"Straw" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his wish, than his fingers closed over some object on the ground. He grasped it with about the same hopefulness that a dying man will grasp at a straw. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... coprah-makers as early as the 'Seventies of the last century. They were nearly all ruined adventurers, either escaped from the Noumea penitentiary or otherwise the scum of the white race. Such individuals would settle near a good anchorage close to some large village, build a straw hut, and barter coprah for European goods and liquor. They made a very fair profit, but were constantly quarrelling with the natives, whom they enraged by all sorts of brutalities. The frequent murders of such traders were excusable, to say the least, and many ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... quite a contradiction, that you are!" was the exclamation of Harriet Mannering to her sister. And she continued, "You are not too proud to wear a cotton dress and coarse straw bonnet, and even to be seen in them by the very persons who knew us when we had a carriage; and yet you will not accept these presents ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... biscuit and water; and they were not even able to make it into a warm mess by heating the water, as they had no vessels; moreover, when their hard day's work was at an end, they had but a handful of straw on which to lie. These privations, added to their hard and laborious life, brought on an endemic fever, which incapacitated for work many soldiers and labourers, numbers of whom had to be dismissed. Very soon the unfortunate men, who ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... walls and thatched roofs, stood amidst gardens filled with unclipped greenery and homely flowers. Quickset hedges, ragged and untrimmed, divided these from the roadway, and to add to the rural look one garden possessed straw bee-hives. Here and there rose ancient elm-trees and grass grew in the roadway. It was a blind lane and terminated in a hedge, which bordered a field of corn. To the left was a narrow path running between hedges past the cottages and into ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... it has now only water of twenty yards width, yet when full it occupies ninety. Just below the mouth is another village or wintering camp of the Ricaras, composed of about sixty lodges, built in the same form as those passed yesterday, with willow and straw mats, baskets and buffaloe-skin canoes remaining entire in the camp. We proceeded under a gentle breeze from the southwest: at ten o'clock we saw two Indians on the north side, who told us they were a part of the lodge of Tartongawaka, or Buffaloe ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... childhood had been passed; "I peeped in twice at the window. I wanted you so much to walk to the village. But you will come now, will you not?" added the girl, coaxingly, as she looked up at him under the shade of her straw hat. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an awkwardness that proclaimed the novice. Quite plainly the majority of these girls were smoking not at all because they desired to smoke, but for a lark. A little thing, you will say, very harmless, and possibly you are right, and yet it is the straw which reveals the direction of ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... to put a stop to all Winter soldiering, so that a fellow could go home as soon as cold weather began, sit around a comfortable stove in a country store; and tell camp stories until the Spring was far enough advanced to let him go back to the front wearing a straw hat and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... said I to myself, "on whom all good advice and delicacy are thrown away! I have been cheated by the simplicity of her manner, which I suppose she can assume just as she could a straw bonnet, were it the fashion, for the mere sake of celebrity. I suppose, notwithstanding the excellence of her understanding, the society of half a dozen of clowns to play at whisk and swabbers would give her more ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... search for the I.W.W. men, and after looking up and down the road, and all around, he at length found them behind an old strawstack. They were comfortably sitting down, backs to the straw, eating a substantial lunch. Kurt was angry and did not care. His appearance, however, did not faze the strangers. One of them, an American, was a man of about thirty years, clean-shaven, square-jawed, with light, steely, secretive gray eyes, and a look of intelligence ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... taking the tickets and stood with the ticket-box in his hand, trying to calm the crowd, but he was as a straw in the wind. The maddened people ran over him. When the excitement cleared away he was found almost buried in mud, mire, and oil outside, his clothes torn to shreds, but he still grasped the precious box in ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... the straw that broke the camel's back, when she heard of the company that only waited to dig china clay out of Penbeacon and wash it in the Ewe till they could purchase a slice of the hill pertaining to the Vale Leston estate. Major Harewood had replied that his fellow-trustee was too ill to attend to business, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a similar view of me. Our minds have no thought in common, but as it is necessary to talk, I tell him it is a warm evening. Perhaps it