild cry of horror, sank into my arms. I laid her on a sofa close by. As I held her there, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... idolatry. His kingdom was of this world, therefore did his servants fight; but they did not fight always alone, for he fought at nine battles or sieges in person, and in ten years achieved fifty military enterprizes. He united religion and plunder, by which he allured the vagrant Arabs to his standard. He asserted that the sword was the key of heaven and hell; that a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms are of more account than two months of fasting and prayer. He ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou

... believe it, chance led them to discovering the murderer. A vagrant who had been many times convicted, notorious for his vicious life, was seen selling for drink a snuff-box and watch that had belonged to the doctor. When he was questioned he was confused, and answered with an obvious lie. A search was made, and in his bed ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... since our legislators took proper steps to prevent the maiming of the little show children, who are put through excruciating practices to please a British public, and they would have done well at the same time if they had taken steps to prevent the warping influence of a vagrant's life having its full force upon the tribes of little Gipsy children, dwelling in calico tents, within the sound of church bells—if living under the body of an old cart, protected by patched coverlets, can be called living in tents—on the roadside in the midst of grass, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... old Woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant, as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... time there was a little hunchback girl in the court, upon whom the duke fixed his vagrant desires, and she became his unconcealed favorite. The duke was ever in the habit of talking freely with Catharine about his paramours ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... all her voyages!) and surveyed the outer hull of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So, perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that held the busier voice from which my vagrant fancy derived ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... am I to argue with van Manderpootz? But is that the whole purpose of this dizzy robot? Just a basis for logic?" The mechanism replied with its usual rasp as it leaped toward some vagrant car beyond the window. ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

... to add, "vagrant rogues," but she stopped short and looked at Florent. The scornful pout of her lips and the expression of her bright eyes plainly signified that in her belief only villains made such prolonged fasts. It seemed to her that a man able to remain without food for three ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... the merchant without honesty, the friar, the pardoner, the hermit, who under the garment of saints conceal hearts that will rank them with the accursed ones. Fals-Semblant is the pope who sells benefices, the histrion, the tumbler, the juggler, the adept of the vagrant race, who goes about telling tales and helping his listeners to forget the seriousness of life. From the unworthy pope down to the lying juggler, all these men are the same man. Deceit stands before us; God's vengeance be upon him! Whenever and wherever ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... other hand, while this idea of the infamy attending the exposition of the person is thus recognised by the law, it is impossible to adopt regulations which would effectually prevent such horrid crimes as the murder of vagrant wretches who can be snatched from society without their being missed, as in the case of the late conspiracy. For instance, if it was now to be enacted, as seems reasonable, that persons dying in hospitals and almshouses, who die without their friends claiming their remains, should be given ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... With its help they explored the tiny cellar and the upper floor. There was no sign of a recent occupancy. Everything was as Bobby had found it on awakening. A vagrant wind sighed about the place. They looked at each other with startled eyes. They filed out ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp

... that some fine day This vagrant stream may serve a mill; My doggy guard a master's yard; My free heart choose another's will. How this may fare we little care, My dog and I, as still we run! Whilst by our side the brook doth glide, And laugh and sparkle in ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... a wild day in Manila. Far over near the Escolta somebody shot at a vagrant dog lapping water from a little pool under one of the many hydrants. The soldier police essayed an arrest; the culprit broke and ran; the guard fired; a lot of coolies, taking alarm, fled jabbering ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King

... hour of condemnation, he remained reckless as the wind—unrepenting as the flint—venomous as the blind-worm. With that deep and horrible cunning which is so often united to unprincipled ignorance, he had almost involved in his fate another vagrant with whom he had chanced to consort, and to whom he had disposed of some of the blood-bought spoils. The circumstantial evidence was so involved and interwoven, that the jury, after long and obvious hesitation as to the latter, found both guilty; and the terrible sentence of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various