is a warm evening, perhaps it isn't; in either case he agrees with me. I ask him if he is going to Ascot. I do not care a straw whether he is going to Ascot or not. He says he is not quite sure, but asks me what chance Passion Flower has for the Thousand Guineas. I know he doesn't value my opinion on the subject at a brass farthing—he would be a fool if he did, but I cudgel my brains to reply to ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... his curiosity. He stooped to the sufferer, composed his limbs upon the straw, and, as the vehicle, by this time, had approached the tavern, he ordered the wagoner to drive to the rear of the building, that the wounded man might lose, as much as possible, the sounds of clamor which steadily rose from the hall in ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Prince, "you're none of you worth a straw, you can't wash. Why there sits a beggar lassie, I'll be bound she knows how to wash better than the whole lot of you. Come here, lassie," ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... fear of failing when one is ready to pay the full value of what one wants to get. I have bought three coasters and eight fishing boats, and have a sufficient store of pitch and oil, with plenty of straw and faggots. There was no difficulty in getting men to come with me. As soon as they heard that a fleet of eighteen Moorish galleys was in the next bay, they were ready enough to aid in any plan for their destruction, for they ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... green-baize board with its white rows of tapelike paper, and three members standing before it. One of them, a tall, stout, good-humoured-looking man in pince-nez and a white waistcoat, becoming conscious, removed his straw hat and took up a position whence, without staring, he could gaze at her; and Gyp knew, without ever seeming to glance at him, that he found her to his liking. She saw her father's unhurried figure passing that little group, all of whom were conscious now, and eager to get away out of this sanctum ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... miniature copies of Gunnar, stood there solemnly. Each wore a new straw hat with a black and red band around it. They were barefooted. Odin guessed that the hats had been bought special for ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... noted Joe Ellison in his blue overalls and wide straw hat cleaning out a bank of young dahlias a distance up the bluff. He now took Maggie's arm and guided her in ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... at length made out to his own complete satisfaction that Doctor Mulhaus' wife was in labour, and that he was come for the surgeon, who was probably drunk and asleep inside. So, being able to sympathize, having had his wife in the straw every thirteen months regularly for the last fifteen years, he prepared to assist, and for this purpose took a stone about half a hundredweight, and coming behind the Doctor, when he was in full kick, he ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... manalis), it is practically certain that the original ritual was the purely imitative process of pouring water over the stone. A similar rain-charm may possibly be seen in the curious ritual of the argeorum sacra, when puppets of straw were thrown into the Tiber—a symbolic wetting of the crops to which many parallels may be found among other primitive peoples. A sympathetic charm of a rather different character seems to survive ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... has Riddell with your cribs, I'd like to know?" exclaimed Parson, indignant, not at all on the question of morality, but because the last straw on which he had relied for scrambling through ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... distance from markets such as Taos affords, prevents them from transporting thither more than their small surplus of grain; but, as in this case, on thus finding many hungry horses and mules to feed, their corn-stalks and wheat-straw come into demand, and bring them in a remuneration in ready money, in sums which they have not even dreamed of before. The only difficulty in trading with such people is to fix a fair price on their produce; ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... were of clerical cut, he wore a white necktie, and on his head was a brown straw hat with wide brim. He folded his hands meekly on his knees, and turned towards ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... inhabitants. The centre of the settlement was a fortified town, known as the "Fort," to distinguish it from the dwellings scattered along the river-banks. The Fort stood on the western bank of the river and contained about a hundred small wood houses with bark or thatch-straw roofs. These primitive dwellings were packed closely together and surrounded and protected by a palisade about twenty-five feet high; at each corner was a wooden bastion, and a block-house was erected over each gateway. The only public buildings in the enclosure ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... a hamper that we found awaiting us. It was a large box. And besides that there were two cases addressed to Dicky and me, and through the gaps in the boards we could see twisted straw, and our hearts leapt high in our breasts, because we knew ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... lieutenant, who remarked that the tile floor might make a stable smell sweeter but it hardly offered the slumbering possibilities of a straw shakedown. While the men arranged their blankets in those quarters, the horses grazed and rolled in green paddocks fenced with white painted rails. The cooks got busy with the evening meal and the men off duty started exploring the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... bias velvet bands on the brim of a straw hat for the early spring trade, felt that she was sustained neither by the pleasures of vanity nor by the sounder consolations of virtue. Her philosophy was quite as simple, if not so material, as ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... His age was perhaps twenty. He sat loose-jointed and indolent on the top rail of the fence, his hands hanging over his knees: his hoe forgotten. His feet were bare, and his jeans breeches were supported by a single suspender strap. Pushed well to the back of his head was a battered straw hat, of the sort rurally known as the "ten-cent jimmy." Under its broken brim, a long lock of black hair fell across his forehead. So much of his appearance was typical of the Kentucky mountaineer. His face was strongly ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... sacred to their memory. It was a clachan of miserable little huts built entirely of clay from the dreary and sticky pit in which they had been flung together. A shapeless hole on one side was the doorway, and a little hole, stuffed with straw in winter, the window. Some of the remnants of these hovels still stand. Their occupants, though they went by the name of gypsies among themselves, were known to the weavers as the Claypots beggars; and their King ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... having been consecrated to Mars, has been called the Campus Martius. It happened that there was a crop of corn upon it ready to be cut down, which produce of the field, as they thought it unlawful to use, after it was reaped, a great number of men carried the corn and straw in baskets, and threw them into the Tiber, which then flowed with shallow water, as is usual in the heat of summer; that thus the heaps of corn as it stuck in the shallows became settled when covered ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... the Fawners strain and relax the Muscles of their Faces in making Distinction between a Spinster in a coloured Scarf and an Handmaid in a Straw-Hat, the Worriers use the same Roughness to both, and prevail upon the Easiness of the Passengers, to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Dmitritch," Paklin began, "you are upset, and for a very good reason. But have you forgotten in what times and in what country we are living? Amongst us a drowning man must himself create the straw to clutch at. Why be sentimental over it? One must look the devil straight in the face and not get ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... a straw; only so far, that when I have been cross, and have begged a person's pardon,—which I don't do as often as I ought,—I always feel that it begets kindness. If I could help you in ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... which I feel my pen can do but little justice; from the first glance at the timber-ends emerging past a leafy turn in the up-stream, and bounding onward with a momentary increase of impetus, until the strong raft becomes but as a bed of straw upon the torrent. Then there is the desperate plying of the oars, their hurried abandonment, with the in-gathering, of the bold crew clinging together with cheers round their bright flag, until the leap is made, and the assailing waves rise ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... pulleys, rails, and wagon-wheels, much more solid than metal wheels, and far lighter. And it was this lightness and solidity which Robur availed himself of in building his aerial locomotive. Everything—framework, hull, houses, cabins—were made of straw-paper turned hard as metal by compression, and—what was not to be despised in an apparatus flying at great heights—incombustible. The different parts of the engines and the screws were made of gelatinized fiber, which combined in ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... these singular people. A quarrel originating in jealousy had produced results of the most serious nature. A blow on the head with a tent-pole had evidently produced concussion of the brain if not fracture, and the victim was lying on his straw bed in a state of profound coma. The tent was tripartite, being formed of three main tops meeting in a centre: one was sacred to the women—the gynekeion of the Greeks, the anderoon of the Persians: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... before he reappeared, and thrust her in through what seemed to be a door. Then there was another waiting before the light of a lamp blinked out, and she saw that she was standing in a little log-walled room with bare floor and a few trusses of straw in a comer. There was also a rusty stove, and a very small pile of billets beside it. Winston, who had closed the door, stood looking at them ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... a rickety station hack, which had approached on the soft, dusty road almost noiselessly. Just stepping out of it was a sunburned young man, very upright in carriage, and dressed in a light-gray suit, with a jaunty straw hat. He carried a bamboo cane, which he switched somewhat nervously as the pretty girl advanced toward him across ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... in the clearing the snow lay nearly four feet deep. It loaded the roof. It buried the low, broad, log barn almost to the eaves. It