... the dedication written by Lord Bacon to James I., in which he puts him beyond all kings, living and dead—beyond Caesar and Marcus Aurelius. In those days the literary man was a servant, a hack. He lived in Grub Street. He was only one degree above the sturdy vagrant and the escaped convict. Why was this? He had no money and he lived in an age when money was the fountain of respectability. Let me give you another instance: Mozart, whose brain was a fountain of melody, was forced to eat at table with coachmen, with footmen and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... built of stone, plastered over, in the fashion of the French provinces, and very low. In the long wall from the door to the garden gate is only one small high window. But time and nature have done much to beautify the spot. In the cracks of the roof, thatched or tiled, whichever it may be, many a vagrant seed has found lodgment. The weeds have grown up in profusion to cover the bare little place with leaf and flower. Indeed, there is here a genuine roof garden of the prettiest sort, and it extends along the stone wall separating the dooryard from ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll

... Power," was the first hymn on this particular Sunday morning, and it usually held Patty's rather vagrant attention to the end, though it failed to do so to-day. The Baxters occupied one of the wing pews, a position always to be envied, as one could see the singers without turning around, and also observe everybody in the congregation,—their entrance, garments, behavior, and especially their bonnets,—without ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... so close that they all but rested in its shadow, was one of those monster aircars, its tentacles moving to and fro as though wafted into motion by some vagrant breeze. But since neither Sarka nor Jaska could feel the breeze, Sarka knew that it was life which caused the waving motion of those ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... before been told, This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold, And with his dancing crest So beautiful, through savage lands Had roam'd about, with vagrant bands Of Indians in ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... vices having enervated the states of the wealthy part of Asia, the vagrant and indigent people of the adjacent deserts and mountains coveted the enjoyments of the fertile plains; and, urged by a cupidity common to all, attacked the polished empires, and overturned the thrones of their despots. These ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... Sally had replied: "They always are, when you haven't got 'em." But had fallen into contemplation, and presently said—out of the blue—"Because I'm an unsettled sort of party—a vagrant. I shouldn't do for a G.P.'s wife, thank you, Jeremiah! I should like to live in a caravan, and go about the country, and wood fires out of doors." Was it, Fenwick wondered, the gipsies they had seen to-day that had made her ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... removal. Grose gives directions to "Steal a piece of beef from a butcher's shop, and rub your wart with it, then throw it down the necessary house, or bury it, and as the beef rots, your warts will decay."[161] Some have great faith in having a vagrant count them, mark the number on the inside of his hat, and then when he leaves the neighborhood he takes the warts with him. Coffin water was also ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... vessels plying between Bangkok and the ports of French Indo-China there were but two—the Bonite, a French packet slightly larger than a Hudson River tugboat, which twice monthly makes the round trip between the Siamese capital and Saigon; and a Danish tramp; the Chutututch, an unkempt vagrant of the seas which wanders at will along the Gulf Coast, touching at those obscure ports where cargo or passengers are likely to be found. The Bonite swung at her moorings in the Menam, opposite my hotel windows, so, made cautious by previous experiences on other coastwise vessels, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... with that clear, disarming gaze that she knew how to achieve so perfectly. He felt a great yearning overwhelm him ... a desire to meet her halfway ... a vagrant displeasure at ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... the shade, bareheaded, dressed in white, stood a girl, so amazingly beautiful, that Sam wondered for a few moments whether he was asleep or awake. Her hat, which she had just taken off, hung on her left arm, and with her delicate right hand she arranged a vagrant tendril of the passion-flower, which in its luxuriant growth had broken bounds and fallen from its place above.—A girl so beautiful that I in all my life never saw her superior. They showed me the other day, in a carriage in the park, one they said was the most beautiful girl in England, a descendant ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... imbibed too much of the vagrant humours of his own Court in exile to feel any tragic indignation over his brother's confidences. We can fancy what view would have been taken of such a daring breach of royal etiquette, either at the Court of James I., or of Charles ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik

... checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform^; versatile. unstaid^, inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c v.; restless; agitated &c 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c 605; capricious &c 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c 111; wavering. Adv. seesaw &c (oscillation) 314; off and on. Phr. a rolling stone gathers no moss; pictra mossa non fa muschis [It]; honores mutant mores [Lat.]; varium et mutabile ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... experiment with a band of wandering Algonquins had convinced the Jesuits that their schemes of mission-conquest could not bear much fruit if they were confined to the vagrant tribes of the north. Farther west in the peninsula of the great lakes lived Indians of fixed habits and domicile, and otherwise further advanced towards civilisation than the improvident hunting tribes round about Quebec. Of these the most notable were the Hurons. As long before as 1615 the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... Mr. Stewart. This boy, called Thomas, was reared on the skirts of the vicious French court, now in a Jesuit school, now a poor relation in a palace, always reflecting in the vicissitudes of his condition the phases of his sire's vagrant existence. Sometimes this father would be moneyed and prodigal, anon destitute and mean, but always selfish to the core, and merrily regardless alike of canons and of consequences. He died, did this adventurous gentleman, in the very year which took off the first George in Hanover, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... colour and light were caught and imprisoned within the web. At the bend in the river, where the rushes grew thickly, the river-god kept his harp, which answered with shy, musical murmurings to every vagrant wind. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... whom Achilles, swiftest of the swift. My noble friend, offspring of Telamon! Thou seem'st sincere, and I believe thee such. But at the very mention of the name 805 Of Atreus' son, who shamed me in the sight Of all Achaia's host, bearing me down As I had been some vagrant at his door, My bosom boils. Return ye and report Your answer. I no thought will entertain 810 Of crimson war, till the illustrious son Of warlike Priam, Hector, blood-embrued, Shall in their tents the Myrmidons assail Themselves, and fire my fleet. At my own ship, And at my own ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... seemed at peace with himself, where he understood what he was made for, was out of doors in the woods. When he should have been poring over the sweet, palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table, his vagrant gaze was always on the open window near which he sat. He could never study when a fly buzzed on the window-pane; he was always standing on the toes of his bare feet, trying to locate and understand the buzz that puzzled him. ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... The exact number of vagrant and destitute children to be found in the Five Points is not known. There are thousands, however. Some have placed the estimate as high as 15,000, and some higher. They are chiefly of foreign parentage. They do not attend the public schools, for they are too dirty and ragged. The poor ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... scattered about, like black specks, in its vast white interior, and the fog hung heavily in the vaulted dome and dark little chapels. One corner alone blazed with brilliancy and colour; this was the altar of the Virgin. Toward it the tired vagrant made her way, and on reaching it sank on the nearest chair as though exhausted. She did not raise her eyes to the marble splendours of the shrine—one of the masterpieces of old Italian art; she had been merely attracted to the spot by the glitter of the lamps and candles, and took no thought as ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... be permanent. After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the meanwhile they do not acquire a distaste for steady labor and get vagrant habits. I would talk this over with 'Siah and ask him in serious mood if he really thinks best to spend so much money in fishing-gear, when he could buy land with it ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... the centripetal force of gravitation: a most ruinous event to this planet, and one which would also obscure, though it most probably would not extinguish, the solar luminary. An unlucky stripling, one of those vagrant geniuses who seem sent into the world merely to annoy worthy men of the puddinghead order, desirous of ascertaining the correctness of the experiment, suddenly arrested the arm of the professor just at the moment that the bucket was in its zenith, which immediately descended with astonishing ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... pomp which waits on greatness, Ill suits my humble, unambitious soul;— Then leave me here, to tread the safer path Of private life; here, where my peaceful course Shall be as silent as the shades around me; Nor shall one vagrant wish be e'er allow'd To stray beyond the bounds of ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More

... meaning; in which it becomes true also for our historical experience. Csar and Rome have flourished and expired together. The illimitable attributes of the Roman prince, boundless and comprehensive as the universal air,—like that also bright and apprehensible to the most vagrant eye, yet in parts (and those not far removed) unfathomable as outer darkness, (for no chamber in a dungeon could shroud in more impenetrable concealment a deed of murder than the upper chambers of the air,)—these attributes, so impressive ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... old. Single. Had two sisters in Brooklyn who were poor. In this country eighteen years. Had no regular trade but worked in hotels as porter. Out of work five months. Worked on a farm a good deal in Ireland. Looked like a vagrant. ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb

... they got up in the morning. Out the little old woman jumped, and whether she broke her neck in the fall or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the three Bears never saw ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten

... herself to reach the school ideal, thus force herself to drive hard nails of fact into her vagrant thoughts. And with success. For she had, it turned out, a retentive memory, and to her joy learning by heart came easy to her—as easy as to the most brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... as we bowled along. There were long glittering side-streams between us and the black or green prairie,—streams with little ripples on their faces, as the breeze kissed them in passing, and now and then a dimple, under the visit of a vagrant new-born beetle. To call such shining waters mud or puddles did not accord with the spirit of the hour; so we fancied them the "mirroring waters" of the poet, and compared them to fertilizing Nile,—whose powers, indeed, they share, to some extent. By their sides ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... relax its grasp. Taking advantage of this outward expression of tractability, he drew her gently with him until they reached the hotel, which—in her newer aspect of a guest whose board was secured by responsible parties—had forgivingly opened its hospitable doors to the vagrant child. Here the master lingered a moment to assure her that she might count upon his assistance tomorrow; and having satisfied his conscience by this anticipated duty, bade her good- night. In the darkness of the road—going astray several times on his way home, and narrowly escaping ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... man of impulse, a poet. He got off the train at the next station, bought a piece of meat at a butcher shop, and captured the vagrant on the outskirts of the town. The return trip was made in the baggage car, and so Wolf came a second time to the mountain cottage. Here he was tied up for a week and made love to by the man and woman. But it was very circumspect love-making. Remote and alien ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... 1866, directed that the new State officials be entrusted with the unhampered control of civil affairs, and this was more than enough to revive the bulldozing methods that had characterized the beginning of Hamilton's administration. Oppressive legislation in the shape of certain apprentice and vagrant laws quickly followed, developing a policy of gross injustice toward the colored people on the part of the courts, and a reign of lawlessness and disorder ensued which, throughout the remote districts of the State at least, continued till Congress, by what are known as the Reconstruction ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... assailant assistant attendant clairvoyant combatant recreant consonant conversant defendant descendent discordant elegant exorbitant important incessant irrelevant luxuriant malignant petulant pleasant poignant reluctant stagnant triumphant vagrant warrant ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... Patroclus dead? Living, I seem'd his dearest, tenderest care, But now forgot, I wander in the air. Let my pale corse the rites of burial know, And give me entrance in the realms below: Till then the spirit finds no resting-place, But here and there the unbodied spectres chase The vagrant dead around the dark abode, Forbid to cross the irremeable flood. Now give thy hand; for to the farther shore When once we pass, the soul returns no more: When once the last funereal flames ascend, No more shall meet Achilles and his friend; No more our ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... mother. There was that same peculiar look also in its eyes. 'You're all hers!' I joyfully cried, 'you are your mother's own child!' I seized hold of the neck-rope. I opened the pen-door and I went out through that door quicker than a vagrant cat ever got round a corner of a house where a Scotch terrier boards. The calf went under the cow and I struck her, head on. But I had come to stay. I grabbed the pail with one hand and a teat with the other. I tugged it, pulled ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... inhabitant, had turned from that gateway toward the village burying-ground. The wheel track leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... the pleasant arc of sky The great stone box is cruelly displayed. The street becomes more dreary from its shade, And vagrant breezes touch its walls and die. Here sullen convicts in their chains might lie, Or slaves toil dumbly at some dreary trade. How worse than folly is their labor made Who cleft the rocks that this might rise ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer

... Ingjald, the Sheepisles' Priest, came to Bjorn isles for fishing. [Sidenote: Thorolf's quarrel] He took ship as one of the crew with a man called Thorolf. He was a Broadfirth man, and was well-nigh a penniless vagrant, and yet a brisk sort of a man. Hall was there for some time, and palmed himself off as being much above other men. It happened one evening when they were come to land, Hall and Thorolf, and began to divide the catch, that ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous

... stand long at the window, staring with unseeing eyes down into the village street. By good rights, he should have seen one future, if not the other, opening out before him in ever-widening vistas. At nineteen or so, however, one is not too imaginative. Scott merely saw a vagrant dog trying to paw his way through a deep drift that lay across the road. He had a fellow feeling for the dog, when he gave up his effort and, sitting down in the ruins of his tunnel, abandoned himself to the contemplation of ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... the vagrant, for such he was, silenced Shanty, though it did not convince him that he was mistaken in his conjecture. However, the old man, changing his mode of attack, and regretting that he had put the stranger on his guard by giving him so home a thrust, pretended ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]