whitely fenced in the trodden, chip-littered, straw-strewn space of the yard which lay between the barn and the cabin. It heaped itself fantastically, in mounds and domes and pillars, over the stumps that dotted the raw, young clearing. It clung densely ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Layard, there are instruments apparently composed of metal rods or plates, touched by hammers, upon the same general principle as the toy instrument with glass plates, or the xylophone composed of wooden rods resting upon bands of straw. In these the use of the hammer for producing the tone is obvious. In the Middle Ages there was an instrument called the psaltery, apparently some sort of a four-sided harp strung with metal strings. The evidence upon this ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... honour and ladies of the palace had no establishment at Trianon. When invited by the Queen, they came from Versailles to dinner. The King and Princes came regularly to sup. A white gown, a gauze kerchief, and a straw hat were the uniform dress of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... doings and wrongs are forgiven. None the less it must be said for them that they take fairly good care of their minuscule quadrupeds. They feed them, usually three times a day, with boiled chopped straw and beans, and grass in summer-time, and with this diet you see the little brutes, which are only about 10 hands high, and even less sometimes, go twenty-five or thirty miles a day quite easily, with a weight ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... their meal they all went to sleep for a little while, those in cages curling up in a corner, and the horses lying down on straw, but the elephants took their sleep standing up, for an elephant, even in the jungle, never lies down except perhaps to roll in water, or a mud-puddle. And the only time they lie down in a circus is when they ...
— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis
... proved a haven to man and beast. One of the first foremen to arrive during the second week was Nat Straw. He drove up at sunset, with a chuck-wagon, halted at the tent, and in his usual easy manner inquired, "Where is ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... got some stuff to put in the wounds, assuring us it would stop the flow of blood, and it did. This man helped me to bandage up the wounds with bandages made from garments taken from myself and the children. They helped my husband, and we followed them into a little hut, where they laid him on a straw bed and locked us in. Hot water for bathing our bruises, food and drink were handed us through a small window, and we could hear them planning how they would save us. We told them how anxious we were to hear ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... light was still faint, filtering in through a high-silled window and the door. A round, brown table stood in the center of the room. In the corner of the room behind stood the crescentic, white plaster stove, with its dull wooden kettle-lids and its crackling straw. Two cooks, country women, sat in the hidden corner behind the stove, and poked in the great bales of straw and gossiped. Their voices and the answers of the serving amah filled the kitchen with noise. In their decorous niche at the upper ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... determined. The king split up a war-arrow, which he sent off in all directions, and by that token a number of men was collected in all haste. Then said Egil Ulserk,—"At one time the peace had lasted so long I was afraid I might come to die the death of old age (1), within doors upon a bed of straw, although I would rather fall in battle following my chief. And now it may so turn out in the end as ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... understand the English language?" she demanded. "I don't mean you, Mr. Saunders," she added sharply, as the little clerk set the suitcase down abruptly and stepped forward, again fumbling his much-fumbled straw hat. This was the moment when the red cocker's tail came to grief. The dog arose with an astonished yelp and fled to his mistress; he had never been so outrageously set upon before in all his pampered life. Seizing the opportunity ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... affirmatives. "I want help," I said hoarsely. "I want to get some stuff up the beach—stuff I can't very well leave about." I became aware of three other pleasant-looking young men with towels, blazers, and straw hats, coming down the sands towards me. Evidently the early bathing section ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... her if the judge would feed her up and fatten her; and the judge said he would try. He gave her that night food enough for four cows, and she consumed it as if she had been upon half rations for a month. When she finished, she got up, reached for the hired man's straw hat, ate it, and then, bolting out into the garden, she put away the honeysuckle vine and a coil of India-rubber hose. The man said that if it was his cow he would kill her; and the judge told him that he had perhaps better just ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... only, with but a pallet of straw upon the floors, Mrs. Jocelyn would have responded to that appeal, and she stepped forward resolved to smile and appear pleased with everything, no matter how stifled she might feel for want of space, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... back twenty-four again, I'll go on it, too," said, in English, a young man in the chair at Mary's right. He was a brown, well-groomed, clean-shaven youth, whose hair was so light that it looked straw-coloured in contrast with his sunburnt skin. "It's en chaleur, as they say of numbers when they keep coming up. It may come a third time running. I've seen it happen. Five repetitions is the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... syne he would be able to haud up his head ... Oh, mither! ... I wish terrible they had come and ta'en me at nicht... It's a dog-cart, and I was praying it micht be a cart, so that they could cover me wi' straw." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... made after the fashion of Ruth's own, of light grey soft stuff, and on the glorious wealth of her hair was a broad-brimmed straw hat such as Ruth wore. Indeed, to look at them both, standing there side by side, they could but have been taken for two twin sisters—daughters of the Day and Night—as my loving fancy called them afterwards—rather than the daughters of different peoples, and children of far-parted ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... rightly what you might call a feeling, nor yet azactly, as you might say, t'wards her. And it can't be so strong as I reckoned, for when she spoke the word 'marriage' you might ha' knocked me down with a straw." ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... into the grate, "mebbe what's comin' 'll int'rest ye more 'n the rest on't has. I was standin' gawpin' 'round, list'nin' to the band an' watchin' the folks git their tickets, when all of a suddin I felt a twitch at my hair—it had a way of workin' out of the holes in my old chip straw hat—an' somebody says to me, 'Wa'al, sonny, what you thinkin' of?' he says. I looked up, an' who do you s'pose it was? It was Billy P. Cullom! I knowed who he was, fer I'd seen him before, but of course he didn't know me. Yes, ma'am, it was Billy P., an' ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... representative of his country and its laws. We Americans smile superior, as I did at the Mayor's table; and yet, I fancy, we lose some very agreeable titillations of the heart in consequence of our proud perogative of caring no more about our President than for a man of straw, or a stuffed scarecrow straddling in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... animals from their slumbers in the straw— the wingless apteryx, like a little armless man with a very long nose; the huge misshapen earthy-looking ant-bear, and those four-footed Rip Van Winkles, the quaint, rusty, blear-eyed armadillos. But the giant ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... quantity of food under any circumstances. Horses have been known to consume 40 lbs. of hay in twenty-four hours, whereas 16 lbs. to 18 lbs. is the utmost which should have been given. Mr. Croall, an extensive coach proprietor in Scotland, limited his horses to 4-1/2 lbs. cut straw, 8 lbs. bruised oats, and 2-1/2 lbs. bruised beans, in the morning and noon, giving them at night 25 lbs. of the following; viz., 560 lbs. steamed potatoes, 36 lbs. barley-dust, 40 lbs. cut straw, and 6 lbs. salt, mixed up together: ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... recognize any of the framed photographs that stood there. One, evidently copied from a daguerrotype, was of a curly-haired girl, about fourteen, probably the daughter who died years ago, and another, close at her elbow, was of a lanky boy of eight or ten, wearing a broad straw hat, and grasping a fishing pole, probably Horace, as a child, but there was nowhere to be seen the photograph of him in cap, gown, and hood that stood on Miss ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... of the Past—Splitting the Straw. All right. If you drop me a line to that effect, legibly signed with your name, I'll wear it next my heart. I shall have to go now. I have a date. Good-bye. Glad ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... like a fan, and is borne on a three-cornered stalk. It is cut while young, the stiff parallel veins removed, then slit into shreds by whipping it, and immersed in boiling water, and finally bleached in the sun. The same "straw" is used in the interior. The "Mocora," which grows like a cocoa-nut tree, with a very smooth, hard, thorny bark, is rarely used, as it is difficult to work. The leaves are from eight to twelve feet in length, so that the "straws" ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... American, and obtained his purpose by attracting the attention of an American gentleman in the street, who promised to do what he could for him, but advised him in the meantime to proceed quietly. The whole party were thrown into a dismal underground vault, and the stones covered with straw, which seemed to Judson so foul that he could not bear to sit down on it, and he walked up and down, though sick and giddy with the chill, close, noisome atmosphere. Before his walking powers were exhausted, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... one walnut after dinner it gave her such pain. That rather reminds one of the story of a half-witted fellow who used to go about the country doing odd jobs, and asking in return a meal and a shake-down of straw or hay. ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... occupation than impertinent curiosity about me—What am I? how big am I? why am I halved? why am I gibbous? I am inhabited; I am just a mirror hung over the sea; I am—whatever their latest fancy suggests. It is the last straw when they say my light is stolen, sham, imported from the sun, and keep on doing their best to get up jealousy and ill feeling between brother and sister. They might have been contented with making him out a ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... the connection it might have with the Peerage question; to which he only replied by enlarging on 'the importance of the Belgic question,' either unable or unwilling to embrace this measure in its complex relations, and never perceiving that the country cares not a straw about Belgium or anything but Reform, though they may begin to care about such things when this question is settled. Haddington also went to Aberdeen, who would hear nothing; but he and the Duke severally ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the time wonderfully. They are scrubbing down the waist, washing the decks with brushes and squeejees and lashins of blue Mediterranean; they wear dungaree tunics, and trousers of dark blue and faded pale blues, with red cloth round their straw skull-caps, and are all in shadow—that colourful, melting, warm shade you have in the South in ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... on a broad-brimmed straw hat, a distractingly pretty combination of filmy cool stuffs, and led the way to the long, low structure that I had noticed ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... some twenty years was coming up the path. She wore a scarlet cloak, its hood lined with white silk; a straw hat shaded her fair face, blushing very much just now; in her dark-grey eyes might be read vexation, as she ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... and a hollow tree than anything that civilization had yet been able to produce, and he proceeded to descend to the ground again by so dark and friendly a passage. His progress was stopped by a bundle of straw at the bottom, which he quickly tore away, and having emerged from a grove of asparagus in the fireplace, he found himself not on the earth, but in Mrs. Walters's bedroom. In what ways he now vented his ill-humor is not clear; but ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... hour arrives, God will summon the angels to enter into combat with the monster. But no sooner will leviathan cast his glance at them than they will flee in fear and dismay from the field of battle. They will return to the charge with swords, but in vain, for his scales can turn back steel like straw. They will be equally unsuccessful when they attempt to kill him by throwing darts and slinging stones; such missiles will rebound without leaving the least impression on his body. Disheartened, the angels will give up the combat, and God will command leviathan and behemot ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... was a great winder, whose two movable reels of wicker held the skeins. Long chains of spools of bright-coloured silks strung on cords were hung near that case of drawers. On the floor was a large basket filled with empty bobbins. A pair of great shears rested on the straw seat of one of the chairs, and a ball of cord had just fallen on the ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... do. But the poor girl has ordered her estates to be sold to cast the die, and I 'm taking the view of her disappointment, for she believes he can do anything; and if I know the witch, her sole comfort lying in the straw is the prospect of a bloody venture for a throne. The truth is, to my thinking, it's the only thing she has to help her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... each of those seated at the table was to sing in his turn. Caedmon was very nervous— felt he could not sing. Fear overcame his heart, and he stole quietly away from the table before the turn could come to him. He crept off to the cowshed, lay down on the straw and fell asleep. He dreamed a dream; and, in his dream, there came to him a voice: "Caedmon, sing me a song!" But Caedmon answered: "I cannot sing; it was for this cause that I had to leave the feast." "But you must and shall sing!" "What must I sing, then?" he replied. "Sing the beginning ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... successful, I used to engage a brick-sloop at Perth Amboy and take the whole crowd down to the fishing-banks on the Atlantic for two days. On one occasion we got outside Sandy Hook on the banks and anchored. A breeze came up, the sea became rough, and a large number of the men were sick. There was straw in the bottom of the boat, which we all slept on. Most of the men adjourned to this straw very sick. Those who were not got a piece of rancid salt pork from the skipper, and cut a large, thick slice out of it. This was put on the end of a fish-hook ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... that he was a fact at all. That nice, sensible, unintrospective people who were too busy trying to exist pleasantly to trouble their heads as to whether they existed or no—that this best part of mankind should have gratefully caught at such a straw as "cogito ergo sum," is intelligible enough. They felt the futility of the whole question, and were thankful to one who seemed to clench the matter with a cant catchword, especially with a catchword in a foreign language; but how one, who was so far gone as to recognise ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... Twenty-five of these have become couriers, riders, and coachmen. Their place is filled up by women, who conduct the plough, and who, to amuse themselves, carry occasionally to the market, carts full of straw or of charcoal. The number of carpenters, masons, and