... from the Wilhelmstrasse, "the first time by any means that kings have chosen to live with dancers. While such conduct is not, perhaps, strictly laudable, we can disregard it if it be accompanied by a certain measure of decorum. Still, a combination of ruler-ship and dalliance with a vagrant charmer is a phenomenon that is as much out of place as is an attempt to govern a country ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... possible that it fairly reproduces his personality, as presented by contemporary tradition; but it is misleading in its facts, and needlessly diffuse. Under pretence of respecting "the Manes of the dead," the writer seems to have found it pleasanter to fill his space with vagrant discussions on the "Middle Comedy of the Greeks" and the machinery of the Rape of the Lock, than to make the requisite biographical inquiries. This is the more to be deplored, because, in 1762, Fielding's widow, brother, and sister, as well as his friend Lyttelton, were still ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... open sloping field, where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its lacy, crystaled edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the establishment of a bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out against a red barn. The litter ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... fisherman, All other tools forsook; And though no vagrant man was he, He lived by ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... sagacity than this prompt employment of the telegraph for the apprehension of the nimble delinquent can scarcely be conceived. The sudden brush of the comet's tail, the instantaneous telegram to the opposite side of the world, and the glimpse thence of the vagrant luminary as it was just whisking itself off into space toward the star Theta Centauri, together constitute a passage that stands quite without a parallel in the experience ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute. For all let there be a choice between a life of dignified, highly-paid, and not over-exacting employment and the despicable life of a vagrant. There can be little doubt about the choice of most, and none about that of a real artist. Art and Religion are very much alike, and in the East, where they understand these things, there has always been a notion that religion should be an amateur affair. The pungis of India are beggars. ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... crowd, in radiant disarray, On heaven's broad boulevard in pageants vast, And things of earth, the hunted and outcast, Come from their haunts and hiding-places; yea, Even from the nooks and crannies of the mind Visions uncouth and vagrant fancies start, And specters of dead joy, that shun the light, And impotent regrets and terrors blind, Each one, in form grotesque, playing its part In the ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... saw the crater, "vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together a thousand feet under us and totally shut out land and ocean; not a vestige of anything was ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... and sizes, and of all colours from parchment-white to very old oak. There was a capatas, or overseer, and seven or eight paid peones, the others being all agregados—that is, supernumeraries without pay, or, to put it plainly, vagabonds who attach themselves like vagrant dogs to establishments of this kind, lured by the abundance of flesh, and who occasionally assist the regular peones at their work, and also do a little gambling and stealing to keep themselves in ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... man. I have not accepted wealth without accepting the personal responsibility for it. Sick men and women in more than one hospital lie in wards provided by Martin Renard and myself; and I am not dishonoured in my Institution at Poplar. Those vagrant wanderings with Andriaovsky have enabled me to know the poor and those who help the poor. My personal labours in the administration of the Institute are great, for outside the necessary routine I leave little to subordinates. I ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

... of the family in which they happen, for it is supposed that they have failed in their duty. The reason of punishing this so severely is, because they think that if they were not strictly restrained from all vagrant appetites, very few would engage in a state in which they venture the quiet of their whole lives, by being confined to one person, and are obliged to endure all the inconveniences with which it ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... pale, thin vapour that clung close to the shimmering surface and dazzled the eye with an ever-shifting glaze. The air was lifeless, sultry, stifling; not a leaf, not a twig in the tall, drooping willows moved unless stirred by the passage of some vagrant bird. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... eyes of anxious elders, such vagrant ways naturally take on the colours of idleness and a love of low company. Stevenson was, however, in his own fashion an eager student of books as well as of man and nature. He read precociously and omnivorously in the belles-lettres, including a very wide range of English ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... then to gather bitter shame Of spirit, I had been most wildly proud— Yet in my pride had been Some little courage, formless as a cloud, Unpiloted save by the vagrant wind, But still an earnest of the bonds that tame The legionary hates, of sacred loves that lean From the high soul of man towards his kind. And all my grief Had been for those I watched go to and fro In uncompassioned woe Along that little span my unbelief Had ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various









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