other artisans, is diminished by about a half. But the price of all articles of workmanship having risen also one half; it comes to the same thing, and a compensation is established. One ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... was a wall of uncertain darkness speckled with little flames and alive with half-caught forms and faces and shadows. The voices of early evening had settled down to one soothing hum whose deepest note was the steady chumping of the bullocks above their chopped straw, and whose highest was the tinkle of a Bengali dancing-girl's sitar. Most men had eaten and pulled deep at their gurgling, grunting hookahs, which in full blast sound ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... with sleep, and this intrusion seemed to him to be a final indignity offered to him by the man whom he now hated. "What business have you to come in here?" he said, leaning on his elbow. "I don't care a straw for the horse. If you have anything to say send my servant. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... moment; his pulses were racing; he could not think. He sat down and buried his face in his hands; and gradually his brain cleared and quieted. Then he realised what it meant, and his soul rose in blind furious resentment. This was the last straw; it was the woman's devilish jealousy. But what could he do? The Justice was here. Could he warn his friends? He clenched his fingers into his hair as the situation came out clear and hard before his brain. Dear God, what could ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... while all good patriots are listening to the friends of the people in the political meetings. You will be closely watched, for we are surrounded by spies; and if any act of yours arouses the slightest suspicion we shall all go to sleep on the straw in the Conciergerie or the Abbaye, until we are ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... perhaps, in unusual cases, there is absolutely nothing by which people know that they are going to be properly mated. If a man with a tendency to neurasthenia breaks down and is tied to a nagging wife, that is usually the last straw in the way ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... an indignant virtuoso from Hungary, and began to talk to the Duchess of Paisley. She looked wonderfully beautiful with her grand ivory throat, her large blue forget-me-not eyes, and her heavy coils of golden hair. Or pur they were—not that pale straw colour that nowadays usurps the gracious name of gold, but such gold as is woven into sunbeams or hidden in strange amber; and they gave to her face something of the frame of a saint, with not a ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... plantation of Master James Henry Hammond. We find other boys there, too. We go to the fields and chop cotton, after we rest up. No sah, we wasn't flogged often. One time the grown men and women was choppin' two rows to our one, and a straw-boss slave twit us and call us lazy. The white overseer, who was riding by, heard him. He shake his whip at the straw-boss and tell him: 'The young niggers not yet 'spected to make a half hand and you do pretty well to 'tend to your ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... zeros and ones and nothing else; some tiny chisels; and a mouth organ. Pop, who'd make a point of just helping in the hunt, appropriated that last item—I might have known he would, I told myself. Now we could expect "Turkey in the Straw" at odd moments. ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... be carried on on land. If we go to work the right way, there is no reason why we should not be able to trace her. I propose to take Lechmere and Dominique and the four black boatmen. If we stain our faces a little, and put on a pair of duck trousers, white shirts, red sashes, and these broad straw hats I bought at San Domingo, we shall look just like the half-caste planters we saw in the streets there. I should take Pedro, too, but you will want him to translate anything you have to ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... instruments of authority were touched and diverted from their appointed purpose, and came back and said, 'Never man spake like this Man.' To the music of Christ's words all other eloquence is harsh, poor, shallow—like the piping of a shepherd boy upon some wretched oaten straw as compared with the full thunder of the organ. Words of unmingled graciousness came from His lips. That fountain never sent forth 'sweet waters and bitter.' He satisfies the canon of St. James: 'If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man.' Words of wisdom, of love, of pity, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... rounded bust visible above them. Sometimes the thickly interlaced boughs hid her for several minutes, then, where the bushes were thinner, the colour of her dress would show through them and the pale straw of her hat would catch the sunlight. The nearer she came the more slowly she walked, loitering among the verdant shrubs, stopping to gaze at the cypresses, stooping to gather a handful of fallen leaves. From the last terrace ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... mean that, because, if your friends tell the truth about you, you can come as near to making bricks without straw as the next man. But the Red Butte Western reorganization asks for something more than a good ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... them all is only to confuse. The best of anything is sufficient. We present two, for the benefit of two classes of persons. For all who have care enough to attend to it, the best remedy is to bind a handful of straw around the tree, two feet from the ground, tied on with one band, and the ends allowed to stand out from the tree. The females, who can not fly, but only ascend the trunk by crawling, will get up under the straw, and may easily be killed, ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... disappeared with all possible haste, her terrific yells vibrating in my astonished ears long after I had turned the corner of the street; nor did I feel perfectly at ease until I found myself stretched on a bundle of straw in a corner of the ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... Chevalier. But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected The Offence of Galilee to open with tells its own tale. He was convinced, but not converted, and he stood there with his little legs apart, chewing a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the chaste decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one more ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... of Charity," said he, gratefully. "But I can't afford to scratch my neck." And coolly he took a fold of my brown silk skirt, patted it over the straw, and with a sigh of satisfaction rested his head ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... degrees above zero. The fruits and biscuits were shrivelled and tasteless, having evidently been there some months. It reminded me of a children's doll dinner-party. With the exception of these Barmecide feasts and some straw-flavoured eggs, there was nothing substantial to be got in any of the post-houses till ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... find the house without the Mountain Sylph, the inference must be in favour of all being genuine. There are no indications of cooking going on, and, bating an iron pot, a three-legged stool, a bench, half a dozen willow-pattern dishes, and a few ropes of straw suspended from the roof with the evident object of supporting something which is not there, no signs of property are visible. And this is the outcome of a farm of five acres—Irish acres, be it well understood. There is nothing at all to feed ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... form'd and cherish'd here! And not the lightest leaf, but trembling teems With golden visions, and romantic dreams! Down by yon hazel copse, at evening, blaz'd The Gipsy's faggot—there we stood and gaz'd; Gaz'd on her sun-burnt face with silent awe, Her tatter'd mantle, and her hood of straw; Her moving lips, her caldron brimming o'er; The drowsy brood that on her back she bore, Imps, in the barn with mousing owlet bred, From rifled roost at nightly revel fed; Whose dark eyes flash'd thro' locks of blackest shade, ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... laughing, and talking to it wildly, and nodding at it. He was taken up a hopeless idiot, and so lived for years and years; clanking the chain, and moaning under the lash, and howling through long nights when the moon peered through the bars of his solitary cell, and he buried his face in the straw. ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Absalom in the wish that all the king's enemies may be 'as that young man is.' But the veil was thin, and the attempt to console by reminding of the fact that the dead man was an enemy as well as a son, was swept away like a straw before the father's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a contract surgeon, who merely looked in upon them, administered a little medicine, and left them to utter neglect and misery. Here they died at a fearful rate, and their dead bodies were removed from the miserable pallet of straw, or the bare floor where they had breathed their last, and buried in rude coffins, and sometimes coffinless, in a low piece of ground near by. The proportion of deaths, was about seventy-five percent. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... those on the Servian shore, had the same poverty-stricken look I had frequently noticed in Galicia. Wretched clay huts, thatched with straw, lay scattered around; and far and wide not a tree or a shrub appeared to rejoice the eye of the traveller or of the sojourner in these parts, under the shade of which the poor peasant might recruit his weary frame, while it would conceal from the eye of the traveller, in some degree, ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... the pursuit was the last straw. I gave up hope, and my intentions were narrowed to one frantic desire—to hide the jewels. Patriotism, which I had almost forgotten, flickered up in that crisis. At any rate Laputa should not have the Snake. If he drove out the white man, he should not clasp the ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... in one corner, where was some loose dry silver-sand upon the floor, which others had perhaps used for a resting-place before. 'Thou must lie here for a month or two, lad,' he said; 'tis a mean bed, but I have known many worse, and will get straw tomorrow if ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... incident in a bird's life will furnish an answer to several of these questions. Two sparrows were seen attempting to take possession of the same straw. Each held firmly to his end of the straw. A regular tug of war ensued. They pulled one another about for some time on the top of an awning, and finally, becoming tired of this, they dropped the straw and furiously ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock |
