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More "Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... squaws and almost nude children squatted or lay in the sunshine. One solitary white man was seen standing in front of a tepee. He was dressed in a dark pair of pantaloons, brown duck overcoat and his head was surmounted by a large, broad brimmed, drab felt hat, with a big dinge in each side of it. The white man proved to be Allison, the government scout and interpreter. It was he who entered the hostile camp the previous year and brought in the main body of the Sioux warriors, led ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... feet two in his felt slippers. His face, so like, yet so unlike his son's, showed heavy lines from the nostril to the corner of the mouth. Beneath his eyes were faint pouches. The thick thatch of yellow hair had lost its yellow light and now was drab in tone. His flannel shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, showed a strong neck, and the rider's belt that circled the top of his blue denim pants outlined a waist as slim and ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... a low-ceilinged room above a baker's shop in the village, and had strewn it about with books and photographs and nick-nacks until the drab surroundings seemed to reflect a little of her dainty personality. Thither, later in the day, she took Betty off to tea and introduced her to a tall fair girl with abundant hair and a gentle, rippling laugh that had in it the ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... people in the world are the spontaneous. We lead such drab lives ourselves and keep back so much, we like to see a little Niagara of human emotion occasionally. The Thoracic feels everything keenly. Life's experiences make vivid records on the sensitive plate of his mind. He puts them on the Victrola that is himself ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... 'Poor pet wee drab of it!' exclaimed my father. 'One is glad, Richie, to fill a creature out of one's emptiness. Now she toddles; she is digesting it rapidly. The last performance of one's purse is rarely so pleasant as that. I owe it to her that I made the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pantaloons; two active youths, of the ages of seventeen and fifteen respectively, in precisely similar costume; a man-servant in pepper and salt, and a little thin timid boy in blue, a sort of confidential page without the buttons. All of them wore drab gaiters and shoes of the thickest conceivable description. From the inside of the coach there issued a delicate elderly lady, who leaned, in a helpless manner, on the arm of a young, plain, but extremely fresh and ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... nine and half past nine in the morning; there was only one coach on the stand; one Crane drove the coach; I saw the gentleman get out of the chaise into the coach, he stepped out of the one into the other; I opened the door, and let down the step for him; he had a brown cap on, a dark drab military great coat, and a scarlet coat under it; I only took notice of the lace under it. The gentleman ordered the coach to drive up to Grosvenor-square; I do not remember that he told me the street in Grosvenor-square. I really think that is the gentleman, it ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... the Tave and ran past tobacco factories, breweries, powder mills, scattered hovels, and unkempt streets. Here was no sun, but plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull brown with the mud of recent rain. Not even the inhabitants were attractive. They were not garbed as Serbs, but wore ungainly ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... avenue they came, two and two, two and two, two and two, and behind those twos still others, all boys of Johnnie's own age, all dressed just alike, wearing clean khaki uniforms, new flat-brimmed hats of olive-drab, leggings, and polished brown shoes. What they were he did not know, though he guessed them to be rich, noting how proud was their carriage—chins up, backs straight. Beside them walked their leader, a grown young man, slender, and with a tanned ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... we think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable tho not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist"—as Shakespeare has been well called—do not exhibit the drab-colored Quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from "The Whole Duty of Man" or from "The Academy of Compliments!" We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... ship, Sir; they say she is waiting until after the 'sizes, to take the drab-jackets ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... sheet which he called the Vidette. It was printed on any sort of paper that could be procured, and consequently, although perfectly consistent in its politics, it appeared at different times in different colors. Sometimes it would be a drab, sometimes a pale rose color, and, my recollection is, that Boone's surrender was recorded upon a page of delicate pea-green. Colonel Morgan finding the pleasure that it gave the men, took great pains to promote the enterprise. The Vidette was expected ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... made of peat and sand; human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the useful, of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... grab fled ship blot lump drab sled whip spot pump slab sped slip plot jump stab then drip trot hump brag bent spit clog bulk cram best crib frog just clan hemp gift plod drug clad vest king stop shut dash ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... in which horses are exercised. They looked offensively modern, and I wondered why our Army had not got field artillery with fixed ammunition and 8,000 yards range. Some officers and men of the Staats Artillerie, dressed in a drab uniform with blue facings, approached us. The commander, Adjutant Roos—as he introduced himself—made a polite salute. He regretted the unfortunate circumstances of our meeting; he complimented the officers on their ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... at Rouen—even coachmen! Yes, indeed, madame—the coachman at the prefecture! I know it for a fact, for he buys his wine of us. And now that it is a question of getting us out of a difficulty she puts on virtuous airs, the drab! For my part, I think this officer has behaved very well. Why, there were three others of us, any one of whom he would undoubtedly have preferred. But no, he contents himself with the girl who is common property. He respects married women. Just think. He is master here. He had only to say: 'I ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... gentleman who was to join me, and whose capital I was to administer, to come and visit us. Trevanion complied; and there arrived a tall fellow, somewhat more than six feet high, answering to the name of Guy Bolding, in a cut-away sporting-coat, with a dog whistle tied to the button-hole, drab shorts and gaiters, and a waistcoat with all manner of strange furtive pockets. Guy Bolding had lived a year and a half at Oxford as a "fast man,"—so "fast" had he lived that there was scarcely a tradesman at Oxford into whose books he ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... inspiriting figure. Her face shone through the drab fog like an undimmed star of purest light. He bounded up the steps toward her, drawn as by magnet against which there was no such thing ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... could see he was hardly more than a boy, perhaps twenty years of age. His lean, gray body was nearly naked. Around his waist he wore a drab-colored tunic, of a substance they could not identify. His feet and legs were bare. On his chest were strapped a thin stone plate, slightly convex. His thick, wavy, black hair, cut at the base of his neck, hung close about his ears. His head was uncovered. His ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... another minute he was on the ridge. The Gulf opened out, a dead dull gray. The skies were hidden behind drab clouds. The air was clammy, cold, hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... south of Santa Catalina, out in the Pacific, open to wind and fog, scorched by sun, and beaten on every shore by contending tides. Seen from afar, the island seems a bleak, long, narrow strip of drab rock rising from a low west end to the dignity of a mountain near the east end. Seen close at hand, it is still barren, bleak, and drab; but it shows long golden slopes of wild oats; looming, gray, lichen-colored crags, where ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... surprised at her absence. It was either caprice or serious illness. She had dwindled to a skeleton, with a maleficent smile. Her teeth were yellow, her hands become claws, the scarlet of her clothes a drab hue, the plumes on her hat gone. Ambroise wondered. About midnight a mean-looking fellow entered and asked for him. A lady, a very ill lady, was in a coupe at the door. He hurried out. It was Aholibah. Her eyes were glazed and her lips black and ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... from his own bottle, recovered, and more than recovered, his Bacchanalian good humor. He clapped Jack on the shoulder. "Who's the right doctor now?" he asked cheerfully. "A drab of a housekeeper? or Father Schwartz? Your health, my jolly boy! When the bottle's empty, I'll help you to finish the flask. Drink away! and the devil take ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... blazing and confused suggestion of colour to objects by contrast with bluish shadows, especially in the evening, but there is often very little colour in things themselves. The East is supposed to be full of blazing colour and the North gray and drab. Yet compare a barge in Rotterdam or Rochester with one in Baghdad. The former is picked out in green and gold and glows with rich, red sails, while the latter, for all its sunshine, is the colour of ashes—not a vestige often of paint or gilding. Some mahailas I found with traces of rich colouring, ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... the hearth when the grandees hold the floor. You see nothing of her at Holland House, which Tom may use as his inn, or at Bowood, if she can help herself, which in the country is his house of call. She is the Jenny Wren of this little cock-robin; she wears drab, too often mourning; but you find that she counts for very much with Tom. He loves to know her at his back, loves to remind himself of it. He is always happy to be home again in her faithful arms. Through all the sparkle and flash, under all the talk, through ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... them, they want wine; your true fool will never fight without it. Or a drab, a drab; Oh for a commodious drab betwixt them! would Helen had been here! then it had come to something. Dogs, lions, bulls, for females tear and gore; And the beast, man, is valiant ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... of the guild of Wise Watchers, who keeps a sharp lookout for the reptiles and little fishes he spears with his strong pointed bill, and places his nest on the ground; the eggs are drab-colored, not pale green like those of most members of ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... fingers. Well, this was the end. She was to be thrust out of the new brightness, back into the drab dreariness, the emptiness that was her ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... a little fluffy, drab-colored gosling, one of the sheep had stepped on it, crushing out its life so nearly that Mrs. Hardy had no idea it would ever recover, but Dan begged for its life. He felt sure he could set the broken leg, ...
— A District Messenger Boy and a Necktie Party • James Otis
... a great light; giving new depth to shades, new brilliance to colours, an amazing vividness to all sensations and vitality to all thoughts: so that all that had been lived before seemed to have been lived in a drab world ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... of bright colours and extravagance in dress carried to such an extreme. Large numbers of the Quakers yielded to it, and even the very strict ones carried gold-headed canes, gold snuff-boxes, and wore great silver buttons on their drab coats and handsome ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... laid down her knitting, and she went over to the beans. Now, never believe me, if she didn't see sitting right before her a bit of an old man, with a cocked hat on his head and a dudeen (pipe) in his mouth, smoking away! He had on a drab-coloured coat with big brass buttons on it, and a pair of silver buckles on his shoes, and he working away as hard as ever he could, heeling a little pair ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... feet high, with a narrow crown composed of flat sprays and a trunk naked for one-third to one-half its height and from one to six feet in diameter, with a smooth bark, silvery or whitish in young trees, becoming thick and heavily fissured into rounded ridges on old trunks, and gray or drab-brown in color, it is readily distinguishable, with its companion, the red fir, by the regularity of construction of trunk, branch and branchlet. As Smeaton Chase expresses it, "The fine smooth arms, set in regular formation, divide and redivide again and again ad infinitum, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... prostrate under the sky in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-colored road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes. At one side of the hotel, the windows looked on a little wooden ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... sense enough to set no particular value on it) and I was soon known by sight to almost everybody in the University. A ridiculous little circumstance aided in this. The former rule of the University (strictly enforced) had been that all students should wear drab knee-breeches: and I, at Mr Clarkson's recommendation, was so fitted up. The struggle between the old dress and the trowsers customary in society was still going on but almost terminated, and I was one of the very few freshmen who retained the old habiliments. This ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... eating, enumerating pigs, dogs, yams, and coconuts, as the component parts of the feast. He was taken down to the wardroom, and shortly underwent a complete metamorphosis, effected by means of a regatta shirt of gaudy pattern, red neckcloth, flannel trousers, a faded drab Taglioni of fashionable cut buttoned up to the throat, and an old black hat stuck on one side of his woolly head. Every now and then he renewed his invitation to go on shore, but was satisfied when given to understand that our visit must be deferred ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... women, thin and emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... the streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always are. So fare ye, fare ye well, old ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... in a long drab coat with red facings, was preparing to get off the box of a smart brougham, but before he could reach the pavement, a charming head, covered with a lace cap, was thrust out of the window, and a musical and ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... entered to-day, and exchanged a frigid bow with Monroe. The Senator from Virginia took a chair in the rear of the others, stretched his long legs in front of him, and folded his arms defiantly. He looked not unlike a greyhound, his preference for drab clothing enhancing the general effect of ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... pass the hemlock, when it's on fire. I'll go with you till you get beyond that," said uncle Nathan, taking his drab overcoat from a nail ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... come in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha dearly loved a scene, for to be admitted to a scene ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... Donna," he told her, when there came to him for the first time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a change from the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert, "we'll take horses and pack-animals and go up into that ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... still redder and more uncomfortable a moment after, when a sudden turn in the conversation introduced the subject of dress. One of the young ladies asked Jo where she got the pretty drab hat she wore to the picnic and stupid Jo, instead of mentioning the place where it was bought two years ago, must needs answer with unnecessary frankness, "Oh, Amy painted it. You can't buy those soft shades, so we paint ours any color ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... But to go back to whar I started from, it all makes in the end for that pretty little chap over yonder in the dining-room. Rather puny for his years now, but as sound as a nut, and he'll grow, he'll grow. When his mother—poor, worthless drab—gave birth to him and died, I told her it was the best ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... her knees meeting for age, walking like a bow leaning on a shaft, hollow eyed, vntoothed, furrowed on her face, hauing her lips trembling with the palsie, going mumbling in the streetes, one that hath forgott[e] her pater noster, and hath yet a shrewd tongue in her head, to call a drab, a drab. If shee haue learned of an olde wife in a chimnies end: Pax, max, fax, for a spel: or can say Sir Iohn of Grantams curse, for the Millers Eeles, that were stolne: All you that haue stolne the Millers Eeles, Laudate dominum de coelis: And all they ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... time, and Mrs. Green had already called up the staircase that dinner was nearly ready before Mopsey had commenced to clothe himself in such garments as he supposed Richard the Third wore. First he put on a thin pair of cotton pants that had once been white, but were now a drab, and which fitted quite closely to his skin. On the outside seams of these he pinned a strip of gilt paper, and then drew on a pair of boots, the tops of which came up quite as high on him as the ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... added, that in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him to return. Perhaps she told him ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... away. There were no more wanderings in public places, no more tryings of new cafes. Mr. Dosson used to look sometimes as he had looked of old when George Flack "located" them somewhere—as if he expected to see their heated benefactor rush back to them with his drab overcoat flying in the wind; but this appearance usually and rather touchingly subsided. He at any rate missed Gaston because Gaston had this winter so often ordered his dinner for him; and his society was not, to make it up, sought by the count and the marquis, whose mastery of English was ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... conception of a morrow. The future was drab and formless. His trouble drew her like a magnet. She trembled at the mere thought of being able ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... make port and you stay awhile, and you find that the woman you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab. And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman beside you is pastier nor dough, and the man of the public house ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... said Elise, "would give anything if I could see and put on canvas the lovely colors that you can. I can't see anything but drab, somehow. It must be a somberness of ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... down the aisle. Dr. Hartwell and Mrs. Lockhart stood near the altar. Mr. Lockhart's indisposition prevented his attendance. Satin, blond, and diamonds were discarded; Pauline was dressed in a gray traveling habit and wore a plain drab traveling bonnet. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the children, dressing the warrior's wounds, looking after the herds, and any other light and airy trifle which might come to her notice. But all this was in the background. Plain useful work has always been considered dull and drab. ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... hurt therwyth. Thys Turpyn, sodeynly turnyng[43] hym and seeing[44] it, reuyled the wyfe therfore, and ran to hys mayster and told hym what she had don: wherfore master Vauesour incontinent callyd the wyf and seyd to her thus: thou drab, quod he, what hast thow don? why hast thou pourd the podage in my cloth sake and marrd my rayment and gere? O, syr, quod the wyfe, I know wel ye ar a iudge of the realme, and I perceyue by you your mind is to do ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... priests and ministrants were rich with embroideries. "People," said William Morris, "have long since ceased to take in impressions through their eyes," indeed so insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him and he averts ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... made a comfortable illumination. But he worked cheerlessly. The excitement of the robbery and the chase was over, and then the conflict with the men was passing. He began to see things truly by the drab light of retrospection. The bullets of Allister and Clune might have gone home— they were intended to kill, not to wound. And if there had been two deaths he, Andrew Lanning, would have been equally guilty with the men who handled the ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... was not, indeed, in his way, but to suffer it was his too-frequent lot. From first to last he was protesting against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of English life. "The [Greek: euphnes] is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnes] on the other hand is our Philistine." "I do not much believe in good being done by ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... cars stopped amid a crowd of people, who had assembled to meet us. The lord provost met us at the door of the car, and presented us to the magistracy of the city, and the committees of the Edinburgh antislavery societies. The drab dresses and pure white bonnets of many Friends were conspicuous among the dense moving crowd, as white doves seen against a dark cloud. Mr. S. and myself, and our future hostess, Mrs. Wigham, entered ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... people appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... of loose earth and rotting bodies. Parts were covered in as bomb-proof shelters, and in places sloping shafts led steeply down to mine galleries before the enemy's front line. Between those two series of drab mounds of earth which marked the opposing lines, lay as terrible an acre as ever was. The hasty burying during the armistice three months ago had been inadequate, and the saps had cut through many of ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... land than belonged to this property, no other house could Levin see over all the prospect except the bold and tarnished form of Johnson's castle, sliding its long porch forward at the base of that tall, blank, inexpressive roof which seemed suspended like the drab curtain of a theatre between the solemn chimney towers; the northern chimney broad and huge, and bottomed on an arch; the southern chimney leaner, but erect as a perpetual sentry on the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed flat—the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling, the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... river whose banks were like cliffs, consequent upon ages of the swift stream cutting its way downward through the soft earth, while here and there clumps of trees grew luxuriantly green, and refreshed the eyes of the lookers-on after a couple of months spent in riding over the drab and dreary veldt. ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... gradually rising, rock-covered slope that led to the base of Quill's Window. On all sides were great, flat slabs of stone, some of them almost buried in the earth, others sticking their jagged points up above the brush and weeds. Back in ages dim these drab, moss-covered rocks had been sliced from the side of the towering mound by the forces that shaped the earth, to be hurled hither and thither with the calm disdain of the mighty. No human agency had blasted them from their insecure hold on the shoulders of the cliff. Uncounted centuries ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... his career he will carry a virgin drab-coloured diary in his breast pocket, wherein he will be expected to record every moment spent on duty, every penny he spends. If any illusion remains in his mind that he will be turned loose on the streets to catch thieves or murderers, it is quickly ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... constitutional had lasted so long that Mattie grew quite frightened, and came down in her drab dressing-gown to wait for him. It was not a becoming costume, but it was warm and comfortable; but then Mattie never considered what became her. If any one had admired her, or cared how she looked or what she wore, or had taken an ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... 1808, was incorrectly styled the Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, with strings and rosettes ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... and jumped back. The audience was lifted fairly to its feet with excitement. What monster could it be that was giving so much trouble? The next moment, while Tomaso's whip hissed in vicious circles over his head, a plump little drab-colored pug-dog marched slowly out upon the stage, its head held arrogantly aloft. Volleys of laughter crackled around the arena, and the delighted spectators settled, tittering, back ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... weather-beaten man in a weather-worn drab coat, entertained me with tales of the clearances made in the famine time that left the country side so empty. It is hard to believe that ever human beings were so cruel to other human beings in this Christian land, and that it ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... pointed, and seeing a man with a gun, gave a startled jump, and pulled up her pony, evidently supposing that we were about to be attacked. "Sha'n't we run?" she began, but then checked herself, as she took in the facts of the drab clothes of the gang and the two armed men in uniform. "They are convicts?" she asked, and when I nodded, she said, "Poor things!" After a pause, she asked, "How long is ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... buildings are the finest modern structures in Manila. Carriages are waiting in the street in front of the hotel, and at the entrance may be seen a group of army officers in khaki uniform, in white and gold, or—very much more modern—olive drab. The dining-room is entered through the rustling bead-work curtain. Here the Chinese waiters, in ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... This one had been made before, and not by, her marriage. Her father, then, had commanded riches. And when one knew, as Duchemin knew, what delights New York has for young women of wealth and fashion, one perceived a radiant and many-coloured background for this drab life of a recluse, expatriate from the high world of her inheritance, which Eve de Montalais must lead, and for the six years of her premature widowhood must have led, in that lonely chateau, buried ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... tread was firm, and his arm still strong enough to steady his long, heavy, double-barrelled rifle. An ample coat of dark blue covered his body; his limbs were enveloped in long buttoned leggings of drab cloth, and a cap of sable surmounted his high, broad forehead. Under this his blueish grey eye glanced with a calm but clear intelligence, and a single look from it satisfied you that you were in the presence of a superior mind. Were I to give the name of this person, this would readily ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... which we should wish to see, there will be more joy of life than in the drab tragedy of modern every-day existence. After early youth, as things are, most men are bowed down by forethought, no longer capable of light-hearted gaiety, but only of a kind of solemn jollification by the clock at the appropriate hours. The advice to "become ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... round and earnest. He wore a blouse waist, a short jacket, and knickerbockers. Under his arm he held an old umbrella that was as tall as he was. Its covering had once been of thick, brown cloth, but the color had faded to a dull drab except in the creases, and Trot thought it looked very old-fashioned and common. The handle, though, was really curious. It was of wood and carved to resemble an elephant's head. The long trunk of the elephant was curved to make a crook for the handle. ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... the summer boarder, and was presented to him by a young lady who liked him very much. It was wrought in a Persian pattern slightly mingled with the Greek, and was embroidered with purple, yellow, crimson, Magenta, sage green, invisible blue, ecru, old gold, drab, and other shaded worsteds, dotted with stitches of shining silk and beads of silver, the tassel alone containing skeins of ecru sewing silk. The young lady lived not very far from Mr. Stimpcett's, and she was that other ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... He was a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant, as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught at school. His thoughts flew from this ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... should be selected with due regard to the species of garment and the tone of the complexion. If the face be of that faint drab which your friends would designate pallid, and your enemies sallow, a coat of pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, must necessarily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... the midst of it, added another pretty touch of color to the scene, with her blue ribbons and hat with the forget-me-nots around it, but if her thoughts could have been seen, they would have showed a sober drab. The meeting with Captain Burrell had left her depressed and unhappy. The thought uppermost in her mind was why should there be such a difference in fathers? Why should Peggy Burrell have such an adorable one, and she be left ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... awoke from a sleep that had lasted all day and glowered out upon the room he occupied in Baxter Street. It was as wretched as all tenements in the Five Points, but it had the distinguishing mark of neatness. Drunk as he might be, the drab who lived with him knew that he would detect dirt and disorder, and that her slender hold on his tolerance would be forfeited at once. There were too many of her sort in the Five Points eager for the position of mistress ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... in the face of the impending contingency, of applying for a commission. Albert in olive drab! To Lilly ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... little party was unusual in walking; glances of uncomprehending pity were cast at them from victorias and landaus that rolled past. Even the convalescent British soldiers facing each other in the clumsy drab cart drawn by humped bullocks, and marked Garrison Dispensary, stared at the black-skirts so near the powder of the road. The Sisters in front walked with their heads slightly bent toward one another; they seemed to be consulting. Hilda ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... so quiet that Sally believed him to be asleep. But at her first movement he would unclose his eyes and groan her name, groping with his finger to detain her. So she sat in his big square bedroom with the drab walls and the plain furniture, watching the daylight fade and pondering to herself. It was a gloom period, and it had a perceptible effect upon her vitality. At other times Gaga would rally, would even sit up and talk in his ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... up the path from the opposite direction ... dressed drab in one long, undistinguished gown like a Hicksite or Quaker, without the hood ... her head was bare ... her fine, brown hair ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... as a corral for the ninety-head herd of bull phantis Carse kept on Iapetus. These creatures resembled mostly the old ostrich of Earth, but grew no feathers. The neck, however was shorter than the ostrich's; the leathery skin of a drab gray color; the powerful hind feet, on which they stood erect, prehensile and armed with short stabbing spurs; the forearms short and used for plucking the delicate shoots and young leaves on which they lived. There was a dim flicker of rudimentary ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... said, actually make the shallow waters of the lake look pink. Fortunately they had not been hunted for their plumage and were not timid. After two days of familiarity with the boat they were willing to let me approach within twenty yards before finally taking wing. The coloring, in this land of drab grays and browns, was a delight to the eye. The head is white, the beak black, the neck white shading into salmon-pink; the body pinkish white on the back, the breast white, and the tail salmon-pink. The ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... let ye 'ave my babby for a hour unless yer paid for 'it? As it is, yer pays far too little. I'm an honest woman as works for my livin' an' wot drinks reasonable, better than you by a long sight, with yer stuck-up airs! A pretty drab you are! Gi' me the babby; ye 'a'n't no business to keep it a minit longer." And she made a grab at ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... could see the drab peaks of the mountains which loomed between the partly dismantled trees. Beyond lay the kingdom. Would they ever reach it? There was only one pass; this they dared not make. Yet if they attempted to cross the mountains in a deserted place, ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... quite narrow at the top. Her forehead was the thin edge of the wedge, and she widened slowly as she neared the ground; the first indication of a settlement showing in the lobes of her ears, then in her cheeks, and then in her drab-apparelled person. Her whole aspect gave the impression of a great self-importance, early realised and made part of life, but kept in abeyance by the society of Aunt Mary and by a religious conviction that others also had their ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Of all that "walking out" implied: of love, even as it was understood in Bloomsbury basements, Janie's anaemic little heart suspected very little; but romance was there, fluttering tattered ribbons, luring her on through the drab fog of her ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... me before upon the green settee are familiar with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... came in sight. It used to be painted white; it was drab now, and there was a bay-window in the sitting-room. There was a new pump in the old place, and, happy omen, he discovered it was one of his own manufacture. He made his way by sheer force of habit past the ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and its "Punches," and finally, at William's suggestion, actually resigns his box-seat in favour of his (William's) friend, "the gentleman with a very unpromising squint and a prominent chin, who had a tall white hat on with a narrow flat brim, and whose close-fitting drab trousers seemed to button all the way up outside his legs from his boots to his hips." In reply to a remark of the coachman this worthy says:—"There ain't no sort of 'orse that I 'ain't bred, and no sort of dorg. 'Orses and dorgs is some men's fancy. They're wittles and drink to me—lodging, ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... exceedingly simple, consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they came nearly up to the man's armpits, and covered his back and chest, while the braces he wore were short in the extreme. To finish the description of an ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... feet, then to her knees, then to her waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... though typical of the country which he traversed, was distinctive, or it might have been a certain natural grace that made it seem so. He wore a light-gray, soft shirt made of French flannel, a dark-blue silk scarf, leather chaps over olive-drab khaki trousers, black, hand-sewed riding boots which displayed their polish despite a coating of fine dust, silver spurs, and, strapped to his right thigh, was a worn leather holster, natural color, from which protruded the black ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... just a rosy sunset over the Hoboken hills. And there are parks and squares of almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along upper ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... out alone!' A woman's figure in front had induced this thought. Her walk seemed oddly familiar, and when she turned the corner for which he was bound, his heart began to beat. He hastened on to the corner to make certain. Yes! It was Irene; he could not mistake her walk in that little drab street. She threaded two more turnings, and from the last corner he saw her enter her block of flats. To make sure of her now, he ran those few paces, hurried up the stairs, and caught her standing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... from his pocket a drab-covered notebook. The outside was rough and worn, the leaves discoloured. On the first page were written the initials "J.H.N." and the date "1883." Holmes laid it on the table and examined it in his minute way, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... think I am a mason? Charming! Know, then, that I am the Marquis D'Astafiorquercita. My heart is languishing for you, I seek to color my drab existence with a few pigments from your own. I must travel—but with you. That is why I have penetrated into your garden, disguised as a mason! [He throws off his workman's clothes and hat, and appears in a dazzling costume. His wig is powdered and ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand
... to be performed by their own hands. Thus, one elderly gentlemen was whipping cream under a chestnut-tree, while a very fashionably-dressed young man was washing radishes in the lake; an old lady with spectacles was frying salmon over a wood-fire, opposite to a short, pursy man with a bald head and drab shorts, deep in the mystery of a chicken salad, from which he never lifted his eyes when I came up. It was thus I found how the fair Isabella's lot had been cast, as a drawer of water; she, with the others, contributing her share of exertion for the common good. The old gentleman who accompanied ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... room; the gas jet shed a hideous glare over the place. The room in itself was by no means pretty, for the paper was the worse for wear, and the paint was nearly worn through to the woodwork. The hangings to the windows and to the two little beds were of an ugly drab color; and the view out of these windows only revealed a narrow street. At Kitty's own home she had a bedroom in the Castle end; the paper hung in ribbons, the door was draughty, the bedstead rickety and old; ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... away from this smoky little den on a drab November day, sick at heart. The winter. He tried to face it, and at what he saw ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... and as the stable clock struck three we were led round to the front of the house. It was all very grand, and three or four times as large as the old house at Birtwick, but not half so pleasant, if a horse may have an opinion. Two footmen were standing ready, dressed in drab livery, with scarlet breeches and white stockings. Presently we heard the rustling sound of silk as my lady came down the flight of stone steps. She stepped round to look at us; she was a tall, proud-looking ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... the plains dead and drear, barren of verdure—a dull, drab expanse of waste world with no life or movement in it, ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... thin, nervous man, looking too brittle and delicate to be used even for a pipe-cleaner. The narrow oval of his face sloped to a pointed, untrimmed beard. His linen was reproachable, his dingy boots were down at heel, and his cocked hat was drab with dust. Such are the effects of a ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... about this time Master Raymond was sitting in the porch of the Red Lion, thinking over a sight he had just seen;—a man had passed by wearing on the back of his drab coat a capital I two inches long, cut out of black cloth, and sewed upon it. On inquiry he found the man had married his deceased wife's sister; and both he and the woman had been first whipped, and then condemned to wear this ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... whiskers cut back from his cheeks. His face was rather full and flabby, and yet it was not altogether a face without power. A few grog-blossoms marked the neighbourhood of his nose. He flung back his long drab greatcoat, revealing that beneath it he wore a suit of cinder-gray shade throughout, large, heavy seals, of some metal or other that would take a polish, dangling from his fob as his only personal ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... Dead CATILINA of Crebillon into ROME SAUVEE of Voltaire, and the other samples of dead into living,—that stupid old Crebillon himself and the whole Universe may judge, and even Pompadour feel a remorse!—Readers shall fancy these things; and that the world is coming back to its old poor drab color with M. de Voltaire; his divine Emilie and he rubbing along on the old confused terms. One face-to-face peep of them readers shall now have; and that is to be enough, or ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... of modern Belgium might have been expected. The worship of colour and form had always been a strong characteristic of the race, and even in the drab years of the Austrian regime Belgian painters had never ceased to work. A far more startling development was the appearance, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, of a national Belgian school of literature. In the Middle Ages, Flemish and French letters in Belgium ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... to afford us pleasure, we wonder why we were born. The soul longs for happiness; feels certain she was created for it. So she is. Looking at the masses of drab, ugly, and unsuccessful lives around us, we may well ask what purpose and what progress is there in the lives of all these hopeless-looking people. But there is not one life that does not have brought before it, and into it, the opportunity of, ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... table was doubtless, "First come, first served." Forthwith each bill was busy, and the scene became animated in the extreme. There must have been great difficulty to the most accomplished of the carrion in stripping the Quaker of his drab. The broad-brim had probably escaped with the first intention, and after going before the wind half across the unfrozen Tarn, capsized, filled, and sunk. Picture to yourself so many devils, all in glossy black feather coats and dark breeches, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... because coats were too hot, and you can't climb with your arms held by coat-sleeves. We had our coats in the packs, for emergencies. We wore blue flannel shirts with the Scouts' emblem on the sleeves, and Scouts' drab service hats, and khaki trousers tucked into mountain-boots hob-nailed with our private pattern so that we could tell each other's tracks, and about our necks were red bandanna handkerchiefs knotted loose, and on our hands were gauntlet gloves. ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... in, see that you offend not in the greatest. For Christ thought, if he might bring you from the smallest manner of faults, and give you warning to avoid the least, he reckoned you would not offend in the greatest and worst, as to call your neighbour thief, whoreson, whore, drab, and so forth, into more blasphemous names; which offences must needs have punishment in hell, considering how that Christ hath appointed these three small faults to have three degrees of punishment in hell, as appeareth by these three terms, judgment, council, and ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... vociferous crowd of New York hack drivers, that swarmed upon the pier as the Massachusetts glided into her dock, it was good to see that subduedly respectable and consciously private and superior man in the drab overcoat and the nice gloves and boots, who came forward and touched his hat to Mrs. Oferr, took her shawl and basket, and led the way, among the aggravated public menials, to a handsome private carriage waiting ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... was full of gaunt, narrow houses, with prim fronts and narrow railed windows, let in segments, flats, and bachelor apartments. Number 10 was as like its fellows as one drab soul resembles another. Superintendent Merrington's ring at the doorbell brought forth an elderly woman with an expressionless face surmounted by a frilled white cap. She informed them in an expressionless voice that Captain Nepcote's apartments were on the second floor. ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... extending on and on to the waving horizon-line. A lonely, hard, heroic country, where flowers and fruit were not, nor birds and brooks, nor green pastures. Whirling strings of dust looped up over fallow ground, the short, dry wheat lay back from the wind, the haze in the distance was drab ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the distant wooded hills, the river, the stone bridge below him, whose broad gray piers painted perpetual arches on the sluggish, sea-colored water. The smoke from one or two far-off foundries hung just above it, motionless in the gray, in tattered drifts, dyed by the sun, clear drab and violet. A still picture. A bit of Venice, poor Adam thought, who never had been fifty miles out of Wheeling. The quaint American town was his world: he brought the world into it. There were relics of old Indian forts and mounds, the old times and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the parrot and a dignified salaam from James, who was trimming the wick of the oil-lamp. For the last year and a half this room had served as headquarters. Many a financial puzzle had been pieced together within these dull drab walls; many a dream had gone up to the ceiling, only to sink and dissipate like smoke. There were no pictures on the walls, no photographs. In one corner, on the floor, was a stack of dilapidated books. These were mostly old novels ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... all was still— For one of us was thinkin' of a hill, With pine trees on it black against th' moon— And one of us was dreaming of a town, All drab an' brown— An' one of us was lookin'—far an' high Ter some one who had gone back home too soon To that real home that is beyond ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... pictures, feathers, and bands of various colours. They had adopted a plain suit of clothes. They wore cloaks, when necessary, over these. But both the clothes and the cloaks were of the same colour. The colour of each of them was either drab or grey. Other people who followed the fashions, wore white, red, green, yellow, violet, scarlet, and other colours, which were expensive, because they were principally dyed in foreign parts. The drab consisted of the white wool undyed, and the grey of the white wool mixed with the black, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... you begin?' Robert looked round the room, but he got no ideas from the faded green curtains, or the drab Venetian blinds, or the worn brown oil-cloth on the floor. Even the new carpet suggested nothing, though its pattern was a very wonderful one, and always seemed as though it were just going to make you think ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... other person | |holding the right to wear a uniform was so | |intensely proud as to expose his ornamentation | |uncovered and take a risk at pneumonia. | | | |It was, as a matter of fact, a pretty drab-looking | |crowd that began to file into the Polo grounds a | |little after noon. You can't get much local color | |out of a gum shoe and a mackintosh.... | | | | The Game Play by Play | | | |It was 2.15 when the navy squad ploughed through the| |mud ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... with reality. Hunger had made him faint and drowsy. Things changed, became unfamiliar, fantastic. Between the stunted trees he could see the afterglow of the sunset like the reflection of a blazing city. The road then was full of silence and shadow. The drab outlines grew faint and the mean houses were merged into the vaster shapes of night. Robert waited, motionless, breathless. He was sure that something was coming to him down the path of fading light. He did not know what it was. Once, indeed, it had been Francey, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... fire, in auld red rags, Ane sat, weel brac'd wi' mealy bags, And knapsack a' in order; His doxy lay within his arm, Wi' usquebae an' blankets warm— She blinket on her sodger: An' ay he gies the tozie drab The tither skelpin' kiss, While she held up her greedy gab Just like an aumous dish. Ilk smack still, did crack still, Just like a cadger's whip, Then staggering and swaggering He ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... remembered that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. That sign, says Dorothy, was the sign of the cross. Long ago he had written of human life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and even violent colours that took the pattern of the Cross. He saw the Cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right and left: he saw it signed by man as he shaped a paling or a door post. The ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... in the Hither Isles, well walled between the This and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts, sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat and cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scraping and feeding ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... night Is but a drab inglorious street, Yet there the frost and clean starlight As ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... "But the circumstances in which he visited it were somewhat drab. Still, it's not an attractive town, and, as the other way's shorter and the road's ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... not scream? Why are her eyes fastened—not on her lover—not on the madman, but upon another object? What is that object? Is it a man? Can any man move as that thing moves? Surely that cannot be a man, that streak of drab color—yonder thing that casts to the ground a garment, then shoots backward twenty feet from the abyss—swifter than a panther, as silent as death, with two balls of living fire glaring from—from a face? Surely not a human face! Yes, it is a human face. She does not see the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... him take a vicious drab to wife, I completed my revenge by inviting her to sit to me as a model, and dealing with her thus. I gave her thirty sous a day, paid in advance, and a good meal, and obliged her to pose before me naked. Then I made her ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... not the West as I had dreamed of it, not the West even of banditry and violent action. It was a desolate, forgotten land, without vegetation save for the dry, crackling grass, without visible tokens of fertility. Drab and gray and empty. Stubborn, resisting land. Heroics wouldn't count for much here. It would take slow, back-breaking labor, and time, and the action of the seasons to make the prairie bloom. People had said this was no place for two girls. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... as some of the time may have been, and drab- colored as most of the days certainly were, there were, bright passages here and there, and one reminiscence was related in later years, in her poem "In Honour of Du Bartas," the delight of Puritan maids ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... in this drab hotel, Geoffrey and his wife started once more on their voyage of discovery. Nagasaki is a hidden city; it flows through its narrow valleys like water, and follows their serpentine ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... little of urban manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self without mousetraps and time-traps. By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country; and in a garden, in the midst of enchanting, more than Mahometan paradise, London, whose dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. Oh, her lamps of a night; her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastrycooks; St. Paul's Churchyard; the Strand; ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... almost immediately a boat was lowered by some novel machinery and pulled toward the steamer. There were two men in it, the skipper and the negro. The skipper came up the side of the Springbok. He was loosely dressed in some light drab-colored stuff and a huge straw hat; a man with a long Puritanical head, a nose inclined to be aquiline, a face bronzed by weather and heat, thin, resolute lips, and a square chin. But for a certain breadth between his keen gray eyes, which ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... men and women to fight down their lower nature, that will convince them that their higher nature is a reality, and that will give them a living sense of companionship in their difficult lives—lives often as drab and depressing ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... one of those dull, drab, depressing days when somehow or other it seemed as if there wasn't anything anywhere for anybody to do. It was raining outdoors, so that Alice could not amuse herself in the garden, or call upon her ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... same time, children, perchance, and his hardening lawyer's head are secretly Philistinizing the demagogue, blunting the fine edge of his Radicalism, turning him into a slow-stepping Liberal, otherwise your half-Conservative in his convictions. Can she think it much to have married that drab-coloured unit? Power must be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... crystallized by contact with the plutonics. The formation mostly stands up either in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... like one bred to the trade. A moment later I was aloft, casting loose the gaff-topsail. From that fine height as the barge began to move I saw the horsemen turning away foiled. I saw the lady's leathered hat, making a little dash of green among the drab of the riding coats. Then an outhouse hid them all from sight. I was in a sea-going barge, bound out, under all sail, along a waterway lined with old reeds, all blowing down with a ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... were at breakfast, it seemed a happy time to introduce myself; so I sought the dining room. Horror piled on horror—those bare drab walls and oil-cloth-covered tables with tin cups and plates and wooden benches, and, by way of decoration, that one illuminated text, "The Lord Will Provide"! The trustee who added that last touch must possess ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... bridge below him, whose broad gray piers painted perpetual arches on the sluggish, sea-colored water. The smoke from one or two far-off foundries hung just above it, motionless in the gray, in tattered drifts, dyed by the sun, clear drab and violet. A still picture. A bit of Venice, poor Adam thought, who never had been fifty miles out of Wheeling. The quaint American town was his world: he brought the world into it. There were relics of old Indian forts and mounds, the old times and the new. The people, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a somber but somewhat picturesque costume,—a dark-colored flannel shirt and trousers, which latter were gathered in close round his lower limbs by a species of drab gaiter that appeared somewhat incongruous with the profession of the man. The only bit of bright color about him was a scarlet belt round his waist, from the side of which depended a long knife in a brown leather sheath. A pair of light shoes, and a small round cap resembling what is styled ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... modern Belgium might have been expected. The worship of colour and form had always been a strong characteristic of the race, and even in the drab years of the Austrian regime Belgian painters had never ceased to work. A far more startling development was the appearance, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, of a national Belgian school of literature. In the Middle Ages, Flemish and French letters in Belgium ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... that a lethargy fell upon him and he lay so quiet that Sally believed him to be asleep. But at her first movement he would unclose his eyes and groan her name, groping with his finger to detain her. So she sat in his big square bedroom with the drab walls and the plain furniture, watching the daylight fade and pondering to herself. It was a gloom period, and it had a perceptible effect upon her vitality. At other times Gaga would rally, would even sit up and talk in his old stammer, his grey face whitened and sharpened by illness. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... started for New York, and thence proceeded to New Rochelle. Following the directions they had received, they hired a carriage at the steamboat-landing, to convey them to a farm-house a few miles distant. As they approached the designated place, they saw a slender man, in drab-colored clothes, lowering a bucket into the well. Mr. King alighted, and inquired, "Is ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... success. The short, shy manner of their white-haired host thawed under the influence of Mrs. Elsmere's racy, unaffected ways, and it was not long before everybody in the room had more or less made friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long she had been like the youth in the fairy ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the heavy object being dragged away from the door at the top of the steps. They both sprang to their feet. An oblong patch of drab, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... New York, to get and send me a comic wig, light flaxen, with a small whisker halfway down the cheek; over this I mean to wear two night-caps, one with a tassel and one of flannel; a flannel wrapper, drab tights and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... and cheerful, the walls papered with white and gold, and the floor covered with a drab carpet worked with flowers of every hue. Rose worked the carpet herself under the directions of Margaret, who prevailed on her to learn worsted-work for my sake. So there, again, how useful I was! From the ceiling hung a brilliant glass chandelier, a birthday present from Edward to Rose; and the ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... gold buckles and a lace collar, cambric pantaloon ruffles swinging about her ankles, a quilted pink satin bonnet tied, like those of her elders', with a bow under her right cheek, and a muff and tippet of ermine. Other articles—a frock of rose gros de chine, with a flounced skirt, a drab velvet bonnet turned in green smocked silk, and sheer underthings—he ordered ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man and the hobbling old mare, making their way across the bare lot, made as drab a picture in the early morning as a Millet. At a distance their moving shapes would have seemed like shadows only. There was no other sign of ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... cold grey morning I awaken, worn out with cold and fatigue, to peer with sleepy eyes, no longer down the familiar avenue of ice and pine-trees, but across a white and dreary wilderness of snow. On the far horizon, dividing earth and sky, a thin drab streak is seen which soon merges, in the clear sunrise, into the faint semblance of a city. Golden domes and tapering fire-towers are soon distinguishable, and our driver grows proportionately loquacious ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... garmentys and rayed[42] them very euyll, that they were mych hurt therwyth. Thys Turpyn, sodeynly turnyng[43] hym and seeing[44] it, reuyled the wyfe therfore, and ran to hys mayster and told hym what she had don: wherfore master Vauesour incontinent callyd the wyf and seyd to her thus: thou drab, quod he, what hast thow don? why hast thou pourd the podage in my cloth sake and marrd my rayment and gere? O, syr, quod the wyfe, I know wel ye ar a iudge of the realme, and I perceyue by you your mind is to do ryght and to haue that ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... CATILINA of Crebillon into ROME SAUVEE of Voltaire, and the other samples of dead into living,—that stupid old Crebillon himself and the whole Universe may judge, and even Pompadour feel a remorse!—Readers shall fancy these things; and that the world is coming back to its old poor drab color with M. de Voltaire; his divine Emilie and he rubbing along on the old confused terms. One face-to-face peep of them readers shall now have; and that is to be enough, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... bed in a twinkling. Life was too full and rich now to waste it in sleep. Yesterday morning it had seemed drab and commonplace. To-day it sparkled with prismatic hues. He was a new man in ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... room in itself was by no means pretty, for the paper was the worse for wear, and the paint was nearly worn through to the woodwork. The hangings to the windows and to the two little beds were of an ugly drab color; and the view out of these windows only revealed a narrow street. At Kitty's own home she had a bedroom in the Castle end; the paper hung in ribbons, the door was draughty, the bedstead rickety and old; but what a view there was from the windows! A view of Lake Coulin and the mountains ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... red service flags here and there, here and there a burly figure in olive-drab swaggering along Main Street, nothing except war-bread, the shortage of coal and sugar, and outrageous prices reminded her that the terrific drama was still being played beyond the ocean to the diapason of an orchestra ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... sitting in the little kitchen leaning her elbows on the table. She was a tall, thin, sallow girl, aged twenty-three, by nature slatternly and careless but trained by Anna into superficial neatness. Her drab striped cotton dress and gray black checked apron increased the length and sadness of her melancholy figure. "Oh, Lord!" groaned Miss Mathilda to herself as ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... for a few moments before hopping away beneath the bushes and undergrowth, appearing again farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or dog-cart, highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of three- or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the handsome, horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two before to get ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing like a very drab." ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... the taste of the performer. The young lady should be costumed in a white dress, green apron, and straw hat, hair hanging in curls, and ornamented with red ribbons. The old gentleman's costume consists of a long gray or drab coat, light vest and breeches, black hose, knee and shoe buckles, low shoes, ruffled bosom, and chapeau. The aged matron is costumed in a light brown dress, calico apron, white cap, black collar. The boy can be attired in any costume that has a variety of colors. Cover the floor of the stage ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... countenance of the other; nor, though roguish enough, a certain evil expression which that of the other bore, and which the face of the woman possessed in a yet more remarkable degree. For the rest, he wore drab breeches, with certain strings at the knee, a rather gay waistcoat, and tolerably white shirt; under his arm he bore a mighty whip of whalebone with a brass knob, and upon his head was a hat without either top ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on one summer morning ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the country nurse The poor, that else were undone; Some landlords spend their money worse, On lust and pride at London. There the roysters they do play, Drab and dice their land away, Which may be ours another day; And ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... hollow-sounding in the chilly silences, his own footsteps echoed solemnly as he passed by the door of the great ragged church. Through the heavy darkness within lights flickered faintly and went; service was not begun. A drab crew of cripples lounged on the steps yawning and shivering, and two country girls were strolling to mass with brown arms round each other's waists. When Sandro's footfall clattered on the stones they stopped by the door looking after him and laughed to see his dull face and muffled figure. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... In another minute he was on the ridge. The Gulf opened out, a dead dull gray. The skies were hidden behind drab clouds. The air was clammy, cold, hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Lump. The Lump and the sea were made for one another. I look to see him an admiral one of these days. It is time that England had a red-headed admiral; I'm tired of these refined, drab-haired ones. It is my patriotic duty to give him a taste ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... of the silky robe. Like the others this was made of one piece, loosely fitting, but its bright vivid scarlet made the first seem drab and dull. A belt of metal about his waist shone like gold and matched the emblem of precious metal in the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... bound with indignation? Ought you not to have exacted my admittance to the Comedie as a reparation for the insult? For, after all, it is a defeat for you; if I'm considered unworthy, you are struck at the same time as I am. And so I'm a drab, eh? Say at once that I'm a creature to be driven away from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... my man, if you speak of the Jew till we are out of the Porta San Zuan," growled Petruccio, the leader: "Avanti!" And the drab-coloured crew moved off towards ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Jameson had carelessly thrown open his coat and vest. Underneath he wore the usual sailor-jersey. Thomas steeled his arms. With one hand he pulled the roll collar away from the man's neck and with the other sought for the string: sought in vain. The light, the four drab walls, the haze of tobacco smoke, all ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... shown her was a light grey coat, the exact counterpart of the one worn by the gentleman in the carriage and Uncle William. It was turned inside out, and behold, it became a completely new overcoat of a drab colour, like the ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... was silent; all faces were fixed on Conger—still in the drab prison uniform. The Speaker ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... natural beverage that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature's own laboratory, and one of the chief joys ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... had recovered a little from his shock, he went and sniffed curiously at the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two drab animals of the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger lump, and walked round it several times, trying to find a man ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... louder and louder, and the entrance darkened, and the whispering voices of the hornets, the most frightful robbers and murderers in the insect world, penetrated into the hive, then the faces of the valiant little bees turned pale as if washed over by a drab light falling upon their ranks. They gazed at one another with eyes in which death sat waiting, and those who were ranged at the entrance knew full well that one moment more and all would be over ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... In the drab velvety dust of these four corners, were gathered, one night of July a generation ago, the children of the village and many of their elders. All the events of that epoch were dated from the evening of this particular day. Another day of note the parish cherished, but it was merely a grave ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him to return. Perhaps she told him ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the level blue of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty barrenness of grey and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid heights. Separated by a narrow strip of water, Suroeton, to the west, shows a curved and ridged outline resembling the backbone of a stooping giant. And to the eastward a troop of insignificant islets stand effaced, indistinct, with vague features ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... are greenish-drab in color, spotted, blotched, and dotted irregularly and thickly with yellowish and umber brown. The eggs are two or four, abruptly ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... the dispatching of Ma Sampson's letter to Rosebud. The heralds of spring, the warm, southern breezes, which brought trailing flights of geese and wild duck winging northward, and turned the pallor of the snow to a dirty drab hue, like a soiled white dress, had already swept across the plains. The sunlight was fiercely blinding. Even the plainsman is wary at this time of the year, for the perils of snow-blindness are as real to him as to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... Gallery. We shall pass out of sight of flat dreary London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an enchanted land, a land of angels and aureoles; of crimson and ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for history—and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In both these respects ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... bow with Monroe. The Senator from Virginia took a chair in the rear of the others, stretched his long legs in front of him, and folded his arms defiantly. He looked not unlike a greyhound, his preference for drab clothing enhancing the general effect of a pointed and ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... of a tree which grows in the West-Indies called Morus tinctoria. It affords a durable but not very brilliant yellow dye, and is also used in producing some greens and drab colors. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... frighten game. I have often seen rabbits or deer stand until the bow goes off, then jump in time to escape the arrow. At first we believed they saw the arrow; later we found that they saw the flash. Bows really should be painted a dull green or drab color. But we love to see the ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would have ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of grey wrack and driving rain. The Tower roof showed mistily beyond the ridge of down, but its environs were not in their prospect. The lower regions of the House had been gloomy enough, but this bleak place with its drab outlook struck a chill to Sir Archie's soul. He dolefully ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... monotonous. There was a shading of individuality in the girls and newly-wed women, but it faded soon into the dull drab that seemed the only possible wearing-colour of the place. Occasionally, though, the sameness had been relieved by a vivid touch, but only for a short hour. The Fate who snips the threads, had invariably clipped such colouring from the St. Ange design, and ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... day guns and limbers passed in a steady stream going south—a sure indication that all efforts were being concentrated in widening the breach already made. That evening the Battalion returned to the huts at Couin much depressed at the prospect of taking up again the drab monotony of trench life after hopes aroused in the last few days. The weather now became very bad with almost incessant rain, and we relieved the 5th Gloucesters on July 8th in trenches waist deep in water, badly damaged by the bombardment, and affording the depressing view to right ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... send his messages. For three years they labored with this apparatus, trying every conceivable sort of disk. It is easy to pass over those three years, filled as they were with unceasing toil and patient effort, because they were drab years when little of interest occurred. But these were the years when Bell and Watson were "going to school," learning how to apply electricity to this new use, striving to make their apparatus talk. How dreary and trying these years must have been for the experimenters ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... pain was not, indeed, in his way, but to suffer it was his too-frequent lot. From first to last he was protesting against hideousness, rawness, vulgarity, and commonplace; craving for sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of English life. "The [Greek: euphnes] is the man who turns towards sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnes] on the other hand is our Philistine." "I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless he can give light." ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... a time when, posing as a purist, I thought it fine to criticise and crab CHARLES DICKENS as a crude caricaturist, Who laid his colours on too thick and slab, Who was a sort of sentimental tourist And made life lurid when it should be drab; In short I branded as a brilliant dauber The man who gave us ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... measure as he had fulfilled himself. In as much as he had matured, in so much had his art. Man is not ripened by a shock, but by those elements that develop him to the point of feeling and knowing the shock when it comes to him. In a drab world, drab would have been Lewis's end; but, little as he realized it, his ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... When he was angry with his female disciples, he frequently whipped them; but, being a monstrous coward, he never tried it on a man. The least opposition or contradiction threw him into a great rage, and set him screaming, and cursing, and gesticulating like any street drab. When he wished more clothes, which was pretty often, one of his dupes furnished the money. When he wanted cash for any purpose ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... looking too brittle and delicate to be used even for a pipe-cleaner. The narrow oval of his face sloped to a pointed, untrimmed beard. His linen was reproachable, his dingy boots were down at heel, and his cocked hat was drab with dust. Such are the effects of a ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... assertion she failed of justice to herself, but her eyes were sparkling. She knew that hereabout in this rude world of hers her people were accounted both godly and worthy of respect, but after all it was a drab and poverty-ridden world with slow and torpid pulses of being. Here, she found, in indisputable proof, the record of her "fore-parents". Once they, too, had been ladies and gentlemen familiar with elegant ways ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the land openeth a large sandie drab Bay, for the Sea to ouer-flow, which, and the village adioyning, are therethrough aptly termed Trewardreth, in English, The Sandie towne. Elder times, of more deuotion then knowledge, here founded a religious house, ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... once, for this liability is a ton weight at least. When I came in I found your fire out, and I had it lit again, and made that sulky drab of a servant stay and blow at it with the bellows till it had burnt up properly; now, say ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... damnable to offend in, see that you offend not in the greatest. For Christ thought, if he might bring you from the smallest manner of faults, and give you warning to avoid the least, he reckoned you would not offend in the greatest and worst, as to call your neighbour thief, whoreson, whore, drab, and so forth, into more blasphemous names; which offences must needs have punishment in hell, considering how that Christ hath appointed these three small faults to have three degrees of punishment in hell, ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... is convex to expanded, sometimes broadly umbonate, drab in color, the surface wrinkled or rugose, and watery in appearance. The flesh is thin and ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, and there passed between the two women certain regards that Dick would have appreciated. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... more wonderful even than the promise of a blow-pipe, with arrows galore, and this was that young sister of his, whose name was Oalava, a maid of about sixteen, shy and silent and mild-eyed, rather lean and dirty; not ugly, nor yet prepossessing. And this copper-coloured little drab of the wilderness he proposed to bestow in marriage on me! Anxious to pump him, I managed to control my muscles and asked him what authority he—a young nobody, who had not yet risen to the dignity of buying a wife for himself—could have to dispose ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... bitter glance toward Church Scarsdale, and bit her lip. She saw that she must give it up. A shadow hung upon her drab features. A little scowl—a little sneer—wide lips compressed with a false smile, and a leaden shadow mottling all. Such was the countenance of the lady who only a minute or two before had been smiling and murmuring over the stile so amiably with her idiomatic 'blarney,' as the Irish ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... said, and we were admitted sulkily to a room, of which the conspicuous features were a malodorous lamp, and a brandy- bottle. I had taken the old drab for a landlady rather the worse for liquor, but, more amiably, she remarked now: "It's a pity Jeanne didn't ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... and pigs in the village; so above all did the shoes. No foot could make three plunges into that abyss of pulverised gravel, which had the impudence to call itself a hard road, without being clothed with a coat a quarter of an inch thick. Woe to white gowns! woe to black! Drab ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... only interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and spirit one ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which he lay, ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... pocket a drab-covered note-book. The outside was rough and worn, the leaves discoloured. On the first page were written the initials "J.H.N." and the date "1883." Holmes laid it on the table and examined it in his minute way, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... felt surer of life and the full fruition of every hope and faith. Just how this marvelous blossoming would come, she could not guess. Her chances of meeting her Fate were no better than at any moment of the past years of drab disillusionment, and yet, for some reason, her foolish heart ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules: amiable, though not faultless. The ethical delineations of 'that noble and liberal casuist' (as Shakespeare has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments! We confess, we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... hat, military coatee, and terrific paunch, which resisted all attempts to confine it within reasonable military compass; John Bellingham—the murderer of Spencer Perceval,—with his retreating forehead, long pointed nose, drab cloth coat and exuberant shirt frill; "What? What? What?"—Great George himself, as he appeared in 1810, in full military panoply—huge ill-fitting boots, huge blue military coat, collar, lappets, and star, a white-powdered bob surmounting a clean-shaved unintellectual face, the distinguishing ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... after these fish had been placed in the cistern, it became necessary to clean the latter, and the fish were taken out. They were of a dusky drab color when first taken out, but soon regained their vivid tints when placed in a white vessel containing clear water. They had evidently changed color in order to harmonize with the black walls and bottom ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... down the stairs; The Seraph making only one step at a time, led the way. Far down the drab vista of the back stairs that ended in the scullery, Mary Ellen's red, round face was seen for a moment, like a second rising sun, but vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, at a shout from ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... disappeared, presently to return with two exceedingly rusty keys tied together with a drab piece of tape. He jingled them on his long, slender forefinger with an air of ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... employments in the world of work. Miss Weber exemplified her teachings by her practice. She usually wore a dress coat and pantaloons of black cloth; on full-dress occasions, a dark blue dress coat, with plain flat gilt buttons, and drab-colored pantaloons. Her waistcoat was of buff cassimere, richly trimmed with plain, flat-surfaced, gold buttons, exquisitely polished; this was an elegant costume, and one she wore to great advantage. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... suffer such beauties as these to produce children for us to keep."—"Beauties, indeed! your ladyship is pleased to be merry," answered Scout.—"Mr Adams described her so to me," said the lady. "Pray, what sort of dowdy is it, Mr Scout?"—"The ugliest creature almost I ever beheld; a poor dirty drab, your ladyship never saw such a wretch."—"Well, but, dear Mr Scout, let her be what she will, these ugly women will bring children, you know; so that we must prevent the marriage."—"True, madam," replied Scout, "for ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... death-rattle of the streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always are. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... down for a few minutes to get her breath. Mona, more tired than she realised until she came to sit down, lay back in her father's big chair and looked about her with shy interest. How familiar it all seemed, yet how changed. Instead of the old torn, soiled drab paper, the walls were covered with a pretty blue one, against which the dresser and table and the old familiar china showed up spotless and dainty; the steel on the stove might have been silver, the floor was as clean and snowy as ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... is there for the Volucella to disguise herself as a wasp? Any fly, whether clad in drab or motley, is admitted to the burrow directly she makes herself useful to the community. The mimicry of the bumblebee fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the open perception that this charm, warming like a flame, was also all-revealing like a great light; giving new depth to shades, new brilliance to colours, an amazing vividness to all sensations and vitality to all thoughts: so that all that had been lived before seemed to have been lived in a drab world and with a ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... fit In its abiding-place it presents an irregular strip of silk, green as polished malachite, or dark green and grey, or blue and slaty green, mottled and marbled, with crimped edges and graceful folds—an attractive ornament in the drab rock. Touch any part—there is a slow suspensory withdrawal, and then a snap and spurt of water as the last remnant of the living mantle disappears between the interlocking valves of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... up in a dark, close box behind the chair of state is a humble, drab individual who, from time to time, applies his mouth to the wrong side of the filigreed hole and whispers things. If he were visible at all, he would look like the absurd prompter under the hood at the opera. He is not a famous person. Most people ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... bow. This day had God been very good to me. This was life as I would have it; work to do for brain and brawn, and a woman to do it for who was worth the uttermost that was in me. Romance had flushed the drab night of my life with a rosy dawn, and my heart was lifted up within me. If it faded away, there would at least be the memory of it. But it might not fade. I was under no illusions as to the stiffness of my task. I was matched against the ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Barbed-wire fences, low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops, personnel-housing area carefully shielded against radiation by a huge stellene bubble, sealed ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... tells that he was received by Washington, and, "after ... half an hour, the General came in again, with his hair neatly powdered, a clean shirt on, a new plain drab coat, white waistcoat and white silk stockings. At three, dinner was on the table, and we were shown by the General into another room, where everything was set off with a peculiar taste and at the same time neat ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... a street, I could not see in the direction the noise came; but as I listened, a very handsome tandem turned the corner of the narrow street, and came along towards the hotel at a long, sling trot; the horses were dark chestnuts, well matched, and shewing a deal of blood. The carriage was a dark drab, with black wheels; the harness all of the same colour. The whole turn-out—and I was an amateur of that sort of thing—was perfect; the driver, for I come to him last, as he was the last I looked at, was ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... settlements had picturesque sites and others drew distinction from their fortifications, in general they presented a drab appearance. There were usually two or three long, narrow streets, with no paving, and often knee-deep with mud. The houses were built on either side, at intervals sufficient to give space for yards and garden plots, ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... about fifteen feet from the ground. The space between the inn wall and the beehive curve of the hill, which was very narrow under Mr. Glenthorpe's window, but widened as the hill fell away, was covered with a russet-coloured clay, which contrasted vividly with the sombre grey and drab tints of ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... wondered. He had nothing to do but listen, and watch the man on the bank who led the horse that was towing the barge; or address a rare remark to his solitary companion—an old sailor, dressed in a sou'-wester, blue jersey, and the invariable drab trowsers, tar-besprent, and long boots, of his calling, who steered automatically, facing the meadows in beautiful abstraction. He would have faced an Atlantic gale, however, with that ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... brown species. Mentioning this to a friend of large experience, he told me that he had known several instances where the eggs of the two kinds had been found laid in the same nest. The eggs are, of course, easily distinguishable, those of the common partridge being of a greenish drab colour, while those of the red-leg are of a dull, cream colour, covered with small brown spots. I have been informed by another authority that the eggs of the red-leg have also been found in the nest of an outlying pheasant. {39} A curious provision of ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... the fire, in auld red rags, Ane sat, weel brac'd wi' mealy bags, And knapsack a' in order; His doxy lay within his arm, Wi' usquebae an' blankets warm— She blinket on her sodger: An' ay he gies the tozie drab The tither skelpin' kiss, While she held up her greedy gab Just like an aumous dish. Ilk smack still, did crack still, Just like a cadger's whip, Then staggering and swaggering ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... one of those everyday miracles—the miracles that do happen—that in spite of the severity, the narrowness, the repression of her early training, she should have forced her way through the shell of rigid sectarianism, repudiated her heritage of drab denials, and opened both heart and mind to the new poetry, the new art, and the new knowledge. In her husband she found a kindred spirit, and during the more than fifty years of their pilgrimage together their eyes were ever ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... understood; almost immediately a boat was lowered by some novel machinery and pulled toward the steamer. There were two men in it, the skipper and the negro. The skipper came up the side of the Springbok. He was loosely dressed in some light drab-colored stuff and a huge straw hat; a man with a long Puritanical head, a nose inclined to be aquiline, a face bronzed by weather and heat, thin, resolute lips, and a square chin. But for a certain breadth between his keen gray eyes, which revealed more intellect ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... the night Is but a drab inglorious street, Yet there the frost and clean starlight As over Warwick woods ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... muttering over their guide-books, when nothing is needed on this spot but the imagination; and that solemn quiet of which the tomb is ever jealous pressed down sadly upon the living. Through the yellow panes at the back of the high altar came a glow suggesting sunshine, baffling the drab of the sky outside; and down in the crypt itself the misty blue ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... Low Dutch, and English." He took the two first, and when he had gleaned from the old volume all it had to teach him, he longed for a master. Him he found in the person of an old French emigre priest, {21b} a study in snuff-colour and drab with a frill of dubious whiteness, who attended to the accents of a number of boarding-school young ladies. The progress of his pupil so much pleased the old priest that "after six months' tuition, the master would sometimes, on his occasional ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... that will strengthen men and women to fight down their lower nature, that will convince them that their higher nature is a reality, and that will give them a living sense of companionship in their difficult lives—lives often as drab and depressing as ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... man a thrall, I charm thee from each, And I charm thee from all. Thy freedom's complete As a Blade of the Huff, To be cheated and cheat, To be cuff'd and to cuff; To stride, swear, and swagger, To drink till you stagger, To stare and to stab, And to brandish your dagger In the cause of your drab; To walk wool-ward in winter, Drink brandy, and smoke, And go fresco in summer For want of a cloak; To eke out your living By the wag of your elbow, By fulham and gourd, And by baring of bilboe; To live by your ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... had a tall Man's height, or more; No bonnet screen'd her from the heat; A long drab-colour'd Cloak she wore, A Mantle reaching to her feet: What other dress she had I could not know; Only she wore a Cap that was as white as ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... either in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured by manganese. The greater part of the old city was ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... luminary of the moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... not look like an orphan," said the wife of the Oriel don, subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one. Zuleika would have looked singular in one of those lowly double-files of straw-bonnets and drab cloaks which are so steadying a feature of our social system. Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead and behind her ears, as an orphan's ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the cigarette, sat down, puffed it into a glow, and looked around the drab 6 x 8 foot cubicle called the Captain's cabin by ship designers who must have laughed as they laid out the plans. It had about the room of a good-sized coffin. A copy of the Navy Code was lying on the desk. Chase had ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... fluffy, drab-colored gosling, one of the sheep had stepped on it, crushing out its life so nearly that Mrs. Hardy had no idea it would ever recover, but Dan begged for its life. He felt sure he could set the broken leg, and he pleaded so hard that his mother ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... sitting in the wan light with no one near him to whom he is dear. Of the strength and peacefulness which bring him safely through that hour of desolation he owes much to the players, who have shot the drab texture of life with an infinity of bright and tender hues, so that he can bear to turn it in his hands and look upon it with a wistful pleasure. I say, then, let the shy man frequent the playhouse, and there facet and burnish his dulled mind until it reflects, if it may not touch, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... unlimited orders were given to the upholsterer to do his best, and matters were progressing finely when order number two came from the little lady, who was sorry to seem so fickle, but mamma, whose taste was perfect, had decided against all blue, and would Guy please furnish the room with drab trimmed with blue. "It must be a very delicate shade of drab," she wrote, and lest he should get too intense an idea, she would call it a tint of a shade of drab, or, better yet, a hint of a tint of a shade of drab would describe ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... narrow at the top. Her forehead was the thin edge of the wedge, and she widened slowly as she neared the ground; the first indication of a settlement showing in the lobes of her ears, then in her cheeks, and then in her drab-apparelled person. Her whole aspect gave the impression of a great self-importance, early realised and made part of life, but kept in abeyance by the society of Aunt Mary and by a religious conviction that others also had their ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... platform with nervous stride. A dozen times he looked at his watch—would he be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve he ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... exactly. His predecessor, Mr. Simon Saunders, had been a small, wrinkled, spare old gentleman, with a short cough and a thin voice, who always seemed as if he needed an apothecary himself. He wore generally a full suit of drab, a flaxen wig of the sort called a Bob Jerom, and a very tight muslin stock; a costume which he had adopted in his younger days in imitation of the most eminent physician of the next city, and continued to the time ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... were unsatisfactory, no doubt. All her rights were not hers even now—no, not by a long way. But oh, how much better was this than the drab and shabby and barren existence for ever left behind! She was bound, indeed; yet she was free—freer than another might have been in her place, and far, far less bound. One must expect to pay some tax to Fortune for such extraordinary gifts, and Frances was not the one to pay it in heart's blood. ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... picture of "Pickwick" was a Mr. John Foster (not the biographer of Dickens, but a friend of Mr. Chapman's, the publisher). He lived at Richmond, and was "a fat old beau," noted for his "drab tights ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... novelty renders the body of the carriage much lighter than usual, and more elegant in appearance. Another 'innovation' is the painting. It has hitherto been usual to paint the under part of the carriage white or drab, relieved by the same colour as the body, but in the present case the whole vehicle has been painted a dark green, the family colour of the Lord Mayor elect, relieved by large lines of gold upon the body, and gold and red upon the under carriage. The natural elegance of this arrangement ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; 'Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear: He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian's five-foot sword, nor rascal's stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... the added fascination of reality. But, somehow, I could never quite make myself believe that it was real when a brilliant group of horsemen in pointed, yellow hats and streaming, peacock feathers dashed down the street. It seemed too impossible that I, a wandering naturalist of the drab, prosaic twentieth century, and my American wife were really a living, breathing part of this strange drama of ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the useful, of the improvable by economic science; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... magistrate of a small republic, and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony." Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with "formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, of a Benedicite." The French officers must have been ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... to blue and gold and rose, an inexhaustible wardrobe. She blushes, she frowns, she hesitates; she is like a woman in love. She casts abroad her dewy jewels on the leaves, the blades of grass, the tangled laces of the spiders, the drab cold stones. She ruffles the clouds on the face of the sleeping waters; she sweeps through the forests with a low whispering sound, taking a tithe of the resinous perfumes. Always and always she decks herself for the coming ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... wicked harassed his slumbers. Suddenly he awoke, and dismal groans and unearthly rumblings struck his terrified ear. "Sally! Sally!" said he, leaping from bed and giving his sleeping spouse a vigorous shake, "why sleepest thou? arise and don thy drab camlet and high-crowned cap, and prepare to meet thy Lord; for ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... were melting peacefully and rather contentedly into the general American life found themselves saddled with his obligations. The "colony case" became famous among Illinois lawyers and dragged through twelve years of litigation. Thus the glowing fraternal communism of poor Janson ended in the drab discord of ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... which way to move!" But he was unable to do any coherent thinking. His head ached, his lips burned with fever, and his body kept him busy with the sensation of pain. It seemed to him that illness made his state more detestable, but it also offered him a chance of escape from the whole drab business. He was quite sure that he wanted to escape, and he would not have believed it if any one had told him that he would resist death to the uttermost; yet deep within him was that will to live which had made him the creative artist. It ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... ornaments belonging to it, such as pictures, feathers, and bands of various colours. They had adopted a plain suit of clothes. They wore cloaks, when necessary, over these. But both the clothes and the cloaks were of the same colour. The colour of each of them was either drab or grey. Other people who followed the fashions, wore white, red, green, yellow, violet, scarlet, and other colours, which were expensive, because they were principally dyed in foreign parts. The drab consisted of the white wool undyed, and the grey of the white wool mixed with the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... with snow-water, and the drifts in the coulees were dirt-grimed and forbidding. The great river lay, a gray stretch of water-soaked snow over the ice, with little, clear pools reflecting the drab clouds above. A crow flapped lazily across the foreground and perched like a blot of fresh-spilled ink on the top of a dead cottonwood and cawed raucous ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... advertisement. Jimmy did not know the City, but he knew a good deal of mankind, and he gleaned something of the spirit and traditions of that office, as his eyes wandered from the rows of black, shiny deed boxes to the equally shiny pate of the managing clerk, and then to the drab-looking girl typist, pale-faced and narrow-chested, who seemed to finger the key-board as though the maddening click of her abominable machine had killed any individuality she might once have had, and turned her into a ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... as I had dreamed of it, not the West even of banditry and violent action. It was a desolate, forgotten land, without vegetation save for the dry, crackling grass, without visible tokens of fertility. Drab and gray and empty. Stubborn, resisting land. Heroics wouldn't count for much here. It would take slow, back-breaking labor, and time, and the action of the seasons to make the prairie bloom. People had said this was no place ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... his many-caped drab overcoat, and fox-skin cap and gloves, sat upon the coachman's box with the proud air of a king upon his throne. And why not? It was Oliver's very first visit to the city, and the suit of clothes ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain—a cipher, merely giving value to the men ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... stranger, who proved to be Colonel Meade, once of Washington's staff, that the General was abroad on the estate and pointed out what direction to take to come upon him. "You will meet, sir, with an old gentleman riding alone in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, a hickory switch in his hand, and carrying an umbrella with a long staff, which is attached to his saddle-bow—that ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... is convex, the very thin margin somewhat incurved, disk expanded, uneven, near the center cracked into numerous small viscid brownish areoles; pileus flesh color, flesh same color except toward the gills. Gills dark drab gray, arcuate, distant, decurrent, many of them forked, separating easily from the hymenophore, peeling off in broad sheets, and leaving behind corresponding elevations of the hymenophore which extended between the laminae of the lamellae. Pileus 7 cm. in ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... of England! A fat jolly Mollah looked amazed as I ascended the steps; but when I touched my forehead and said, 'Salaam Aleikoom', he laughed and said, 'Salaam, Salaam, come in, come in.' The faithful poured in, all neatly dressed in their loose drab trousers, blue jackets, and red handkerchiefs on their heads; they left their wooden clogs in company, with my shoes, and proceeded, as it appeared, to strip. Off went jackets, waistcoats, and trousers, with the dexterity of a pantomime transformation; ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... for a touch of colour, So to relieve their sombre air; For me, I like my clothes to be much duller Than what the nigger minstrels wear; I hold by sable, drab and grey; I do not wish to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... their sleek, rain-varnished horses glittering in the flash of the electric lamps. Others spring from out street cabs. Many come by twos and threes, their skirts held high. Still others form a line, its head lost in a small side door. These are in drab and brown, with worsted shawls tightly drawn across thin shoulders. Here, too, wedged in between shabby men, the collars of their coats muffling their chins, their backs to the grim policeman, stand keen-eyed newsboys and ragged street ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... be pinched and cramped to suit the Procrustean measure of Ernest Le Breton's communistic fancies. You shall fly free in the open air, and flash your bright silken wings, decked out bravely in scales of many hues, not toned down to too sober and quaker-like a suit of drab and dove-colour. You were meant by nature for the sunshine and the summer; you shall not be worried and chilled and killed with doses of heterodox political economy and controversial ethics. Better even a country rectory (though with ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... before No. 28, except immediately preceding a wedding or following a funeral. And never, in twenty-two years of respectable tenancy, had the furtive lodger oozed, under darkness, through the Plush front door by night, or a huddle of sidewalk trunks and trappings staged the drab domestic ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... marked failings was an inability to estimate the true value of things. He possessed something of the spirit of adventure and a desire to escape from the drab monotony of his early life, but these found expression in betting on the exploits of others on the football field and the turf, a haunting of the music-halls, and the cultivation of acquaintances on the ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... there to charm away the impress of coarseness settled upon it by the loafers, the habitual drunkards and the riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to recommend ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... Great Western from Maiden Newton makes a wide detour northwards to reach Bridport, passing through a very charming and unspoilt countryside where old "Do'set" ways still hold out against that drab uniformity that seems to be creeping over rustic England. In this out-of-the-way region are small old stone-built villages lying forgotten between the folds of the hills and rejoicing in names that makes one want ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... coats were too hot, and you can't climb with your arms held by coat-sleeves. We had our coats in the packs, for emergencies. We wore blue flannel shirts with the Scouts' emblem on the sleeves, and Scouts' drab service hats, and khaki trousers tucked into mountain-boots hob-nailed with our private pattern so that we could tell each other's tracks, and about our necks were red bandanna handkerchiefs knotted loose, and on our hands ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... fast asleep in the shade, Tom, who was on the watch, observed a herd of small deer apparently coming down to drink. He roused up Desmond, and taking their rifles they crept behind two trees. The deer came on in single file. They were graceful little animals of a dark drab colour on their backs and sides, and white underneath, and pretty large antlers. Without hesitation they at once began to cross the stream, passing along close to where the midshipmen were concealed. Tom selected one animal and Gerald another, and ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... minute he was on the ridge. The Gulf opened out, a dead dull gray. The skies were hidden behind drab clouds. The air was clammy, cold, hushed, as if the god of storms were gathering his breath for ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... all decorated with wreaths and garlands, and wearing almost the same dress that we had seen at Tahiti—a coloured long-sleeved loose gown reaching to the feet. The natives here appear to affect duller colours than those we have lately been accustomed to, lilac, drab, brown, and other dark prints being the favourite tints. Whenever I stopped to look at a view, one of the girls would come behind me and throw a lei of flowers over my head, fasten it round my neck, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... rayed[42] them very euyll, that they were mych hurt therwyth. Thys Turpyn, sodeynly turnyng[43] hym and seeing[44] it, reuyled the wyfe therfore, and ran to hys mayster and told hym what she had don: wherfore master Vauesour incontinent callyd the wyf and seyd to her thus: thou drab, quod he, what hast thow don? why hast thou pourd the podage in my cloth sake and marrd my rayment and gere? O, syr, quod the wyfe, I know wel ye ar a iudge of the realme, and I perceyue by you your mind is to do ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... struck three we were led round to the front of the house. It was all very grand, and three or four times as large as the old house at Birtwick, but not half so pleasant, if a horse may have an opinion. Two footmen were standing ready, dressed in drab livery, with scarlet breeches and white stockings. Presently we heard the rustling sound of silk as my lady came down the flight of stone steps. She stepped round to look at us; she was a tall, proud-looking woman, and did not seem pleased about something, but she said nothing, ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... however, that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified as a "drab." Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him, her heart would be wrung. That was all he asked for, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... countenance in which bluffness was singularly blended with vivacity and grimace; and with a complexion which would have been ruddy, but for a yellow hue which rather predominated. His dress consisted of a snuff- coloured coat and drab pantaloons, the former evidently seldom subjected to the annoyance of a brush, and the latter exhibiting here and there spots of something which, if not grease, bore a strong resemblance to it; add to these articles ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... back streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional table before her, and "work"—a plum-coloured walking dress ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... think of having both the lamp and the shade for one day's work! Aren't you glad you wore your pink gingham now, even if mother did make you put on flannel underneath? You do look so pretty in pink and red, Rebecca, and so homely in drab ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... estranged our King. I blame you not, I say but what is true. I pray you, then, to waive your own desire, But if it please you otherwise, then speak! What flow'ry fate, what flatt'ring punishment, Is suited to the sin this drab has done? ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... reality. But, somehow, I could never quite make myself believe that it was real when a brilliant group of horsemen in pointed, yellow hats and streaming, peacock feathers dashed down the street. It seemed too impossible that I, a wandering naturalist of the drab, prosaic twentieth century, and my American wife were really a living, breathing part of this strange drama ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... himself for a fool, he had passed down into the street again and the episode had ended. There was really nothing in it—nothing at all; but it was the atmosphere, the atmosphere of romantic adventure shot suddenly across a rather drab and colourless existence, and he had liked to dwell on the possibilities of the affair and ask himself about it. Who was the woman, and why had she cried out? Why was there no one in the room? And why ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... he told her, when there came to him for the first time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a change from the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert, "we'll take horses and pack-animals and go up into that wonderful ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... for Pies, Damsons, to Preserve, Deafness, Debility, Bitters for, Decanter, to Remove a Stopper from, Diseases, Summer, Domestics, on the Management of, Dough-nuts, Drab, to Color, Drawn Butter, Dressing, or Stuffing, Dried Beef, Dried Beef, to Stew, Dropsy, Ducks, to Roast, Dumplings, Apple, and Peach, Dumplings, Bacon, Dumplings, Corn, Dumplings, Drop, Dumplings, Large, Dumplings, Light Bread, Dumplings, Rice, Dumplings, Stew, Dumplings, Suet, Dutch-ovens, to Bake ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... was that any single colour or combination of single colours—for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion behind—is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers' meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... but one mood, no matter what it cheers or destroys. It always laughs. There is no melancholy note in it, no drab, dull color of death such as the flood comes tainted with. Even while it eats away our homes and possessions, it has a certain comfort in its touch and glow if we ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... regret that bread and soup luncheon, after all. It was an adventure of sorts, and quite a streak of colour in its way, across the drab background of South ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... well-dressed, middle-aged man who now paused, half in doubt, on the threshold of the Buildings, the sordid-looking vestibule, with its bare floor and drab-coloured walls, presented an epitome ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... that lay between the cove from which she had just emerged and Western Harbour, and Wink Wheeler, who was sitting on the rail on the starboard side of the deck, gave utterance to an exclamation of surprise and pointed ahead to where a drab-coloured power-boat had suddenly emerged into sight nearly ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... had been rather a drab one as seen through other people's eyes, but it had never seemed so to her till within the last few years. Her own father had been the village doctor, but of him she had no memory. Her mother's second marriage to a venerable country lawyer, John Gilman, had brought a kindly, inefficient stepfather ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was in high glee, having received a message from Captain Johnston, to inform him that the latter was pressed! The captain used to dress in a blue long-tog, drab-breeches and top-boots, when he went ashore. "He thought he could pass for a gentleman from the country," said Mr. Irish, laughing, "but them press-gang chaps smelt the tar in his very boots!" Cooper was sent to the rendezvous, with the captain's desk and papers, and the latter was liberated. ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... chang'd into the quite contrary, in less than three Months Time; and instead of pleasant Jests at Table, Dishes and Trenchers have flown about. The Husband, instead of my dear Soul, has been call'd Blockhead, Toss-Pot, Swill-Tub; and the Wife, Sow, Fool, dirty Drab. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... drovers, immense hogs and immense men whom I took to be the gents of Wolverhampton. What huge fellows they were! almost as huge as the hogs for which they higgled; the generality of them dressed in brown sporting coats, drab breeches, yellow-topped boots, splashed all over with mud, and with low-crowned broad-brimmed hats. One enormous fellow particularly caught my notice. I guessed he must have weighed eleven score, he had a half-ruddy, half-tallowy ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... spurious passion which is the outcome of the head rather than of the heart. Thus Johnson tells us that Prior's Chloe "was probably sometimes ideal, but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species." The case of popular and patriotic poetry is very different. It is wholly devoid of affectation. Whatever be its literary merits or demerits, it always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It enables us to gauge ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Oliver and Dolly; and now that the hour was positively come he felt very light-hearted and full of spirits, defying the wind which wrestled with him at every turn. Dolly must be wrapped up well, he said to himself, and old Oliver must put on his drab great coat, with mother o' pearl buttons, which he had brought up from the country forty years ago, and which was still good for keeping out the cold. He ran down the alley, and passed through the shop ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... were like Miss Granger's morning-room. No frivolous mediaevalism here, no dainty upholsterer's work in many-coloured woods, but solid mahogany, relieved by solemn draperies of drab damask, in a style which the wise Sophia called unpretentious. The chief feature in one room was a sewing-machine that looked like a small church organ, and in the other a monster medicine-chest, from the contents ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Salisbury's niece! and the equal of Sally herself for worthless good looks and behaviour. She is not yet well known to the town or I could not have been so took in. But you will recall that Molly Skerret observed the likeness to that drab Sally on seeing her. Good Heaven, that I had heeded, and not ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... anything now, as I would to any other woman in the world, as I would have said to you weeks ago before I knew all that you are . . . I don't say anything about the imbecility of keeping such a woman as you are here in this narrow, drab hole, this sordid prison . . . you born, if ever a human being was, to rich and warm and harmonious living! It is your birthright. Let me give it to you. All that, even that, a whole world of beauty and fullness ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... quarry, too, was overgrown again; being almost inaccessible to Wilson's cattle its undergrowth was rank and high, and as it was sheltered from the sun's rays and watered in part by a tiny spring, it was often the one green oasis in a weary land of crackling yellow and drab. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... knowledge often means increase of sorrow. It is, in truth, the sorrow of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain—a cipher, ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... she used to herself; perhaps, as the butler had suggested, she had brought home some terrible ideas from the East—ideas about Kismet and fatalism and the cheapness of human life in comparison to human good. Wrong ideas, from the point of view of the queer, drab, cramped and ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... almost venerable in his aspect, but his tread was firm, and his arm still strong enough to steady his long, heavy, double-barrelled rifle. An ample coat of dark blue covered his body; his limbs were enveloped in long buttoned leggings of drab cloth, and a cap of sable surmounted his high, broad forehead. Under this his blueish grey eye glanced with a calm but clear intelligence, and a single look from it satisfied you that you were in the presence of a superior ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... under a sovereign brought in by a revolution. They made a favourite of Courtenay, but they desired to marry him to the queen, not to Elizabeth: Gardiner told the young earl that he would sooner see him the husband of the vilest drab who could be picked out of the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard Barton. His verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the sect; for from title-page to colophon, there was no sin either in the way of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal and housewifely Muse, that brewed ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... cheerfulness flooded with the soft, radiant light of returning happiness—reflected in her eyes; while the sunlight streaming down into the enclosure took on a brightness that made the girl's eyes glisten; while the drab and empty days since her father's death began to slip back into the limbo of memory—the sting and the sorrow of them removed. So does the heart of youth respond to the nearness ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... wended the wilds among, With a purse of gold and a silver tongue; His hat it was broad, and all drab were his clothes, For he hated high colors—except on his nose, And he met with a lady, the story goes. Heigho! yea thee and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... a matter for comment that American newspaper advertising of the English packaged medicines was singularly drab. In the mother country, the proprietors or their heirs were faced with vigorous competition. It behooved them to sharpen up their adjectives and reach for their vitriol. In America the apothecary or merchant had no proprietary interest in any of ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... the brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... estimation, a low character for commercial honesty, and a certain flavor of pretentious hypocrisy. This probably has been much owing to the acerbity and pungency of Sydney Smith's witty denunciations against the drab-colored State. It is noted for repudiation of its own debts, and for sharpness in exaction of its own bargains. It has been always smart in banking. It has given Buchanan as a President to the country, ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... on them, they want wine; your true fool will never fight without it. Or a drab, a drab; Oh for a commodious drab betwixt them! would Helen had been here! then it had come to something. Dogs, lions, bulls, for females tear and gore; And the beast, man, is valiant ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... time when, posing as a purist, I thought it fine to criticise and crab CHARLES DICKENS as a crude caricaturist, Who laid his colours on too thick and slab, Who was a sort of sentimental tourist And made life lurid when it should be drab; In short I branded as a brilliant dauber The man who gave us Pecksniff ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... features; eyes like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... footsteps, and sounds of doors opening and shutting. They put new locks on the doors lest the villagers had procured keys, but this proved of no avail. The servants talked of seeing appearances of a gentleman in drab and of a lady in silk, which Mrs. Ricketts disregarded. Her husband went to Jamaica in the autumn of 1769, and in 1771 she was so disturbed that her brother, Captain Jervis, a witness of the phenomena, insisted on her leaving the house in August. He and Mrs. Ricketts then ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... women, or even in part for Savina. Her attitude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night assumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page of righteousness. It was ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... cousins, notably of pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do look so lovely!" Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the drab Cooney milieu. Recent progress in the great game had more than blotted out all memory of little mishaps ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... one bred to the trade. A moment later I was aloft, casting loose the gaff-topsail. From that fine height as the barge began to move I saw the horsemen turning away foiled. I saw the lady's leathered hat, making a little dash of green among the drab of the riding coats. Then an outhouse hid them all from sight. I was in a sea-going barge, bound out, under all sail, along a waterway lined with old reeds, all blowing down with ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... the town was lost in the drab melancholy of its ancient streets amid the frightened silence of its inhabitants, who had retired very early, when Luis Cervantes reached Primitivo's general store, his arrival interrupting a party that ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... a warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... Life, stale and drab since his eyes opened, gathered to itself the pale glow of awakening interest. Ford rose painfully, inch by inch, until he was sitting upon the side of the bed, got from there to his feet, looked down and saw that he was clothed to his boots, ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... this time Master Raymond was sitting in the porch of the Red Lion, thinking over a sight he had just seen;—a man had passed by wearing on the back of his drab coat a capital I two inches long, cut out of black cloth, and sewed upon it. On inquiry he found the man had married his deceased wife's sister; and both he and the woman had been first whipped, and then condemned to wear this letter for the rest of ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... done, he would give his servants a dram, but he was by no means over-flush in this way. During the six months of his service, Clark never once saw Burns intoxicated or incapable of managing his business. The poet, when at home, used to wear a broad blue bonnet, a long-tailed coat, drab or blue, corduroy breeches, dark blue stockings, with cootikens or gaiters. In cold weather he would have a plaid of black and white check wrapped round his shoulders. The same old man described Mrs. Burns as a good and prudent housewife, keeping everything neat ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... he rode away, not giving Tom time to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches, drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave himself airs because he wore smart ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... appearance. "There," was our reply, pointing at the same time to a well-cushioned and genially sequestered seat at the north-west corner, and we were ushered into it with becoming decorum. In two minutes afterwards five women and a festive infant, dressed in a drab cloak, and muffled all over to keep the cold out, stopped at the pew door. We stepped out; three of the females, with the baby, stepped in; the remainder went into the next pew; and after condensing our nerve power, we settled down in the corner from ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Squire Bean and his wife easily. In fact, the queer aspect of the room was not calculated to dispel her nervous terror. Squire Bean's peculiarities showed forth in the arrangement of his room, as well as in other ways. His floor was painted drab, and in the center were the sun and solar system depicted in yellow. But that six-rayed yellow sun, the size of a large dinner plate, with its group of lesser six-rayed orbs as large as saucers, did not ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... return to the land of the Franks, by ordering a beef-steak, and a bottle of porter, and bespeaking the paper from a gentleman in drab leggings, who had come from Manchester to look after the affairs of a commercial house, in which he or his employers were involved. He wondered that a hotel in the Ottoman empire should be so unlike one in Europe, and asked ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... jury's careful examination a very different picture. He made no secret of the fact that, from the point of view of the ordinary unconventional man or woman, Mrs. Clarke had often acted unwisely, and, with not too fine a sarcasm, he described for the jury the average existence of "a careful drab woman" in the watchful and eternally gossiping diplomatic world. Then he contrasted with it the life led by Mrs. Clarke in the wonderful city of Stamboul—a life "full of color, of taste, of interest, of charm, of innocent, joyous and fragrant liberty. Which ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... us under a sky that would make of Job an optimist. All around are light and color, the evidences of life and hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of hope from the ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... where there followed a service which Avery regarded as downright revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers—as many prayers as the Vicar could get in, rendered in an emotionless monotone with small regard for sense and none whatever for feeling. The whole thing was drab and unattractive to the utmost limit, and Avery rose at length from her knees with a feeling of having been deliberately cheated of a thing she valued. She left the church in an unwonted spirit of exasperation, which lasted throughout the midday meal, which ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... that overlooked the chairs Where dozens sat, and where a pop—eyed daub Of Shakespeare, very like the hired man Of Christian Dallman, brow and pointed beard, Upon a drab proscenium outward stared, Sat Harmon Whitney, to that eminence, By merit raised in ribaldry and guile, And to the assembled rebels thus he spake: "Whether to lie supine and let a clique Cold-blooded, scheming, hungry, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... years they labored with this apparatus, trying every conceivable sort of disk. It is easy to pass over those three years, filled as they were with unceasing toil and patient effort, because they were drab years when little of interest occurred. But these were the years when Bell and Watson were "going to school," learning how to apply electricity to this new use, striving to make their apparatus talk. How dreary and trying these years must have been for the experimenters we may ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... impressed with the belief that her grandfather was a cunning device in wax. The chests were taken out with all convenient despatch, and taken in to be unlocked by Mrs Jarley, who, attended by George and another man in velveteen shorts and a drab hat ornamented with turnpike tickets, were waiting to dispose their contents (consisting of red festoons and other ornamental devices in upholstery work) to the best advantage in the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... glazing, that there seems to be no reason why he should have given the preference. It is said the Flemish School used white grounds—probably Rubens did so generally, not all other painters. Teniers used a light drab, and, if we were to judge from some of his skies, painted upon it when that thinly coloured ground was wet. Unless a great body of colour be used, even in the most transparent painting, white grounds are apt to give a weakness and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the young, strong mower going forth with his mower for to mow spareth the tall and drab hornet's nest and passeth by on the other side, so Time, with his Waterbury hour-glass and his overworked hay-knife over his shoulder, and his long Mormon whiskers, and his high sleek dome of thought with its gray lambrequin of ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... the Hotel Esplanade caught my ear. I approached the table and found two flashily dressed bullies and a bedraggled drab from the streets talking ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... his bill and gone out, he stopped at the corner of the street just to look at the people passing by. A large part of the monotony of this war is occasioned, of course, by the fact that the soldier sees nothing but the everlasting drab of uniforms. When a man is in the front line, or just behind, for weeks at a time he sees nothing but soldiers, soldiers, soldiers! Each man has the same coloured uniform; each has the same pattern tunic, the same ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... the southwest, the water of a pale tawny color, and just enough motion to make things frolicsome and lively. Add to these an approaching sunset of unusual splendor, a broad tumble of clouds, with much golden haze and profusion of beaming shaft and dazzle. In the midst of all, in the clear drab of the afternoon light, there steamed up the river the large new boat, the Wenonah, as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along, all trim and white, covered with flags, transparent red and blue streaming out in the breeze. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... they could see the drab peaks of the mountains which loomed between the partly dismantled trees. Beyond lay the kingdom. Would they ever reach it? There was only one pass; this they dared not make. Yet if they attempted to cross the mountains in a deserted ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... behind any of its neighbours of the grove in conjugal and parental affection, for it builds its nest, hatches its own eggs, and rears its own young, Wilson assures us. It is about a foot in length, clothed in a dark drab suit with a silken greenish gloss. A ruddy cinnamon tints the quill-feathers of the wings; and the tail consists partly of black feathers tipped with white, the two outer ones being of the same tint as the back. The under surface is a pure white. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... was a room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men, some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly—a squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy corners of the low dark cafe ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... taken to a small, drab internment room. A half hour passed and still no word from the Major. From the moment the Patrol crew had boarded them, everything had seemed like a bad dream. The shock of the arrest, the realization that the Captain had been serious when ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... worn with a bright green bonnet; red and green, like our friend a-la-macaw; salmon colour and blue; yellow and red; green and blue. Two ill-assorted shades of the same colour, such as a dark and light blue; or a red lilac and a blue lilac; or a rose pink and a blue pink; or drab and yellow. Instances might be multiplied without end of incongruous inharmonious blending of colours, the mere sight of which is enough to give any one a bilious fever. There are colours which, in themselves, may be inoffensive, but of which only particular shades assort well together. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... unthinkable monotony of the universal course, of the centuries wheeling in dull succession into infinity. Life seemed to him no more varied than the wire drum in which squirrels raced nowhere. His own lot, he told himself grimly, was no worse than another. Existence was all of the same drab piece. It had seemed gay enough when he was young, worked with gold and crimson ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the home of her daughter, Ida Baker. The clean-swept walks of the small yard were brightened by borders of gay colored zinnias and marigolds in front of the drab looking two-story, frame house. "Come in," answered Ida, in response to a knock at the front door. "Yessum, Mammy's here. Go right in dat dere room and you'll ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... narrow passage from the door of entrance to the room. General Washington stopped at the end to let Mr. Adams pass to the chair. The latter always wore a full suit of bright drab, with loose cuffs to his coat. General Washington's dress was a full suit of black. His military hat had the black cockade. There stood the 'Father of his Country' acknowledged by nations the first in war, first in peace, and first ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... whether the husband is a brute or a darling. What I wish to prove is that marriage guarantees woman a home only by the grace of her husband. There she moves about in HIS home, year after year, until her aspect of life and human affairs becomes as flat, narrow, and drab as her surroundings. Small wonder if she becomes a nag, petty, quarrelsome, gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house. She could not go, if she wanted to; there is no place to go. Besides, a short period of married life, of complete ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... among the second-hand clothes; every shop on both sides of the street invited him—the whole street at this sordid end of it was trying to help him. For a very few shillings he bought just the garments that he had imagined—loose and big made of drab canvas or drill, the suit of overalls that had been worn by some kind of mechanic, with two vast inside pockets to the jacket, in which the wearer had carried tools, food, and his bottle of drink. Dale also bought a common soft felt hat, a thing ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... speaker finished, he stepped to one side, bringing into view of the porch a woman seated upon the head of a barrel in the cart. A poor army drab, left behind in the evacuation, had been decked out in what Janice instantly recognised as her Mischianza costume; and with hair dressed so that it stood up not less than two feet above her forehead, splashed over with white paint, a drink-coloured face, doubly red in contrast, and bare feet, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... his desk and gazed listlessly out of the window. The day arose before him in prospect, drab, desolate, and dreary. High up overhead, through the dingy panes, he could see the little fleecy clouds floating about in peaceful unconcern. May was a slack month. And at its end came June—June, with its four weeks' inventory ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... case, though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, when reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall* in bed: "Well, ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour. Paul remembered him vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a good deal ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... be dispensed with; and, with their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, picture-less. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere gambling.—Imagine a dull deal board, or drum ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... little they drew near to Los Angeles. And then they were there, sliding slowly through the yards in a drab drizzle of one of California's fall rains. Then they were in a taxicab, making for the Third Street tunnel. Then Jean stared heavy-eyed at the dripping palms along the boulevard which led away from the smoke of the city and into Hollywood, snuggled against ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... In this drab, ineffective gathering, I found one point of colour, like a red rose on a dingy white tablecloth. This was Beatrice, the daughter of Clement Blaine. I believe the man had a wife. One figures her as a worn household drudge. In any case, she made no appearance in any of the places in which I met ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round at the vine-fields, framed in purple lines, and dominated by the nest of grey and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape of a crowning rock—"if you think this spot quiet enough, you can speak to him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Mrs. Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war had then died out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could bring ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring. But spring doesn't come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the two sisters, their speaking and their remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his experiences with the Doermaul opera company, the light thrown on his drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him, his separation from him, the brush-maker's house on St. James's Place, the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... interview was recounted to him by Miss Leaks, the little drab-colored stenographer, who had returned from lunch when the storm was ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... all right." Strangely enough he felt now that it would. Her coming had brought rippling sunshine into a drab world. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... sedate air, and minding his own business. Not a single squash-vine could be detected tickling another squash-vine; each watermelon lay in the middle of his hill with a solemn expression on his large face; the tomatoes looked ashamed of being red; and only a suit of drab apiece seemed wanting, to make the pumpkins as respectably grave as the other members of the community. Two small boys, in wide-brimmed hats and legs of discreet tint, were weeding these decorous vegetables. They raised their heads and took one good stare as the big wagon rattled past, then they ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and all that ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... of home, her spirit suddenly lightened. The narrow, drab-coloured little house, flanked each side by others exactly like it in every single particular, save that their front yards were not so well kept, looked as if it could, aye, and would, keep any ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... She had fought through drab and solitude to dreams and formless craving, this girl of the hills. What things of vigor her life had known were cruel: a passionate shrinking from her uncle, a fear for the brother who had hotly rebelled at the meager life around him, a loneliness aloof from ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... that at Vigo?" said I. He looked at me for a moment, winked, gave a short triumphant chuckle, and then proceeded on his way, walking at a tremendous rate. The Senor Garcia was dressed in all respects as an English notary might be: he wore a white hat, brown frock coat, drab breeches buttoned at the knees, white stockings, and well blacked shoes. But I never saw an English notary walk so fast: it could scarcely be called walking: it seemed more like a succession of galvanic leaps and bounds. I found it impossible to keep up with ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... disliked seeing the place with no colour or ornament save that which the marsh wind gave it of gold and rust. She would have the eaves and the pipes painted a nice green, such as would show up well at a distance. There was plenty of money, so why should everything be drab? Alce discouraged her as well as he was able—it was the wrong time of year for painting, and the old paint was still quite good. Joanna treated his objections as she had treated his proposal—with good-humoured, almost tender, indifference. She let him make his moan at ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... darling—Naughty little dear!" he continued, his round good-humored face wrinkled all over with smiles, as he caught up the truant, "what ever do you mean by splashing through every gutter between home and here, making a little drab of yourself? Why your frock is as wet as a dish-clout!—and your ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... thee when thou suck'dst her breast, Had been a little ratsbane for thy sake! Or else, when thou didst keep my lambs a-field, I wish some ravenous wolf had eaten thee! Dost thou deny thy father, cursed drab? O, burn her, burn her! ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... Tom Purdie, the wide-mouthed, under-sized, broad-shouldered, square-made, thin-flanked woodsman, so well known afterwards by all Scott's friends as he waited for his master in his green shooting-jacket, white hat, and drab trousers. Scott first made Tom Purdie's acquaintance in his capacity as judge, the man being brought before him for poaching, at the time that Scott was living at Ashestiel. Tom gave so touching an account of his circumstances—work scarce—wife ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... father stood very near her. She was terribly agitated. There was a narrow passage from the door of entrance to the room, which was on the east, dividing the rows of benches. General Washington stopped at the end to let Mr. Adams pass to the chair. The latter always wore a full suit of bright drab, with lash or loose cuffs to his coat. He always wore wrist ruffles. He had not changed his fashions. He was a short man, with a good head. With his family he attended our church twice a day. General Washington's dress was a ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... dozen times he looked at his watch—would he be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve he was in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... naked for one-third to one-half its height and from one to six feet in diameter, with a smooth bark, silvery or whitish in young trees, becoming thick and heavily fissured into rounded ridges on old trunks, and gray or drab-brown in color, it is readily distinguishable, with its companion, the red fir, by the regularity of construction of trunk, branch and branchlet. As Smeaton Chase expresses it, "The fine smooth arms, set in regular formation, divide and redivide again and again ad infinitum, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... "the Italian woman." In his "Journal to Stella" for August 6th, 1711, Swift writes: "We have a music meeting in our town [Windsor] to-night. I went to the rehearsal of it, and there was Margarita and her sister, and another drab, and a parcel of fiddlers; I was weary, and would not go to the meeting, which I am sorry for, because I heard it was a great assembly." (See present edition, vol. ii. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... the room. "Look-a-here what Mister Grannis gi' me," and she held out the yellow pitcher. Instantly Miss Baker was in a quiver of confusion. Every word spoken aloud could be perfectly heard in the next room. What a stupid drab was this Maria! Could anything be more ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... The stream was thick with red mud, the condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration of ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... many-caped drab overcoat, and fox-skin cap and gloves, sat upon the coachman's box with the proud air of a king upon his throne. And why not? It was Oliver's very first visit to the city, and the suit of clothes he wore ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... thought of getting something in the mail besides a catalogue and the speeches of his congressman, of having something actually to look forward to, appealed to him strongly the more he considered it. Bowers craved a little of the warmth of romance in his drab existence and this was the only way he knew of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... to be something in what you say—your language may save time and money and grease the wheels of business; but, after all, we are not all business men, nor are we all out after dollars. Just think what a dull, drab uniformity your scheme would lay over the lands like a pall. By the artificial removal of natural barriers you are aiding and abetting the vulgarization of the world. You are doing what in you lies to eliminate the racy, the local, the ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... matter, Cely?—Oh!" For there stood the funniest old woman that Cely or Miss Melville had ever seen. She had on a black dress, very long and very scant, that looked as if it were made out of an old waterproof cloak. Over that, she wore a curious drab-silk sack, somewhat faded and patched, with all the edges of the seams outside. Over that, was a plaid red-and-green shawl, tied about her waist. There was a little black shawl over that, and a green tippet wound twice around her throat with the ends tucked in under the shawl. ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... Joyce would call a drab blonde—washed out complexion and sallow hair. She looks drab all the way through to me, but she may be the kind that improves on acquaintance. She certainly has a good figure, and looks as stylish as one of those fashion ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... hand out and opened a door that might very well escape a stranger's notice; for it was covered with looking-glass, and matched another narrow mirror in shape and size. This door led into a very long room, as plain and even sordid as the drawing-room was inviting: the unpapered walls were a cold drab, and wanted washing; there was a thick cobweb up in one corner, and from the ceiling hung the tail of another, which the housemaid's broom had scotched not killed: that side of the room they entered by was all books. The servant said, "Stay here a moment, sir, and I'll send ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... go— You remember my lyrics translated—like "sweet bully Bottom"—from Hugo? Though I will say it's curious that simply on just that account there should be Men so bold as to say that not one of my poems was written by me. It would stir the political bile or the physical spleen of a drab or a Tory To hear critics disputing my claim to Empedocles, Maud, and the Laboratory. Yes, it's singular—nay, I can't think of a parallel (ain't it a high lark? As that Countess would say)—there are few men believe it was I wrote the Ode to a Skylark. ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... modest discretion. A green flat region, made of peat and sand; human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the useful, of the improvable by economic science; and more of fine productions in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... slowly faded into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... hurried across the icy slope, the sun seemed suddenly quenched and the daylight turned to sodden drab. Heavy drifts of snow could be seen falling headlong from the clouds hanging about the peak, making ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... and colorful, even with all the best people away; Washington Square, cool under the trees, lovely and desirable despite the presence everywhere of alien neighbors from the district to the South. I long for home with an ardent longing; never was London so cruel, so hopeless, so drab, in my eyes. For, as I write this, a constable sits at my elbow, and he and I are shortly to start for Scotland Yard. I have been arrested as a suspect in the case of Captain ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... confessed that I liked to cheat the railway company, and I excused it on the ground that "a ten-mile journey without a ticket is the only romantic experience left in a drab world." That was a delightful bit of rationalisation. The real reason for my delinquency lay in my unconscious. As a child I impotently rebelled against the authority of parents and teachers. Later in life ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... have healthfulness and comedy as well as seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows in every play ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... his head after her. She doesn't expect to marry either of these gentlemen; she does not particularly require their flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other girls.... All of which ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Green is dyed in a bath made with 1 lb. (p. 194) Quinoline Yellow, 1 lb. Azo Fuchsine G, 1/4 lb. Fast Green Bluish, 10 lb. Glauber's salt, and 2 lb. sulphuric acid. By using about half the above quantities of dye-stuffs a drab effect shot ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... the very thin margin somewhat incurved, disk expanded, uneven, near the center cracked into numerous small viscid brownish areoles; pileus flesh color, flesh same color except toward the gills. Gills dark drab gray, arcuate, distant, decurrent, many of them forked, separating easily from the hymenophore, peeling off in broad sheets, and leaving behind corresponding elevations of the hymenophore which extended between the laminae of the lamellae. Pileus 7 cm. in diameter; stem ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... ascent was nothing—a mere nothing, and that before another thought could pass through monsieur's mind the fifth floor would be reached. The boy followed, climbing and ever climbing, until the meagre hand-rail appeared to lengthen into dream-like coils, and the threadbare, drab-hued carpet, with its vivid red border, to assume the proportions of ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... in California prolonged beyond its appointed season. The country and the people needed rain. Claire, always responsive to the moods of wind and weather, longed for the cleansing flood to descend and wash the dust-drab town colorful again. She awoke one morning to the delicious thrill of the moisture-laden southeast wind blowing into her room and the warning voice of her mother at her bedroom door ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... his campaign hat on one of the hooks, Greg doing the same. On account of the heat of the day neither young captain wore a tunic. Each unbuttoned the top button of his olive drab Army shirt before ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... embarrassment—no bed; nothing to offer the invalid in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible, drab-coloured cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal proportions, and called by the name of “bread”; then the patient, of course, had no “confidence in his medical man,” and on the whole, the best chance of saving ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... all autumn's glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty? No. I saw you—only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... green, may not be used in equal quantities in the dress, as they are both so positive in tone that they divide and distract the attention. When two colors are worn in any quantity, one must approach a neutral tint, such as gray or drab. Black may be worn with any color, though it looks best with the lighter shades of the different colors. White may also be worn with any color, though it looks best with the darker tones. Thus white and crimson, black and pink, each contrast better and have a richer effect than though the ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... these little voids were but the divine hiatuses of youth. He sometimes wondered just how strong her character was. There were times when she showed a pronounced inclination for the line of least resistance ... but her youth ... her too sheltered bringing up ... those drab cramped ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... hour of their journeying drew to an end, a sudden vision of green, like an emerald dropped on the drab face of the plain, brought a flush to Honor's cheeks, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... In harvest time he, of course, employed additional help, but the harvesters were for the most part residents of the neighborhood, who found accommodation in their own homes. The house was a small frame, oblong building, of the conventional Canadian farm-house order of architecture, painted of a drab color and standing a hundred yards or so from the main road. The barn and stable stood a convenient distance to the rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and chain. During the preceding season a young orchard ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... old gentleman who was evidently a stranger to every lawyer present. Who was he? Who brought him? Was there any one in the room who knew him? Such were the whispers that floated about, concerning the portly old man, arrayed in blue coat and drab breeches and gaiters, who took his snuff in silence, and watched the proceedings with evident surprise and dissatisfaction. After listening to three speeches this antique, jolly stranger rose, and with much embarrassment addressed the chair. "Mr. President," he said—"excuse me; ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... brown, more or less olivaceous in some eggs, the markings even in this type being generally densest towards the large end, where they form an irregular mottled cap: in the other type the ground is a very pale greenish-drab colour; there is a dense confluent raw-sienna-coloured zone round the large end, and only a few spots and specks of the same colour scattered about the rest of the egg. All kinds of intermediate varieties occur. The texture of the shell is fine and compact, ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... Princes in the Tower,' and 'The Interment of the Bodies by torchlight,' were very forcible and dramatic works of art, and possessed more natural attractions than the pictures of many of his competitors. His pupilage with Sir Joshua prevented his falling into the washed leather and warm drab errors of tone that then distinguished the English school of historical painting. In the picture of the Burial ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... pliable circlet of golden scales, clearing the brows, held the cap securely in place. On each scale a ruby of great size sparkled in solitaire setting. The circlet was further provided with four strings of pearls, two by each ear, dangling well down below in front of the shoulders. A loose drab robe or gown, drawn close at the waist, clothed him, neck, arms, body and nether limbs, answering excellently as ground for a cope the color of the cap, divided before and behind into embroidered squares defined ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... gilded youth, all that curious lot of masculinity classified under the general head of "men about town," crowded into the theatre that night, and when, after being heralded at length by the chorus, the returned prima donna appeared, in shining drab tights, she had a long and ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... his choice. My poor father was quite confounded: for my master saw not any he thought too good, and my father none that he thought bad enough. And my good master, at last, (he fixed his eye upon a fine drab, which he thought looked the plainest,) would help him to try the coat and waistcoat on himself; and, indeed, one would not have thought it, because my master is taller, and rather plumper, as I thought but, as I saw afterwards, they fitted him very well. And being plain, and lined ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... look like an orphan," said the wife of the Oriel don, subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one. Zuleika would have looked singular in one of those lowly double-files of straw-bonnets and drab cloaks which are so steadying a feature of our social system. Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... are all like this, great promisers, and after perform nothing to any. Think you to do with me as you did with Biliuzza, who went off with the ghittern-player?[368] Cock's faith, then, you shall not, for that she is turned a common drab only for that. If you have them not about you, go for them.' 'Alack,' cried the priest, 'put me not upon going all the way home. Thou seest that I have the luck just now to find thee alone, but maybe, when I return, there will be some one or other here ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the landscape. The ground was covered with springy pine needles, and squirrels and birds were everywhere. We walked past rows and rows of white tents pitched in orderly array among the pines, the canvas village of fifty or more road builders. By and by we came to a drab gray shack, weather-beaten and discouraged, hunched under the trees as if it were trying to blot itself from the scene. I was passing on, when the Chief (White Mountain) stopped me with ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... looked out into a world of grey wrack and driving rain. The Tower roof showed mistily beyond the ridge of down, but its environs were not in their prospect. The lower regions of the House had been gloomy enough, but this bleak place with its drab outlook struck a chill to Sir Archie's soul. He dolefully lit ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... appearing again farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... buried him on the hillside, just as the sun swept aside the rosy curtain of dawn. The wind, laden with fresh morning perfumes, blew up joyously from the river. From where I stood I could see the drab walls of the barracks. The windows sparkled and flashed as the gray mists sailed heavenward and vanished. The hill with its long grasses resembled a green sea. The thick forests across the river, almost black ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... her fingers. Well, this was the end. She was to be thrust out of the new brightness, back into the drab dreariness, the emptiness that was her fate. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable tho not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist"—as Shakespeare has been well called—do not exhibit the drab-colored Quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from "The Whole Duty of Man" or from "The Academy of Compliments!" We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the fall, she motored out to a Long Island club where the last of the season's golf was being enjoyed by some of her most intimate friends. Carley did not play. Aimlessly she walked around the grounds, finding the autumn colors subdued and drab, like her mind. The air held a promise of early winter. She thought that she would go South before the cold came. Always trying to escape anything rigorous, hard, painful, or disagreeable! Later she returned to the clubhouse to find ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... criminal stands the sullen drab figure of a girl who tries to show how loyal she is to the vagabond in the hands of the law. It all began with a misguided idea of liberty. The youth is the one who told his father he had had all the education he needed and promptly ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... third correspondent draws attention to "The School for Scandal" and Mr. Farren's performance of Sir Peter Teazle in a costume appropriate to the date of the comedy, the other players wearing dresses of the newest vogue. "Even Sir Oliver," it is added, "appeared in a fashionable modern drab greatcoat." In a note Leigh Hunt records his opinion that Mr. Farren was right, and that it was "the business of all the other performers to dress up to his costume, not for him to wrong himself into theirs," and adds, "there is one way of settling the matter which puts an end ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... precious dreams had just melted into drab reality—his mother was compelled to go ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... I am a mason? Charming! Know, then, that I am the Marquis D'Astafiorquercita. My heart is languishing for you, I seek to color my drab existence with a few pigments from your own. I must travel—but with you. That is why I have penetrated into your garden, disguised as a mason! [He throws off his workman's clothes and hat, and appears in a dazzling costume. His wig is ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand
... she began and stopped. A sense of stricture in the throat stopped her, as her eyes took in the washed-out colour of the thin face, the washed-out colour of the thin hair—thin drab hair, dragged in straight, hard unbecomingness from the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his nephew on the one side, and the favourite housekeeper on the other. At a long interval, and beneath the salt of course, sate old Robin, a meagre, half-starved serving-man, rendered cross and cripple by rheumatism, and a dirty drab of a housemaid, whom use had rendered callous to the daily exercitations which her temper underwent at the hands of her master and Mrs Wilson. A barnman, a white-headed cow-herd boy, with Cuddie ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... uncleanly and dishevelled drab, Who there doth scratch herself with filthy nails, And crouches now, and now on foot ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... How can those roots send up the golden tints, the snowy white and the red, and never have the colors mixed? Close by is a Plutarch, deep brilliant red. The roots intermingle. How is it possible to pick out of the dull soil, Nature's eternal drab, that brilliant color for your peony? There are your iris, the new sorts absolutely undescribable. There are a dozen different shades in a single bloom. But those blind artists at work in their subterranean studios never make a mistake. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... hold a sweet place in my memory. Perhaps, like other masterpieces that one loves in youth, one would now find them like those beautiful creatures of the sea that seem to be vermilion and purple and gold under the waves, but are drab and ugly things when taken out of the water. This applies to some books that one reads with pleasure in early days, and wonders, later, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... there and she would scarcely notice the difference. Here and there were the same places to her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound of a ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... like them, it's only jumping into one of the deepest of them from off a wooded island and my reputation will be fixed forever." An old lady, whose guest he was, down in the country, told how he was "gay, very gay, and good looking, creating a great sensation, in a rich suit of drab with laced ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some back streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and apartment cards above. We found ourselves in a drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional table before her, and "work"—a plum-coloured walking dress I judged at its most analytical ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... to look at her, and as he did so he found to his great joy that his stiff white collar had disappeared. So, too, had the drab serge suit and the clumsy hob-nailed boots that had hurt him so. Instead, he wore a single garment of some soft brown, the colour of earth, girdled by a broad green belt that felt like velvet. His feet were bare, and as he buried them in the thick grass on which he ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... have strayed from the fold, Though your "thee" has grown "you," and your drab blue and gold, To the old friendly speech and the garb's sober form, Like the heart of Argyle to the tartan, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... country which have no hair on their tail. this Specis we found on the Missouri as far up it as the woody country extended. it is as large as the Common European house rat or reather larger is of a lighter Colour bordering more on the lead or drab colour, the hair longer; and the female has only four tits which are placed far back near the hinder legs. this rat I have Seen in the Southern parts of the State of Kentucky & west ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... called "Cato," which is to be acted on Friday. There were not above half a score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them; and the drab that acts Cato's daughter, in the midst of a passionate part, calling out "What's next?" I went back ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... had been placed in the cistern, it became necessary to clean the latter, and the fish were taken out. They were of a dusky drab color when first taken out, but soon regained their vivid tints when placed in a white vessel containing clear water. They had evidently changed color in order to harmonize with the black walls and bottom ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... everlasting offer no great inducements to a creature that lives only on nectar. But that cocoon, compactly woven with silk and petals, which hangs from the stem, tells the story of the hunter's butterfly's presence. A brownish-drab chrysalis, or a slate-colored and black-banded little caterpillar with tufts of hairs on its back, and pretty red and white dots on the dark stripes, shows our butterfly in the earlier stages of its existence, when the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... stretching out of the radiance, as well as the houses on the western bank, but these showed out with incredible sharpness in high lights and dark shadows. From where they were lying they could not see the great curve of the quays, and the town in spite of the brilliancy of the atmosphere looked drab ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... above is so pessimistic one might suppose that a ballroom is always a chamber of torture and the young girl taken as an example above, a very drab and distorted caricature of what "a real young girl" should be and is. But remember, the young girl who is a "belle of the ballroom" needs no advice on how to manage a happy situation; no thought spent on how to make a perfect time better. The ballroom is the most wonderful ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Workhouse. On a low stone wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief put all his worldly possessions, with the exception of the "bit o' baccy" down his sock. And then, as the last light was fading from the drab-coloured sky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with our pitiful little bundles in our hands, a forlorn group ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... storm-petrel on her way. She looked up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapors to gray, drab, ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints. They were so like the wintry mountains of her Western home that she felt a satisfaction such as the hundred-thousand-dollar house ...
— Options • O. Henry
... sign of activity, but two or three untidy loungers leaned against a rude shack with "Pool Room," painted on its dirty window. All round, the rolling prairie stretched back to the horizon, washed in dingy drab and grey. The prospect ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... he could not load her with gifts, he could show his approbation by asking her to his house; and after some deliberation, she consented to accompany Mr and Miss Benson there. The house was square and massy-looking, with a great deal of drab-colour about the furniture. Mrs Bradshaw, in her lackadaisical, sweet-tempered way, seconded her husband in his desire of being kind to Ruth; and as she cherished privately a great taste for what was beautiful or interesting, as opposed to her husband's love of the purely useful, this taste ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... uncomfortable hour's wait, while the low smoke-stack belched black vapours into the dirty drab mist that lay oppressively upon everything about the harbour. From time to time the sound of the shovelling of coal arose from the engine-room. One at a time five or six passengers came on board, porters carrying their luggage. The saloon was nothing more than a glass case on deck, inside of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... weariness of spirit, I stood within the lobby looking out upon the grayness of London in November. A slight mental effort was sufficient to blot out that drab prospect and to conjure up before my mind's eye a balcony overlooking the Nile—a glimpse of dusty palms, a white wall overgrown with purple blossoms, and above all the dazzling vault of Egypt. Upon the balcony my imagination ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... leaves, drab with age, being quite worn away at much-read verses by the forefingers of unpractised readers in former days, where they were moved along under the line as an aid to the vision. The special verse in the Book of Ruth was sought out by Bathsheba, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... first time, that the second vehicle was not a humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or dog-cart, highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of three- or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the handsome, horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two before to get her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... coats, because coats were too hot, and you can't climb with your arms held by coat-sleeves. We had our coats in the packs, for emergencies. We wore blue flannel shirts with the Scouts' emblem on the sleeves, and Scouts' drab service hats, and khaki trousers tucked into mountain-boots hob-nailed with our private pattern so that we could tell each other's tracks, and about our necks were red bandanna handkerchiefs knotted loose, and on our hands were gauntlet gloves. Little Jed Smith, who is a fatty, ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... full-rigged ships by stumpy, unlovely tramp-steamers in the Hooghly River, to which I have already referred, is only one example of the universal disappearance of the picturesque. In twenty-five years' time, every one will be living in a drab-coloured, utilitarian world, from which most of the beauty and every scrap of local colour will have been successfully eliminated. I am lucky in ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... moments before hopping away beneath the bushes and undergrowth, appearing again farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning Fourth War scars and heritage of ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... glare over the place. The room in itself was by no means pretty, for the paper was the worse for wear, and the paint was nearly worn through to the woodwork. The hangings to the windows and to the two little beds were of an ugly drab color; and the view out of these windows only revealed a narrow street. At Kitty's own home she had a bedroom in the Castle end; the paper hung in ribbons, the door was draughty, the bedstead rickety and old; but ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... healthfulness and comedy as well as seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows in every ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Many colored; white, drab, green, purple or bright red; cuticle very thin, peeling from the edge, adherent toward the centre; bell-shaped, at first compressing the gills, then expanded, until finally the centre of the cap becomes depressed ...
— Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous • Anonymous
... soldiers," said Karen, pleased with her good idea. "Our flags, she says, they are, and that the world would be drab-coloured ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... but beautiful. The sandstone, reduced by ages to a crumbling marl, was of all colors. There were layers of green, reddish-brown, drab, purple, red, yellow, pinkish, slate, light-brown, orange, white, and banded. Nature, not contented with building enchanted palaces, had frescoed them. At this distance, indeed, the separate tints of the strata could not be discerned, but their general ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... and tulle mists of head dresses began to appear between the drab or tattered suits of the bystanders. Among the coming reception guests was Susan Mitchell, co-editor with George Russell ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... It'll be all right." Strangely enough he felt now that it would. Her coming had brought rippling sunshine into a drab world. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... It used to be painted white; it was drab now, and there was a bay-window in the sitting-room. There was a new pump in the old place, and, happy omen, he discovered it was one of his own manufacture. He made his way by sheer force of habit past the kitchen windows to the side door. That was where they had quarreled ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... life has been one long changing of garments and moving from one show to another. Tuesday was Viceroy's Cup Day at the races, a very pretty sight. One side of the ground was crowded by pretty women in lovely gowns, and on the other side the natives sat in their hundreds and chattered, not the drab-coloured crowd we produce, but gay and striking as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... to twenty inches in length, eight or ten inches in diameter, and weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds and upwards; skin thin, easily pierced or broken, of an ash-gray color, spotted, and marked with light drab and nankeen-brown,—the furrows dividing the ribs light drab; stem small; flesh deep orange-yellow, of medium thickness; seeds pure white, broader in proportion to their length than those of the Hubbard ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... retiring from her, I stoop for stones strewn thick about the sand, Aim them, fling them, And, as my idle arm resumes the knack, Score a hit and laugh To see her stumble hurt, behind the pine trunks. "Unless you work, I throw again, To it and steady at it. Mark me, drab, we Camilli Mean what we say." Stone after stone still flies, But aimed to knock chips from the pine-boles now; For she is busy gathering sticks, increasing Her distance as she may. The noon is sultry, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... pearls. When I first spoke to you—a child with all autumn's glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty? No. I saw you—only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that moment in ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... that scornful of social amenities; but he could hardly wait for the approach of sunrise to be on his way to Seafood on this brilliant Christmas morning. It was not a brilliant, shimmering day for him, however. He saw nothing beautiful in the steel-blue sky: to him it was a drab, unlovely pall. He saw no beauty in the snow-clad foliage, no splendour in the bejewelled tree-tops, no purity in the veil of white that lay upon the face of the earth. He saw only himself, and he was a drear, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... this aristocratic argument which seeks to identify democracy with a drab utilitarianism may be found in action such as that of the Hungarian Commune—whose name I decline to repeat. This Commune did just one of those acts that prove that a separate people has a separate personality; it threw something away. A man can ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant, as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught at school. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the threshold of the dining-room she stopped aghast. The walls had been distempered a particularly hideous drab; the curtains were mustard yellow; the carpet was a dull brown; the mottled marble mantelpiece, for which she had been intending to substitute one in walnut wood with tiles, still shone in slabs of petrified brawn; there was a huge mahogany ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... desire, for advertisement. Jimmy did not know the City, but he knew a good deal of mankind, and he gleaned something of the spirit and traditions of that office, as his eyes wandered from the rows of black, shiny deed boxes to the equally shiny pate of the managing clerk, and then to the drab-looking girl typist, pale-faced and narrow-chested, who seemed to finger the key-board as though the maddening click of her abominable machine had killed any individuality she might once have had, and turned her into a mere part of the mechanism of the City. The one spot of colour ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... blue eyes were round and earnest. He wore a blouse waist, a short jacket, and knickerbockers. Under his arm he held an old umbrella that was as tall as he was. Its covering had once been of thick, brown cloth, but the color had faded to a dull drab except in the creases, and Trot thought it looked very old-fashioned and common. The handle, though, was really curious. It was of wood and carved to resemble an elephant's head. The long trunk of the elephant was curved to make a crook for the handle. The eyes of the beast were small ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... evening in April, 191-, Clement J. Cleggett walked sedately into the news room of the New York Enterprise with a drab-colored walking-stick in his hand. He stood the cane in a corner, changed his sober street coat for a more sober office jacket, adjusted a green eyeshade below his primly brushed grayish hair, unostentatiously sat down at the copy desk, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... when an English peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the English people have come to think of American business ethics as being too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware that only in most exceptional cases can great or ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... walks the convent garden, cannot help asking herself why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by God, all colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the modest Quaker, after hanging all her house and dressing all her children in drab, cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue and yellow and crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect how very differently the great All-Father arrays the world's housekeeping. The consequence of all this has been, that the reforms based upon these severe and exclusive views ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to the west seems inclosed by a long line of trees, which, in the distance, appear to stand in the water. Thence the vast stream sweeps boldly into the south, and with a rush discharges down the rapids, and straight over the line of precipice, in a vast tumultuous greyish-drab torrent which speedily emerges into comparatively still water below. The rock here is an exceedingly hard, mottled limestone, resembling the stone at St. Andrew's Rapids on Red River. Where exposed ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops, personnel-housing area carefully shielded against radiation by a huge stellene bubble, sealed and air-conditioned, with double-doored entrances and exits. ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard Barton. His verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the sect; for from title-page to colophon, there was no sin either in the way of music or color. There was, indeed, a frugal ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... jumped back. The audience was lifted fairly to its feet with excitement. What monster could it be that was giving so much trouble? The next moment, while Tomaso's whip hissed in vicious circles over his head, a plump little drab-colored pug-dog marched slowly out upon the stage, its head held arrogantly aloft. Volleys of laughter crackled around the arena, and the delighted spectators settled, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... from the ground. The space between the inn wall and the beehive curve of the hill, which was very narrow under Mr. Glenthorpe's window, but widened as the hill fell away, was covered with a russet-coloured clay, which contrasted vividly with the sombre grey and drab tints of ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... the walk, and, pointing to the captain, says, 'My husband, though he is become a blackguard jail-bird, must be allowed to be a handsome fellow still.'—On the other hand, he will frequently desire me to take notice of his rib, as she chances to pass.—'Mind that draggle-tailed drunken drab,' he will say; 'what an antidote it is—yet, for all that, Felton, she was a fine woman when I married her—Poor Bess, I have been the ruin of her, that is certain, and deserve to be d—ned for bringing her to ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... a tall Man's height, or more; No bonnet screen'd her from the heat; A long drab-colour'd Cloak she wore, A Mantle reaching to her feet: What other dress she had I could not know; Only she wore a Cap that was ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... sonorously than before. The moving mass of the Terek's rapid brown waters contrasted more vividly with its motionless banks. The waters were beginning to subside and here and there the wet sands gleamed drab on the banks and in the shallows. The other side of the river, just opposite the cordon, was deserted; only an immense waste of low-growing reeds stretched far away to the very foot of the mountains. On the low bank, a little to one ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... Aunt Jen—cloth to supply missing "breadths," yarn to mend the toes of stockings, ribbons which would transform the ancient dingy bonnet into a wonder of beauty on the day of the summer communion. She had "patterns" to buy dress-lengths of—from the byre-lasses brown or drab to stand the stress of out-of-door—checked blue and white for the daintier dairy-worker among her ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of water—motionless, inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour—which at some small distance out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... agreeable to her was a constant impulse. Objects on the way, though ever so common, became interesting the moment she called attention to them; a black swallow in the air pursued by her pointing finger went off in a halo; if a bit of quartz or a flake of mica was seen to sparkle in the drab sand under kissing of the sun, at a word he turned aside and brought it to her; and if she threw it away in disappointment, far from thinking of the trouble he had been put to, he was sorry it proved so worthless, and kept a lookout for something better—a ruby, perchance a ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Creeps into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard fingers ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... this he took for feminine coquetry and his own front was serene. As he had made up his mind to be a dramatist merely because the career appealed acutely to his itching ambition, so did he in due course make up his mind to marry this handsome brunette (what hair he had was drab) who bore all the earmarks of secret wealth in spite of the fact that she lived in a small hotel. As time went on, Gisela resigned herself and put his ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... crab of the wood is sauce very good for the crab of the sea, But the wood of the crab is sauce for a drab that will not ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... torchlight,' were very forcible and dramatic works of art, and possessed more natural attractions than the pictures of many of his competitors. His pupilage with Sir Joshua prevented his falling into the washed leather and warm drab errors of tone that then distinguished the English school of historical painting. In the picture of the Burial of the Princes, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the trouble is I don't want to wait that long. Now, for instance, who lives over there on my left; the square white house with the drab blinds?" ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... it won her instant fame and a small fortune. It was gloomy, pessimistic, excoriating, merciless, drab, sordid, and hideously realistic. Its people hailed from that plebeian end of the vegetable garden devoted to turnips and cabbages. They possessed all the mean vices and weaknesses that detestable humanity has so far begotten. They were all failures ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 'Ay,' said Belcolore, 'you are all like this, great promisers, and after perform nothing to any. Think you to do with me as you did with Biliuzza, who went off with the ghittern-player?[368] Cock's faith, then, you shall not, for that she is turned a common drab only for that. If you have them not about you, go for them.' 'Alack,' cried the priest, 'put me not upon going all the way home. Thou seest that I have the luck just now to find thee alone, but maybe, when I return, there will ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... no beauty of color. God admires clouds, I doubt not, when painted by the setting sun, and stars flashing in the heavens, and the flowers of myriad hues that are scattered over the earth, but if these are objects of His special admiration, as they are of ours, what can He think of a drab Shaker bonnet? What can He think when man and woman, the glory and crown of His creation, are entirely overtopped and thrown into the shade by birds and bees and blossoms, and go poking around the world in unexampled ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... After all, every man that lives has his great adventure, whether it come garbed in drab or radiant with the glow of the sunrise. A prosaic, money-grubbing age we call this, but by the gods! romance hammers once in a lifetime at the door of every mother's son of us. There be those too niggardly to let her in, there be those to whom the knock comes faintly; and there be ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which he lay, ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... they could see he was hardly more than a boy, perhaps twenty years of age. His lean, gray body was nearly naked. Around his waist he wore a drab-colored tunic, of a substance they could not identify. His feet and legs were bare. On his chest were strapped a thin stone plate, slightly convex. His thick, wavy, black hair, cut at the base of ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... not more than one or two and twenty, tall and well-built, although he walked with a slouching gait. He wore corduroy trousers fastened round the waist by a narrow strap, and a blue shirt, with an unbuttoned jacket of fustian. On his head was a limp-brimmed, dirty, drab felt hat, and in his left hand he carried a red handkerchief, which apparently contained all his possessions, and in his right a stout stick which had been obviously cut from a hedge. His hair was extremely short and ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... railways, in a deeper St. Lawrence, in flamboyant adventures with great harbours, in the Quebec Bridge. Borden as yet was master of nothing. Such brilliance and success had never been confronted by such a demoralized party and so much drab common sense in ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... waters of the lake look pink. Fortunately they had not been hunted for their plumage and were not timid. After two days of familiarity with the boat they were willing to let me approach within twenty yards before finally taking wing. The coloring, in this land of drab grays and browns, was a delight to the eye. The head is white, the beak black, the neck white shading into salmon-pink; the body pinkish white on the back, the breast white, and the tail salmon-pink. The wings are ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... piety to much that was only Puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all." Is not Adam Bede justified in saying that "to hear some preachers you'd think a man must be doing nothing all his ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... The porter told me that Mr. Krasnovsky had not yet come in, and I made my way up to the third storey. The door was opened by a tall, stout, drab-coloured flunkey with black whiskers, who in a sleepy, churlish, and apathetic voice, such as only flunkeys use in addressing other flunkeys, asked me what I wanted. Before I had time to answer, a lady dressed in black came hurriedly into the hall. She screwed up her eyes and looked ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... off without much delay, a train-load wholly of men, and all greenhorns. For all of us had nice fresh crinkly blouses, and olive-drab (properly o. d.) knees not yet worn white (as I have seen on returning Plattsburgers) while our canvas leggings were still unshaped to our manly calves. Our hats were new and stiff, and their gaudy cords were bright. And we were inquisitive ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... did not look much like Mr. Pulcifer's. Galusha's trunk had arrived at last, but the garments in it were as drab and old-fashioned and "floppy" as those he wore on his arrival. Horatio was invariably arrayed like a lily of the field—if by that term is meant a tiger lily. Raish generally finished his appraisal ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of the populous parish of Paddington, in a parallelogram bounded by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south, Praed Street on the north, and by Edgware Road on the east and Spring Street on the west, lies an assemblage of mean streets, the drab dulness of which forms a remarkable contrast to the pretentious architectural grandeurs of Sussex Square and Lancaster Gate, close by. In these streets the observant will always find all those evidences of depressing semi-poverty which are more evident in London than in any other English ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... little which appeals to the imagination of posterity in the story of that drab martyrdom. Moreover Collingwood is judged, not individually but by comparison. For ever he is obscured by the more dazzling vision of Nelson. It weighs little in his favour that, devoid of the vanity and the weakness which made of the latter a lesser man even though a greater genius, ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... as though nor man nor beast had ever trodden it. It lay very near the house and I did not know it from up here; it looked now like a long strip of drab linen, which lay bleaching in a boundless meadow. And that again suited my loneliness so well! At last, I looked and saw nothing more. And ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... arm of the bench. The muscles of his face scarcely moved, but its sallow tint changed, under his father's eyes, to a sickly drab. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were better likened to a butterfly, with its wings closed, and only the more or less drab outside showing. The veldt, somewhat uniform and colourless, with its surrounding hills, is the butterfly with its wings closed. Enter the wide hole in the ground, beside the hidden lake, and descend the rough natural staircase of rocky boulders, to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling as of death—the death of the soul—stirred in his heart. His thoughts no longer even beat vainly for escape. The end was near, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Her manner showed severe disapproval of this girl so lost to the feelings of her sex as to have attempted murder. That she was young and pretty made matters worse. Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the hollow of ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... were coming too easy, persisted through his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small house behind the store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the reason ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... know why they do not change the time of it; but I presume they are wise enough to feel that it would be useless. A similar attempt on the part of the Pennsylvania Quakers merely disturbed the operations of nature, but did not save the drab bonnets from the annual wetting. There is a subtle connection between such gatherings and the gathering of what are called the elements,—a sympathetic connection, which we shall, no doubt, one day understand, when we have collected facts enough on the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tawny color, and just enough motion to make things frolicsome and lively. Add to these an approaching sunset of unusual splendor, a broad tumble of clouds, with much golden haze and profusion of beaming shaft and dazzle. In the midst of all, in the clear drab of the afternoon light, there steamed up the river the large new boat, the Wenonah, as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along, all trim and white, covered with flags, transparent red and blue streaming out in the breeze. Only a new ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... homespun drab and gray Drew round his board on Monthly Meeting day, Genial, half ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... how you begin?' Robert looked round the room, but he got no ideas from the faded green curtains, or the drab Venetian blinds, or the worn brown oil-cloth on the floor. Even the new carpet suggested nothing, though its pattern was a very wonderful one, and always seemed as though it were just going to ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... mummy; maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark; Root of hemlock, digg'd i' the dark; Liver of blaspheming Jew; Gall of goat; and slips of yew, Silver'd in the moon's eclipse; Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips; Finger of birth-strangled babe, Ditch delivered by a drab,— Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... scaled and tailed, And drab as a dead man's hand. We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees Or trailed through the mud and sand, Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet, Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... coquette. Her fancy turns from pearl to green, to amber, to pink, to blue and gold and rose, an inexhaustible wardrobe. She blushes, she frowns, she hesitates; she is like a woman in love. She casts abroad her dewy jewels on the leaves, the blades of grass, the tangled laces of the spiders, the drab cold stones. She ruffles the clouds on the face of the sleeping waters; she sweeps through the forests with a low whispering sound, taking a tithe of the resinous perfumes. Always and always she decks herself for the coming ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, when reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall* ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... her shyly and looked quickly away. This girl was not like any woman he had known. Most of them were drab creatures with the spirit washed out of them. His sister had been an exception. She had had plenty of vitality, good looks and pride, but the somber shadow of her environment had not made for gayety. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... there for the Volucella to disguise herself as a wasp? Any fly, whether clad in drab or motley, is admitted to the burrow directly she makes herself useful to the community. The mimicry of the bumblebee fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere childish notion. Patient observation, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion! Fie upon't! foh!—About, my brain! I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... deciding to feed his stomach before I really tried to convince him. "It all comes under the heading of the drab, routine duties of a housewife. Come on ...
— Sorry: Wrong Dimension • Ross Rocklynne
... indignation in the pleasant breeze which had sprung up, he was aware of a dense crowd proceeding toward him. It was headed by an individual who shone out against the drab background like a good deed in a naughty world. Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time, and this was one of the strangest that Roland's bulging eyes had ever rested upon. He was a large, stout man, comfortably clad in a suit of white linen, relieved by a scarlet ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... at their watches, and put them back again without remark to resume the interrupted contemplation of Fifth Avenue in the waning light of a drab, drizzly day. A man in a shiny "slicker" was pushing a sweep and shovel in the centre of the thoroughfare. They wondered how long it would be before a ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... Yes, drab was the word. I am shocked to say it, but the duties of a historian are stern: and the word ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... way. Once more we sped down that devious river, now swirling under the shadow of a steep bank, now steering around a sandspit. The scenery was hideous to me, bluffs of clay with pines peeping over their rims, willow-fringed flats, swamps of niggerhead, ugly drab ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... crack of the iron casket. Mr. Beale's eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified as a "drab." Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him, her heart would be wrung. That was all he asked for, the wringing of her heart. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the useful, of the improvable by economic science; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "4. Drab-colored, impure limestone with fibrous cavities; the 'magnesian deposit of Vanuxem.' Of these, the third is the only one that has yielded gypsum in profitable quantities. The included masses of gypsum, though, for the most part, even-bedded at their base, are usually ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... unaffected pity) made his exit from this wicked world, and where you see the hangman smoking his pipe as he reclines on the gibbet and views the hills of Harrow or Hampstead beyond—a splendid marble arch, a vast and modern city—clean, airy, painted drab, populous with nursery-maids and children, the abodes of wealth and comfort—the elegant, the prosperous, the polite Tyburnia rises, the most respectable district in the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were the significant clouds, fleecy white clouds for the most part, but all deepening to a heavy, gray density. At any moment they might obscure that ruddy light and pour out their dismal measure of discomfort, turning the world from a smiling day-dream to a nightmare of drab regret. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... scarlet. As I stood one day in the Place de Meir in Antwerp and watched a regiment of mud-bespattered guides clatter past, it was hard to believe that I was living in the twentieth century and not in the beginning of the nineteenth, for instead of serviceable uniforms of grey or drab or khaki, these men wore the befrogged green jackets, the cherry-coloured breeches, and the huge fur busbies which characterized the ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... narrow window frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,—a ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Bodmin immediately asked him to dinner. Mr Tremayne declined the majority of the invitations; but he accepted that from Bradmond, which included his family also. So he, in a brown velvet suit, and Custance in the gravest drab, and Arbel with some bright blue ribbons neutralising her sober "sad-coloured" dress, and Robin, whose cap bore a white feather stuck in it in a style not suggestive of Quakerism, walked up to Bradmond ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... faded into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... meet for sports was held in the afternoon before the sale, and was voted by all to be a great success. It is a far cry from the days when games were introduced here by the Mission. Then the people's lives were so drab, and they had little idea of the sporting qualities which every Englishman values so highly. In those early days if in a game of football one side kicked a goal, they had to wait till the other had done the same before the game could proceed, or the play ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... fellow-passengers were taking their fill of the good cheer afforded. Two of the number, dressed like the rest in blue flannel shirts, with trousers of lighter hue and heavier make, fanning their heated faces with their drab, broad-brimmed campaign hats, swung off the rear end of the objectionable car, and, with a quick glance about them, started briskly down the track to where the "diner" and certain sleepers of the Southern Pacific ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... Great Coat, with holes in elbows, moved the second resolution—seconded by Greasy Drab Breeches ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... causeless hatreds rise, And daily where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; 'Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear: He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian's five-foot sword, nor rascal's stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all blockheads have ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... founded in 1808, was incorrectly styled the Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... hand, thinking gratefully of her sister Mary who in addition to her work as superintendent of the neighborhood public school, supervised the household at 7 Madison Street. Hotel rooms were cold and drab, the food was uninviting, and only occasionally did she find to her delight "a Christian cup of coffee."[316] She often felt that the Lyceum Bureau drove her unnecessarily hard, routed her inefficiently, and profited too generously from her labors. Now and then she ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... attracted by nothing except brilliant color, and others who have heard so much of the vulgarity of 'high lights' and gaudy hues, that they will tolerate nothing but brown trees, russet grass, gray skies, slate rocks, drab gowns, copper skins, and shadows so deep that the discovery of the objects represented becomes a real game of 'hide and go seek.' There are also the timidly modest, who, although aware of their own preferences, are yet afraid to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I say the fabric Was wrought of faery woof, Not made in walls of drab brick Nor won with mortal oof; Delicate, dream-like, pretty As sunshine after rain, Worn by Miss Hodgson ("Kitty")— It seems a dreadful pity She spilled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... long after everybody had gone to the north, coiled dismally over the fanlike roof of dirty glass that sheltered a blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time. The ugly drab curtains in the drawing-room smelled of the moth-powder in which they had been wrapped through the summer heat. The imitation lace drapery underneath them had been torn and not mended. Bits of thick brown paper pasted ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Thrala let fall her drab cloak, stood with arms outstretched in the crater land. Her sparkling robe sheathed her in glory and she sang softly, rapt in her own delight. Then Dandtan put his arm about her; she clung to him, staring about as might a ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... that are gifted with the sweetest of songs. In the bed of the Morogoro River lives a warbler who sings from the late afternoon until dusk, and he is one of the very few birds that have that deep contralto note, the "Jug" of the nightingale. And there are little wrens with drab bodies and crimson tails that live beside the dwellings of men and pick up crumbs from the doors of our tents, and hunt the rose trees for insects. In the thorn bushes of higher altitudes are grey finches that might ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... breasts, the mouth resolute and determined. She had now the fine expectation of her youth, her health, her optimism, her ignorance of the world. When these things left her she would perhaps be a yet plainer woman. In her dress she was not clever. Her clothes were ugly with the coarse drab grey of their material and the unskilful workmanship that had created them. And yet there would be some souls who would see in her health, her youth, the kind sympathy of her eyes and mouth, the high nobility of her forehead from which her hair ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... past tobacco factories, breweries, powder mills, scattered hovels, and unkempt streets. Here was no sun, but plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull brown with the mud of recent rain. Not even the inhabitants were attractive. They were not garbed as Serbs, but wore ungainly costumes that might have passed unnoticed in the Bowery. He was irresistibly reminded of ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... drab, middle-aged type of revery, and youth might show more life and color; but the linkages between one thought and the next are typical of any revery. The linkages belong in the category of "facts previously observed". I had previously observed the ownership of this dog by my neighbor, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... appeared, brought not as usual by the footman, in scarlet and drab, but by the old butler, in threadbare but well-brushed black, who, as he was placing it on the table, said—'If you please, Sir Christopher, there's the widow Hartopp a-crying i' the still room, and begs leave to ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... sovereign brought in by a revolution. They made a favourite of Courtenay, but they desired to marry him to the queen, not to Elizabeth: Gardiner told the young earl that he would sooner see him the husband of the vilest drab who could be picked out of the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... the meantime, had come down from the woods and entered upon her duties in the mill office. The change from her dull, drab life, giving her, as it did, an opportunity for companionship with people of greater mentality and refinement than she had been used to, quickly brought about a swift transition in the girl's nature. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... curiously wrought lintels of the massive marble front, and exclaimed: "Upon my soul, gentlemen, it is so grand I begin to fear I shall not be comfortable in it." He had scarcely concluded this sentence, when a distinguished politician, habited in soiled drab trousers and a shabby brown dress coat, and a badly collapsed hat, which he wore well down over his eyes, rushed eagerly out, and was followed by a mellow faced policeman, with a green patch over his left eye and a club in his right hand. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... rising, rock-covered slope that led to the base of Quill's Window. On all sides were great, flat slabs of stone, some of them almost buried in the earth, others sticking their jagged points up above the brush and weeds. Back in ages dim these drab, moss-covered rocks had been sliced from the side of the towering mound by the forces that shaped the earth, to be hurled hither and thither with the calm disdain of the mighty. No human agency had blasted them from their insecure hold on the shoulders of the cliff. Uncounted ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... and preserved as specimens of the English for his highness's museum," said Ned, quietly, as he carefully drew the skin of a lovely blue and drab thrush over its skull. ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the lower ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... 191-, Clement J. Cleggett walked sedately into the news room of the New York Enterprise with a drab-colored walking-stick in his hand. He stood the cane in a corner, changed his sober street coat for a more sober office jacket, adjusted a green eyeshade below his primly brushed grayish hair, unostentatiously sat down ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... having no connections outside of Paul and two sisters, one of whom was then out of the city. The other, owing to various difficulties of her own and a temporary estrangement from us—more our fault than hers—was therefore not available. The rather drab state into which she had allowed her marital affections to lead her was the main reason that kept us apart. At any rate I felt that I could not, or rather would not, go there. At the same time, owing to some difficulty or irritation with the publishing house of which ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... crudely to give in, bundle down the pulpit stairs and bolt, was contemptibly great. His eyesight played tricks on him. Below there, in the body of the church, the rows of faces ran together into irregular pink blots spread meaninglessly above the brown of the oaken pews, the brown, drab, and black, too, of their owners' Sunday best. Here and there a child's light frock or white hat intruded upon the prevailing neutral tints; as did, in a startling manner, Damaris Verity's russet-red ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... promised indulgence, and the indulgence of his sentimental tastes. I will do the fellow the justice to say that he was not a hypocrite. He firmly believed both in himself and his ideas—especially the former. He pushed both hands through the long wisps of his drab-colored hair, and threw his head back until his wide nostrils resembled a ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... party capes and tulle mists of head dresses began to appear between the drab or tattered suits of the bystanders. Among the coming reception guests was Susan Mitchell, co-editor with George Russell on The ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... shopping carts. No advertisements of motherhood, or children, or children's things were in the newspapers or magazines. They were forbidden subjects—too dangerously emotional to touch. Laughter and shrill young voices had vanished from the earth to be replaced by the drab grayness of silence and waiting. Death had laid cold hands upon the hearts of mankind and the survivors ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... young man with spectacles, a large hat, drab gaiters, and a notebook, sat late that night with a copy of the "Times" before him, and a pencil which he rattled nervously between his teeth in the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of L300 per annum who commonly appeared in a plain drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jockey cap, and rarely without boots. His travels never exceeded the distance of the county town, and that only at assize or session time, or to attend an election. Once a week he commonly dined at the next market town ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... and down a long, stone-flagged corridor, with drab-coloured doors on either side, each marked with a number. Some of them were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with tingling nerves. He was reassured to catch a glimpse of cheery fires, lines of white-counterpaned beds, and a profusion of coloured texts upon ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... brighten up Ansdore. She disliked seeing the place with no colour or ornament save that which the marsh wind gave it of gold and rust. She would have the eaves and the pipes painted a nice green, such as would show up well at a distance. There was plenty of money, so why should everything be drab? Alce discouraged her as well as he was able—it was the wrong time of year for painting, and the old paint was still quite good. Joanna treated his objections as she had treated his proposal—with good-humoured, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... "duster." Having exhausted the usual commonplace topics in the course of a monologue that induced no reaction whatever, he voiced a perfectly natural remark about the wonder of sudden riches. He was, in a way, thinking aloud of the changes wrought in drab lives like the Briskows' by the discovery of oil. He was ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... hard-headed, self-satisfied, smooth, narrow egotist. Mr. Taylor contrives to present his person as clearly as his character, and we smell hypocrisy in the sweet scent of marjoram that hangs about him, see selfishness in his heavy face and craft in the quiet gloss of his drab broadcloth, and hear obstinacy in his studied step. He is the most odious character in the book, what is bad in him being separated by such fine differences from what is very good in others. We have even more regard for Alfred Barton, who, though a coward, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... one or two and twenty, tall and well-built, although he walked with a slouching gait. He wore corduroy trousers fastened round the waist by a narrow strap, and a blue shirt, with an unbuttoned jacket of fustian. On his head was a limp-brimmed, dirty, drab felt hat, and in his left hand he carried a red handkerchief, which apparently contained all his possessions, and in his right a stout stick which had been obviously cut from a hedge. His hair was extremely short and black, but he could not have ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... beauties as these to produce children for us to keep."—"Beauties, indeed! your ladyship is pleased to be merry," answered Scout.—"Mr Adams described her so to me," said the lady. "Pray, what sort of dowdy is it, Mr Scout?"—"The ugliest creature almost I ever beheld; a poor dirty drab, your ladyship never saw such a wretch."—"Well, but, dear Mr Scout, let her be what she will, these ugly women will bring children, you know; so that we must prevent the marriage."—"True, madam," replied Scout, "for the subsequent marriage co-operating with the law will carry law into ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... in fact, she had been of that unchangeable, drab quality in emotional affairs which is characteristic of advanced middle-age, when there are no great joys or sorrows to look back on, and no expectation for the future. She had always had something of the indestructible quality of frail things like thistledown or cottonwool; ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... away, not giving Tom time to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches, drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... that a chaste life would secure, a poor recompense for dreary days and months. She realised the length and the colour of the time—grey week after grey week, blank month after blank month, void year after void year! And she always getting a little older, getting older in a drab, lifeless time, in a lifeless life, a weary life filled with intolerable craving! She had endured it once, a feeling as if she wanted to go mad.... ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Messrs. Jarrold & Sons published page for page reprints of Targum and The Talisman. They were issued together in one volume, bound in light drab-coloured paper boards, with white paper back-label, and were accompanied by the following ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the North-East Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colourless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the grey or the drab. Yet he will explain, in serious official documents, that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master-race and the inferior-race." The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument; and ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... the head—fit for boggy land; blue, ribbed, woollen stockings; knee-breeches of some home-made stuff: all the coarser cloth they wore, and they wore little else, was shorn from their own sheep, and spun, woven, and made at home; an old blue dress coat with bright buttons; a drab waistcoat which had once been yellow; and to crown all, a red woollen nightcap, hanging down on one ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... it was there were nights when I could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in this accursed life; and there—somewhere lost to me—things were happening—momentous, terrible things . . . I lived at nights—my days, my waking days, this life I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting, the cover ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... no matter what it cheers or destroys. It always laughs. There is no melancholy note in it, no drab, dull color of death such as the flood comes tainted with. Even while it eats away our homes and possessions, it has a certain comfort in its touch and glow if we ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... ran curling along the ground like smoke. The little party was unusual in walking; glances of uncomprehending pity were cast at them from victorias and landaus that rolled past. Even the convalescent British soldiers facing each other in the clumsy drab cart drawn by humped bullocks, and marked Garrison Dispensary, stared at the black-skirts so near the powder of the road. The Sisters in front walked with their heads slightly bent toward one another; they seemed to be consulting. Hilda reflected, looking at them, that they always ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the marching order. Fife and drum struck up a lively air and to its strains the feet of Yerba Buena's first invading army kept uncertain step as sailors and marines toiled through the sand. Half a thousand feet above them stood the quaint adobe customs house, its red-tiled roof and drab adobe walls contrasting pleasantly with the surrounding greenery of terraced hills. Below it lay the Plaza with its flagpole, its hitching racks for ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... from the Gamma Psi dance at Delmonico's except for several chorus girls from a midnight revue who sat at a side table and wished they'd taken off a little more make-up after the show. Here and there a drab, mouse-like figure, desperately out of place, watched the butterflies with a weary, puzzled curiosity. But the drab figure was the exception. This was the morning after May Day, and celebration ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... approved fashion of the short story in this country. So Harry Anable Kniffin's "The Tribute" weaves in 1,700 words a legend about the Unknown Soldier and makes emotionally vivid the burial of Tommy Atkins. Commonplace types regarded in the past as insufficiently drab, on the one hand, and insufficiently picturesque on the other are reflected in this new romantic treatment. Sarah Addington's "Another Cactus Blooms" prophesies colour in that hard and prickly plant the provincial ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... for their plumage and were not timid. After two days of familiarity with the boat they were willing to let me approach within twenty yards before finally taking wing. The coloring, in this land of drab grays and browns, was a delight to the eye. The head is white, the beak black, the neck white shading into salmon-pink; the body pinkish white on the back, the breast white, and the tail salmon-pink. The wings are salmon-pink in front, but the tips and the under-parts are ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... so many hogsheads of tobacco the head. So notorious was this, that it became one of the jokes of contemporary playwrights, not only that men bankrupt in purse and character were "food for the Plantations," (and this before the settlement of New England,) but also that any drab would suffice to wive such pitiful adventurers. "Never choose a wife as if you were going to Virginia," says Middleton in one of his comedies. The mule is apt to forget all but the equine side of his pedigree. How early the counterfeit nobility of the Old Dominion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... to life in London, is drab, monotonous, and depressed. I am not, of course, comparing life there with that of the rich here, but with that of the average working-class family. When it is realized that the highest wages are about fifteen ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... a Sunday afternoon one beholds some weird and wonderful costumes. On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a Kensington suburb I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a little Cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of his breed. He was presumably going to church, for he carried a large Testament under his arm. He wore, among other ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... wide-mouthed, under-sized, broad-shouldered, square-made, thin-flanked woodsman, so well known afterwards by all Scott's friends as he waited for his master in his green shooting-jacket, white hat, and drab trousers. Scott first made Tom Purdie's acquaintance in his capacity as judge, the man being brought before him for poaching, at the time that Scott was living at Ashestiel. Tom gave so touching an account of his circumstances—work scarce—wife and children in want—grouse abundant—and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... may get a glimpse of the Teutonic Christmas in the half-German streets round Fitzroy Square. They are bald and drab enough, but at Christmas here and there a window shines with a lighted tree, and the very prosaic Lutheran church in Cleveland Street has an unwonted sight to show—two great fir-trees decked with white candles, standing one on each side of the pulpit. The church of the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... imagination; and that solemn quiet of which the tomb is ever jealous pressed down sadly upon the living. Through the yellow panes at the back of the high altar came a glow suggesting sunshine, baffling the drab of the sky outside; and down in the crypt itself the misty blue was as ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with gold buckles, strode along, while Cato, dressed in some of the Squire's old clothes, walked close behind him like his shadow. You would have thought my master ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... hack and went about my business, and it was in this hack—this immortal, historical hack—that the curious thing I speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier, with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been used for a great many Irish funerals. It is possible I took a nap; I had been traveling all night, and though I was excited with my errand, I felt the want of sleep. At all events I woke up suddenly, ...
— The American • Henry James
... the Lump. The Lump and the sea were made for one another. I look to see him an admiral one of these days. It is time that England had a red-headed admiral; I'm tired of these refined, drab-haired ones. It is my patriotic duty to give him a taste ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... woman's figure in front had induced this thought. Her walk seemed oddly familiar, and when she turned the corner for which he was bound, his heart began to beat. He hastened on to the corner to make certain. Yes! It was Irene; he could not mistake her walk in that little drab street. She threaded two more turnings, and from the last corner he saw her enter her block of flats. To make sure of her now, he ran those few paces, hurried up the stairs, and caught her standing at her door. He heard the latchkey in the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... old white coat had some foundation in fact, but not much. He did wear a light drab overcoat when I first saw him, with the full pockets spreading out on each side. As it suited him he wore it many years afterward, and when it was quite worn out he had another one made just like it which he wore many years more. I doubt if he ever had more than two of these famous garments, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... footman, looking very quaint and queer in his livery coat, drab breeches, and white stockings, came to invite me to the table, where I found Mr. B. and his sisters and guests sitting at the fruit and wine. There were port, sherry, madeira, and one bottle of claret, all very good; but they take here much ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Plaskwith was a short, stout man, in drab-coloured breeches, and gaiters to match; a black coat and waistcoat; he wore a large watch-chain, with a prodigious bunch of seals, alternated by small keys and old-fashioned mourning-rings. His complexion was pale and ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... detective begins his career he will carry a virgin drab-coloured diary in his breast pocket, wherein he will be expected to record every moment spent on duty, every penny he spends. If any illusion remains in his mind that he will be turned loose on the ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... after the coachman entered to take his dram, followed by the guard; a more lamentable spectacle of condensed moisture cannot be conceived; the rain fell from the entire circumference of his broad-brimmed hat, like the ever-flowing drop from the edge of an antique fountain; his drab-coat had become a deep orange hue, while his huge figure loomed still larger, as he stood amid a nebula of damp, that would have made an atmosphere for the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... the fineness of the silky robe. Like the others this was made of one piece, loosely fitting, but its bright vivid scarlet made the first seem drab and dull. A belt of metal about his waist shone like gold and matched the emblem of precious metal in the turban ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... above the hips—which I flatter myself no one but myself and my friend Mr. Cooke really do understand. The vapid smoothness of the door dummy, my lard, should be confined to the regions of the Strand. Mr. Elliot, where are you? Just be so good as to show his lardship that lovely new thing in drab and blue fonce. Ah! your lardship can't wait.—Now, my good woman, is this ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured by manganese. The greater part of the old city was built of this alabaster-like[EN34] ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... the pier, but I was almost delirious by this time. The last part of the trip was all one drab, dull nightmare to me. This evening my hands were so swollen I was forced to the extremity of bribing a friend to hold the telephone receiver for me when ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... to have gone instead into his thought and his expression of it—as if the very fact that fate forced him to remain a looker-on had made him the more sensitive to the beauty, the joy, the challenge in everything life gave him to look at. He could wrest romance even out of the drear, drab hospital—there is another characteristic glimpse in one of Stevenson's letters, a picture of Henley sitting up in his hospital bed, his hair and beard all tangled, "talking as cheerfully as if he had been in a ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... offering presents. They sat on the ground in the refulgent meridian sun, and when I dismounted to walk to the shade of a tree, to partake of their hospitality, they would exhort me to shun the shade, (lie e drab'k elbird) for fear it should give me cold. 245 These Bedouin[171] Arabs of Suse and Sahara are the descendants of the ancient Arabs, whose bold and figurative language is the same that was spoken in Arabia twelve centuries ago, in the ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... manner, because they supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ladies foul Murther's a horrible Sin Of one Handsome without, tho' a Coxcomb within; For not being a Beau, the sad Fate of poor Crab, Tho' himself hang'd for Love, was a Jest to each Drab; Then may Jering live long, And may Risby among The Fair with Jack Barkley, and Culpepper throng: May no Ruffin whose Heart as hard as a Stone is, Kill any of those for a ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... the threshold of the room, making a low reverence, which has been interpreted for some centuries into "dinner waits," Mr. Wharton, clad in a dress of drab, bedecked with enormous buttons, advanced formally to Miss Singleton, and bending his powdered head nearly to the level of the hand he extended, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... better dat I should be her mother," the word, on her lips, was surprisingly sweet, "den I will do—anyt'ing!" All at once she broke into phrases that were foreign to Rose-Marie, phrases spoken lovingly in some almost forgotten tongue. And the girl knew that she was quite forgotten—that the drab woman was dreaming over some youthful hope, was voicing tenderly the promises of a long dead yesterday, and was making an impassioned pledge to her small daughter and to the future! The words that she spoke might be in the language ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... for far in the air above the wonderful White Cliff rise in places six hundred feet of drab shales and chocolate limestones intermixed with crimsons whose escaping dye drips in broad vertical streaks across the glistening white. And even above that, in places, lie remnants of the mottled, many-colored beds of St. Elmo shales and limestones in whose embrace, a few hundred miles away, lie ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... reality was no less fascinating: the white sails of the fishermen winging across the sapphire waters, leaving ribboned pathways behind that crossed and recrossed like a chart of the stars; proud white pleasure-yachts, great vessels from all ports in the world; and an occasional battle-ship, drab and stealthy. And the hundred pink and white villages, the jade and amethyst of the near and far islands, the smiling terraces above the city, the ruined temples, the grim giant ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the relatively drab sunsets of Terra, simply couldn't take his eyes from the spectacle that covered the whole western half of the sky—high clouds streaming away from the daylight zone to the west and lighted from below by the sun. There were more clouds coming in at ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved street, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings, with the inevitable battlements-the same, only worse, was ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and conditions of men were these passers-by. Earthling sailors, white, negro, Chinese and Eurasian, most of them in the drab blue of space-ship crews, but each with a ray-gun strapped to his waist; short, thin-faced Venusians, shifty-eyed, cunning, with the planet's universal weapon, the skewer-blade, sheathed at their sides; ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... simple, consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they came nearly up to the man's armpits, and covered his back and chest, while the braces he wore were short in the extreme. To finish the description of an ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... public places, no more tryings of new cafes. Mr. Dosson used to look sometimes as he had looked of old when George Flack "located" them somewhere—as if he expected to see their heated benefactor rush back to them with his drab overcoat flying in the wind; but this appearance usually and rather touchingly subsided. He at any rate missed Gaston because Gaston had this winter so often ordered his dinner for him; and his society was not, to make it up, sought by the ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... like a bow, leaning on a staff; hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed on her face, having her limbs trembling with the palsy, going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her Pater-noster, and yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab. If she hath learned of an old wife, in a chimney-end, Pax, Max, Fax, for a spell, or can say Sir John Grantham's curse for the miller's eels, 'All ye that have stolen the miller's eels, Laudate dominum de coelis: and all they ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... roof. From here the keen eyes of Hildebrand Anne, Baron of Ardrochan, scanned often the countryside, looking for travelling merchants or wandering knights; while his gallant steed Black Rudolph, whose coat was drab and dingy, waited saddled and bridled below, and Blazer the bloodhound sniffed about the burn hard by. Blazer had a weakness for rats quite uncommon ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... sort of a man was he: Straight when it hurt him a lot to be; Times when a lie would have paid him well, No matter the cost, the truth he'd tell; An' he'd rather go down to a drab defeat Than save himself if ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest
... the tall water oaks near the little cabin was a most welcome sight. The house stood only a few feet from a spur of railroad track but the small yard was enclosed by a luxurious green hedge. Roses predominated among the many varieties of flowers in evidence on the otherwise drab premises. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... the schools and the town to carry his clever brush to the welcome of a wider world, without a word or a thought of thanks for the creature who had worshipped and waited upon him hand and foot; and then I saw her life from day to day unroll its long monotonous folds, all in the same pattern, all drab duty and joyless sacrifice, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... to none of them was there conviction. They had all arrived either on Wednesday or Thursday. Two couples were still in occupation of their rooms, but neither of these were at home. Late in the afternoon I reduced my list by eliminating a young man in drab, with side whiskers and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, of thirty or more, of consciously ladylike type. I was disgusted at the sight of them; the other two young people had gone for a long walk, and though I ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... into weeks, and these in turn into months. Simiti, drab and shabby, a crumbling and abandoned relique of ancient Spanish pride and arrogance, drowsed undisturbed in the ardent embrace of the tropical sun. Don Jorge returned, unsuccessful, from his long quest in the San Lucas ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... for some woollen gloves. I had never seen the person (who was rather striking) before, and I watched him rather attentively while Miss Matty listened to the shopman. The stranger wore a blue coat with brass buttons, drab breeches, and gaiters, and drummed with his fingers on the counter until he was attended to. When he answered the shop-boy's question, "What can I have the pleasure of showing you to-day, sir?" ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of the road, as if resting and meditating at one and the same time. Being pretty sure that he recognized his uncle in that venerable figure, Festus came forward stealthily, till he was immediately above the old man's back. The latter was clothed in faded nankeen breeches, speckled stockings, a drab hat, and a coat which had once been light blue, but from exposure as a scarecrow had assumed the complexion and fibre of a dried pudding-cloth. The farmer was, in fact, returning to the hall, which he had left in the morning some time later than his nephew, to seek an asylum in a hollow ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... of them. And yet they are all. They decorate our life for us. They are the gracious figures on the drab wall which lies on this side of our common grave. They lead a sort of ritual dance, that most of us have agreed to take seriously. It is a very binding agreement with which sincerity and good faith and honour have ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... went. There was no scarcity of young fellows in olive drab. The place was thick with 'em. Squads were drillin' every way you looked, and out in the center of the field, where two or three hundred new ambulances were lined up, more squads were studyin' the insides of the motor, or practicin' loadin' in stretchers. Hundreds and hundreds ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... bankrupt at once, for this liability is a ton weight at least. When I came in I found your fire out, and I had it lit again, and made that sulky drab of a servant stay and blow at it with the bellows till it had burnt up properly; now, say ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... beyond Foy, the land openeth a large sandie drab Bay, for the Sea to ouer-flow, which, and the village adioyning, are therethrough aptly termed Trewardreth, in English, The Sandie towne. Elder times, of more deuotion then knowledge, here founded a religious house, which, in King Henrie the eights raigne, vnderwent ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... when he let Cliff into his room at five o'clock in the evening, which meant after the lights were on in the quiet hallways of the Alexandria, and the streets were all aglow. Cliff looked, if not like a hunter, at least picturesque in high, laced boots and olive-drab trousers and coat that ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... great deal. From time to time I stole a look at my companion. His coat was black, and so was his waistcoat; neckcloth he had none, his strong full throat being bare above the snow-white shirt. He wore drab-coloured knee-breeches, grey worsted stockings (I thought I knew the maker), and strong-nailed shoes. He carried his hat in his hand, as if he liked to feel the coming breeze lifting his hair. After a while, I saw that the ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the bishop returned, "is, if you will permit the observation, somewhat extraordinary. For you propose, I gather, to make of her a camp-follower, a soldier's drab. Come, come, messire! you and I are conversant with warfare as it is. Armies do not conduct encounters by throwing sugar-candy at one another. What home have you, a landless man, to offer Melicent? What place is there for ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... furniture was entitled to that designation. Across one corner of the room stood a tall white monument composed of glazed tiles laid in mortar, built into the room as a chimney might have been, with a hidden flue in the rear connecting it with the wall. A drab cornice and plaster ornaments of the same color set off the four or five feet above the mantel which surrounded it, and a brass door, about ten inches by twelve, was in the middle front of the part below. On the mantel were disposed sundry ornaments, ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... which the impressive grandeur of Household uniforms with attendant cuirasses, bear-skins, scarlet and bullion, dwarfed into insignificance. The front of the Asiatic line was crested with fluttering lance pennons, and beneath these flags were stalwart frames in vermillion, rich orange, purple-drab, French-grey, and gold-tipped navy-blue, dressed shoulder to shoulder, making a nether border of ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... herded us down the stairs; The Seraph making only one step at a time, led the way. Far down the drab vista of the back stairs that ended in the scullery, Mary Ellen's red, round face was seen for a moment, like a second rising sun, but vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, at a ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... a room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men, some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly—a squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy corners ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... of the dining-room she stopped aghast. The walls had been distempered a particularly hideous drab; the curtains were mustard yellow; the carpet was a dull brown; the mottled marble mantelpiece, for which she had been intending to substitute one in walnut wood with tiles, still shone in slabs of petrified ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... rough within, but smooth or burnished surface, self- coloured (drab or brown), or intentionally coloured black (by charred matter in the clay, or by a smoky fire), or red (by a clear fire, sometimes aided by a wash or 'slip' of more ferruginous clay). Sometimes a black ware is 'overfired' ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... stands slightly ajar. Amanda Danby is there alone. She is sitting in the master's big chair with a volume of poems in her hand—forgetting the party, forgetting that she has laboriously smoothed her curly hair for the occasion, forgetting that she is wearing her precious drab merino—her mother's wedding gown—now made over for the fourth time, forgetting the new collar and pretty blue bow at her throat (Dorry's gifts), conscious ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Mentioning this to a friend of large experience, he told me that he had known several instances where the eggs of the two kinds had been found laid in the same nest. The eggs are, of course, easily distinguishable, those of the common partridge being of a greenish drab colour, while those of the red-leg are of a dull, cream colour, covered with small brown spots. I have been informed by another authority that the eggs of the red-leg have also been found in the nest of an outlying pheasant. {39} A curious provision of nature, conducing to the preservation of the ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... a voice from the bottom of one of the long mugs at a street breakfast stall, which the fog almost concealed from their view, and presently an urchin in a drab coat and blue collar came towing a wretched, ewe-necked, hungry-looking, roan rosinante along from where he had been regaling himself with a mug of undeniable bohea, sweetened with a composition of ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... that helps"—something that will strengthen men and women to fight down their lower nature, that will convince them that their higher nature is a reality, and that will give them a living sense of companionship in their difficult lives—lives often as drab and depressing as ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... it be possible to look at it while you were seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour out of all beauty?" She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old sugar tongs she ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... dyed in a bath made with 1 lb. (p. 194) Quinoline Yellow, 1 lb. Azo Fuchsine G, 1/4 lb. Fast Green Bluish, 10 lb. Glauber's salt, and 2 lb. sulphuric acid. By using about half the above quantities of dye-stuffs a drab effect shot ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... because classes and callings were so sharply differentiated—each with its own characteristic manners, dialect, dress—that the surface of society presented a rich variety of colour, in contrast with the drab uniformity of modern life. Perhaps to Scott the ideal life was that of a feudal baron, dwelling in a Gothic mansion, surrounded by retainers and guests, keeping open house, and going a-hunting; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... goes as a governess at the end of a delightful visit with her friend Amelia Sedley, on leaving Miss Pinkerton's school. The Sedley carriage takes her to Sir Pitt's door. "When the bell was rung a head appeared between the interstices of the dining-room shutters, and the door was opened by a man in drab breeches and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old neckcloth lashed round his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of twinkling gray eyes, and a ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... efforts of the local member of Parliament, and the style of architecture varies directly with the square of his popularity with the party in power. Thus a flourishing full-strength battalion may be housed in a dingy, drab wooden structure, and in the next town a very ornate and modern building may be tenanted by a corps that is only struggling for existence, or perhaps not even struggling. It is well, however, to refrain from too much criticism of these buildings, pretentious and hideous as they may be, for in ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... confined for life, had a most singular head, such as one, indeed, as I never before saw on a human body. It was immensely large at the base, and appeared perfectly round, while at the crown it rose to a point like a sugar-loaf. He was of a dull, drab-coloured complexion, with large prominent eyes of a pale green colour; his expression, the most repulsively cruel and sinister. The eye involuntarily singled him out among all his comrades, as something ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... of deciding great issues. Four weeks ago he was something of a piece of mechanism, fairly content with his drab-colored life; and now a girl had entered it and brought to him visions too fair and beautiful to be viewed unveiled, and he knew at last the mystery and power of love. Almost a week of her stay had gone before he met her. In those that followed, ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the act of love was once deemed a sacred rite, and that I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... materials should be selected with due regard to the species of garment and the tone of the complexion. If the face be of that faint drab which your friends would designate pallid, and your enemies sallow, a coat of pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... street. Weston, lanky and erect, moved with a masterful stride, not unlike the lean and keen-witted setter that flashed to and fro over the road before him. At his side was the girl, a slender body in drab, tossing her hat gayly about at the end of its long string. They passed the store and the mill, and at the bend were lost to my view. They seemed to find themselves such good company! Even Tim, so fine and ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... an ignoble task with black and broken finger-nails. If longing could have worked the miracle, thus at this hour would Stella Ballantyne have sat and worked, all the colour of her faded to a hideous drab, all the grace of her withered. Mrs. Pettifer turned away with so abrupt a movement and so disordered a face that Robert asked her if ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... work in the book. How admirable is the description; "a tall, thin man with a sandy-coloured head, inclined to baldness, and a face in which solemn importance was blended with a look of unfathomable profundity. He was dressed in a long, brown surtout, with a black cloth waistcoat and drab trousers. A double eye-glass dangled at his waistcoat, and on his head he wore a very low-crowned hat with a broad rim." Every touch is delightful—although all is literal the literalness is all humour. As when Pott, to recreate his ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... himself came on board with some of his attendants. The meeting between himself and his queen was affecting; she, not having been to their country-seat since the death of the young prince, was quite overcome. His Majesty was dressed in a light mixed suit, with drab buskins buttoned to the knee, white boots, and a drab felt hat, with about two inches of crape on it. His buskins, setting off his fine form, gave him a very noble appearance. Indeed, he seemed to feel himself every inch a king. After the queen had become somewhat ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... Insular Tobacco Company and of the Oriente Hotel. These buildings are the finest modern structures in Manila. Carriages are waiting in the street in front of the hotel, and at the entrance may be seen a group of army officers in khaki uniform, in white and gold, or—very much more modern—olive drab. The dining-room is entered through the rustling bead-work curtain. Here the Chinese waiters, in long gowns glide ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... bare elbows, I saw on most days of the week a slim young woman airing herself—a pale-faced, curling-papered, half-bodiced, unwashed drab of a girl, who would have had shame written across her for any one to read if she had not seemed of all women I have ever seen the least shamefaced. Her brows were as unwritten as a child's, her smile as pure as a seraph's, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... be as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields. She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... slumbers. Suddenly he awoke, and dismal groans and unearthly rumblings struck his terrified ear. "Sally! Sally!" said he, leaping from bed and giving his sleeping spouse a vigorous shake, "why sleepest thou? arise and don thy drab camlet and high-crowned cap, and prepare to meet thy ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... of the germinating land, passed over him as though he were made of asbestos. An insulation was about him, removing him from all things that thrill, all things that distend; there was no color, no vibration in the world; iridescences had ceased; the chamber of his soul had been painted a dull drab. ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... cannot be got to see that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the Northeast Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colorless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the gray or the drab. Yet he will explain in serious official documents that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master race and ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... call me heretic; Yet year on year, though I be well or sick Or opulent, or in the slough of need, If, light of foot, fair Life trips by me pleasuring, Or, by the rule of pain, old Time stands measuring The dull, drab moments—still ascends my cry: 'God reigns on high! ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... tell me of some good novels? I remember:—Henry Masterton, three volumes, an amusing story and a happy termination. Smuggle it in, next time that you go to Liverpool, from some circulating library; and deposit it in a lock-up place out of the reach of them that are clothed in drab; and read it together ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... of little drab Susie Melton was a shock to Green Valley. But Grandma Wentworth wasn't a mite surprised and said she knew that Susie would come into her own some day. As for Jake, he is so in love with his rosy little wife and his four good-looking children ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... one of those willing hands always so eager to thrust someone else to the forefront of the battle, Miss Primstinn, clutching her courage and a drab dressing-gown in both hands, half ran, half slipped down ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... lumbering flight; graceful terns (sea-swallows) skim the waves; a great blue heron stalks across the hard sand, majestic, solitary and shy of man's approach; and dainty little beach-birds, piping plover in snowy white and drab, glide rapidly past the surf-line. A mile below Beach Avenue is a high sandhill shelving abruptly toward the beach, half-buried trees projecting from its western slope: it is now known as "Eagle Cliff," so called by the proprietor of Dungeness from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... simplicity and pedantry of a great magistrate of a small republic, and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony." Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with "formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, of a Benedicite." The French officers ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... outline of the cloud-castles softened and seemed to hang down over earth like drooping breasts. These bore more nearly the aspect of ordinary snow-clouds, and their dull reddish gray served to unite the leaden blackness of the higher plane with earth's drab whiteness and dingy appearance. The whole mass hung motionless over the town. The blackness increased. Two hours after midday it was already night in the streets. Dwellers on the ground floor drew down their blinds; in the windows of the upper stories appeared one light after another. In the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... post. The sun and the leaves made spots come down; I looked close at him through the fence; The post was drab ...
— Under the Tree • Elizabeth Madox Roberts
... paused, Oliver's attention, which had wandered off into a vague mist of feeling, became suddenly riveted to the appalling spectacle of his uncle's marriage. He saw the house in Bolingbroke Street, with the worn drab oilcoth in the hall, and he smelt the smell of stale cooking which floated through the green lattice door at the back. All the sweetness of life, all the beauty, all the decency even, seemed strangled in that ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened them ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... making for Ceram; but as the Dutch had forbidden him to travel in the interior, saying that the natives were too dangerous just then; and as Sidin, the mate, had sighted the Dutch tricolor flying above drab hulls that came nosing southward from Amboina way, we had dodged behind the Bandas till nightfall. The crew laughed at the babi blanda—Dutch pigs; but every man of them would have fled ashore had ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... been her hero. She could see him now in the glow of the fire as he had been when in the holidays he had come and snatched her away from a home already drab and difficult for a matinee and an orgy of cream cakes at Gunter's afterwards. He was then a long, slim, handsome boy of irrepressible spirits and impulsive generosity which usually left him, after ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... present too,—coarse and vicious creatures who lacked even the sort of tawdry finery that their sisters in western mining camps affect. There was here no shimmer of even the slaziest satin. In dress as in character they were drab. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... any single colour or combination of single colours—for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion behind—is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers' meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... the equal of Sally herself for worthless good looks and behaviour. She is not yet well known to the town or I could not have been so took in. But you will recall that Molly Skerret observed the likeness to that drab Sally on seeing her. Good Heaven, that I had heeded, ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... eyes brightened suddenly; Mrs. Ferrari's dull drab-coloured complexion became enlivened by ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... archway and down a long, stone-flagged corridor, with drab-coloured doors on either side, each marked with a number. Some of them were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with tingling nerves. He was reassured to catch a glimpse of cheery fires, lines of white-counterpaned ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said Gray, pulling his drab campaign hat down over his eyes to shut out the glare of the westering sun. ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... Rowl came to the crest of Black Cliff, a drizzle of rain was falling in advance of the fog. The wind was clipping past in soggy gusts that rose at intervals to the screaming pitch of a squall. A drab mist had crept around Point-o'-Bay and was spreading over the ice in Scalawag Run. Presently it would lie thick between Scalawag Island and ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... with buildings on them for swimming baths. On one we saw "Swimming School," written in German. A foot regiment passed us with black-and-brass helmets, dark-drab long coats, black belts and scabbards. They had a very sombre appearance, but were fine-looking fellows, evidently fit ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... little sharp catch of her breath Flame dashed to the window, and swung the sash upward! Where once had breathed the drab, dusty smell of frozen grass and mud quickened suddenly a curious metallic dampness like the smell of ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... going everywhere by himself. He began to feel that he could not stand much more of such a life. He would lie in bed at night and think of the joy of never seeing again that dingy office or any of the men in it, and of getting away from those drab lodgings. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... that she doesn't look like the sort of girl who would be an acquaintance of the Pelhams. She doesn't look like their kind, you know. She wears the plainest sort of dresses,—just little straight up and down frocks of brown or drab, or those white cambric things,—they are more like baby-slips than anything; and her hats are just the same,—great flat all-round hats, not a bit of style to them; and she's a girl of fourteen or fifteen certainly. ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... in her arms and another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet the rounded arms—her sleeves were ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... "Um-m-m! No suspicions, eh?" "Said, 'No, no suspicions!'" "Uh! I'll have a word with him." He waddled off, shaking his drab silk suit into shape and twisting a leather watch-guard ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,—a condensed ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... man who could win the love and support of such an attractive creature must of necessity have qualifications to spare. She was very beautiful and very clever. Somehow the unforgetable resplendency of my erstwhile typist (who married the jeweller's clerk) faded into a pale, ineffective drab when opposed to the charms of Mrs. Betty Billy Smith. (They all called her ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... smoked-glass slide seems to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on cloudier days. The trampled earth of the river-banks and the peaty stain in the pools did not look drab but glowing umber, and the dark woods astir in the breeze did not look, as usual, dim blue with mere depth of distance, but more like wind-tumbled masses of some vivid violet blossom. This magic clearness and intensity in the colours was further forced on Brown's slowly reviving senses ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... name was Francesca Margherita de l'Epine, and she was known as "the Italian woman." In his "Journal to Stella" for August 6th, 1711, Swift writes: "We have a music meeting in our town [Windsor] to-night. I went to the rehearsal of it, and there was Margarita and her sister, and another drab, and a parcel of fiddlers; I was weary, and would not go to the meeting, which I am sorry for, because I heard it was a great assembly." (See present edition, vol. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... ground. The space between the inn wall and the beehive curve of the hill, which was very narrow under Mr. Glenthorpe's window, but widened as the hill fell away, was covered with a russet-coloured clay, which contrasted vividly with the sombre grey and drab tints ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... velvet trousers." Considerably in the background, too, were the grotesque performances of his rural life, when, making up for the character of a country gentleman, he "rode an Arabian mare for thirty miles across country without stopping," attended Quarter Sessions in drab breeches and gaiters, and wandered about the lanes round Hughenden pecking up primroses ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... that you offend not in the greatest. For Christ thought, if he might bring you from the smallest manner of faults, and give you warning to avoid the least, he reckoned you would not offend in the greatest and worst, as to call your neighbour thief, whoreson, whore, drab, and so forth, into more blasphemous names; which offences must needs have punishment in hell, considering how that Christ hath appointed these three small faults to have three degrees of punishment in ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... cocked hat, military coatee, and terrific paunch, which resisted all attempts to confine it within reasonable military compass; John Bellingham—the murderer of Spencer Perceval,—with his retreating forehead, long pointed nose, drab cloth coat and exuberant shirt frill; "What? What? What?"—Great George himself, as he appeared in 1810, in full military panoply—huge ill-fitting boots, huge blue military coat, collar, lappets, and star, a white-powdered bob surmounting a clean-shaved unintellectual ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the wood is sauce very good for the crab of the sea, But the wood of the crab is sauce for a drab that will not her ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... point; the edges of the leaf are gently curved, and are of a dark sap green color. The nut is of the form and size of a pigeon's egg, and the kernel completely fills the shell. When fresh it is of a white drab color, but, if long kept, becomes the color of chocolate. The kernel, when new, is nearly all butter, which is extracted in the following manner:—The shell is removed from the kernel, which is also crushed, and then a quantity is put into an earthen pot or pan, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... of the heavy object being dragged away from the door at the top of the steps. They both sprang to their feet. An oblong patch of drab, gray light appeared ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... had an uncomfortable hour's wait, while the low smoke-stack belched black vapours into the dirty drab mist that lay oppressively upon everything about the harbour. From time to time the sound of the shovelling of coal arose from the engine-room. One at a time five or six passengers came on board, porters carrying their luggage. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the small, scattered villages of the fishermen. The wooden frame houses have the look of the packing-case, and though they are bright and toy-like when their green or red or cinnamon paint is fresh, they are woefully drab when the weather of several years has had its ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... a mason? Charming! Know, then, that I am the Marquis D'Astafiorquercita. My heart is languishing for you, I seek to color my drab existence with a few pigments from your own. I must travel—but with you. That is why I have penetrated into your garden, disguised as a mason! [He throws off his workman's clothes and hat, and appears in a dazzling costume. His wig is powdered ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand
... the Oriente Hotel. These buildings are the finest modern structures in Manila. Carriages are waiting in the street in front of the hotel, and at the entrance may be seen a group of army officers in khaki uniform, in white and gold, or—very much more modern—olive drab. The dining-room is entered through the rustling bead-work curtain. Here the Chinese waiters, in long gowns ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... nothing very particular to say about the Destiny; such people, as a rule, lead very colourless lives, nothing seems to affect them much one way or the other, and they will be found to have very little purpose to illumine the drab monotony of their existence. ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... presently appeared, brought not as usual by the footman, in scarlet and drab, but by the old butler, in threadbare but well-brushed black, who, as he was placing it on the table, said—'If you please, Sir Christopher, there's the widow Hartopp a-crying i' the still room, and begs leave to see ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... country nurse The poor that else were undone; Some landlords spend their money worse On lust and pride at London. There the roysters they do play, Drab and dice their lands away, Which may be ours another day; ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... lumbering up the rise we are passed by a young lady riding down towards the hotel. Very bright and pretty she looks, by contrast with the rough surroundings. Quite a lovely picture, in her graceful riding-habit of light drab, and her little billycock hat with its brilliant feather. So think we all, especially our gallant Jehu, who bows profoundly in response to a nod of recognition, and turns to look admiringly after ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round at the ripening vine-fields framed in purple lines and dominated by the nest of gray and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a steep, conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape of a crowning rock—"if you think this quiet enough you can speak to him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to speak ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... be added, that in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... delight in the loveliness of the spring-time found a hiding-place anywhere in the well-ordered chambers of his heart, it never relaxed or softened the straight, inflexible lines of his face. As easily could his collarless drab coat and waistcoat have flushed with a sudden gleam of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... such as one, indeed, as I never before saw on a human body. It was immensely large at the base, and appeared perfectly round, while at the crown it rose to a point like a sugar-loaf. He was of a dull, drab-coloured complexion, with large prominent eyes of a pale green colour; his expression, the most repulsively cruel and sinister. The eye involuntarily singled him out among all his comrades, as something too terrible ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... thought of Lou Macon in her old, drab dress, huddling the poor cloak around her shoulders to keep out the cold, while her father lounged here in luxury. He could gladly have buried his lean fingers in that fat throat. From the first he had had an aversion ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... hungry folk in homespun drab and gray Drew round his board on Monthly Meeting day, Genial, half merry ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... itself is wind-blown and fly-blown and brown, but the harbour is very pretty, with its crowds of shipping, painted with red hulls, which make a nice bit of colour in the general drab of the hills and the town. There are no gardens and no trees, and all enterprise in the way of town-planning and the like is impossible owing to the Russian habit of cheating. They have tried for sixteen years to start ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... iron casket. Mr. Beale's eyes, always rather prominent, almost resembled the eyes of the lobster or the snail as their gaze fell on the embroidered leather bag. And when Dickie opened this and showered the twenty gold coins into a hollow of the drab ticking, he closed his eyes and sighed, and opened ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... our arrival, when I awoke from sleep, how sad I felt! I could see that our windows looked out upon a drab space of wall, and that the street below was littered with filth. Passers-by were few, and as they walked they kept muffling ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... actually make the shallow waters of the lake look pink. Fortunately they had not been hunted for their plumage and were not timid. After two days of familiarity with the boat they were willing to let me approach within twenty yards before finally taking wing. The coloring, in this land of drab grays and browns, was a delight to the eye. The head is white, the beak black, the neck white shading into salmon-pink; the body pinkish white on the back, the breast white, and the tail salmon-pink. The wings are salmon-pink in front, but the tips and the under-parts are black. As they ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... of the running. He excused himself by the necessity of burying himself deeper in his books on Teuton origins and traits. In a brief week the Buchers had forgotten him. All was Herr Deming—the wonderful Herr Deming—the fortunate youth who was bringing the witchery of good luck into the drab home. It was Herr Deming morning, ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... as though it were out of the nature of things for anything to ail her family. "Mr. Doolittle, I want six yards of crash for kitchen towels, three pairs of shoes for the children, and two yards and a half of stone-colored ribbon for Mrs. Darrell's drab bonnet. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... otherwise here with us under a sky that would make of Job an optimist. All around are light and color, the evidences of life and hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... mimicry, a thing most odious to Friends. As I smiled, hearing her, I was aware of my father in the open doorway of the sitting-room, tall, strong, with much iron-gray hair. Within I saw several Friends, large rosy men in drab, with horn buttons and straight collars, their stout legs clad in dark silk hose, without the paste or silver buckles then in use. All wore broad-brimmed, low beavers, and their gold-headed canes rested between ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... And daily where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; 'Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear: He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian's five-foot sword, nor rascal's stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... ravin'd salt-sea shark, Root of hemlock digged i' the dark, Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips, Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-delivered by a drab. ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... and wore a black velvet cap, and cloth shoes. He was of a staid, wealthy, and dissatisfied aspect. In his hand, he conducted to church a mysterious child: a child of the feminine gender. The child had a beaver hat, with a stiff drab plume that surely never belonged to any bird of the air. The child was further attired in a nankeen frock and spencer, brown boxing-gloves, and a veil. It had a blemish, in the nature of currant jelly, on its chin; and was a thirsty child. Insomuch that the personage carried ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... across the icy slope, the sun seemed suddenly quenched and the daylight turned to sodden drab. Heavy drifts of snow could be seen falling headlong from the clouds hanging about the peak, making ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... port and you stay awhile, and you find that the woman you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab. And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman beside you is pastier ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... said I. "But the circumstances in which he visited it were somewhat drab. Still, it's not an attractive town, and, as the other way's shorter and the road's about ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... minutes or so we climbed. It was past the midnight hour; the village was asleep. We entered its outposts. The houses were small structures of clay. In the gloom they looked like drab little beehives set in unplanned groups, with paths for ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... may imagine with what awe we looked on him even though he now went on crutches. He was the epitome of adventure, the very salt of excitement. It was better having him than a pirate in the house. When the circus had gone and life was drab, he was our tutor in the art of turning cart-wheels and making hand-stands against ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on the reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I listen to the dull roar of the breakers, to the solemn tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the bar, and the complaisant "ah-ha-a-a" of some argumentative penguin. Even the drab-coloured African hills in the distance, and the corrugated Catholic church (shipped in sections) with the sun blazing on its windows, are beautiful to me to-day, for I am not of those who think religion is ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... of the high-ceilinged room which was buried under thirty feet of steel reinforced concrete. He came up out of the building into a drab night. A raw wind stabbed at him, and sent light clouds scudding across the face of the moon. Overhead, a night fighter growled its way through the lonely sky. The country spread around the base was flat with only a few hills to ...
— A Yankee Flier Over Berlin • Al Avery
... viewing the curiously wrought lintels of the massive marble front, and exclaimed: "Upon my soul, gentlemen, it is so grand I begin to fear I shall not be comfortable in it." He had scarcely concluded this sentence, when a distinguished politician, habited in soiled drab trousers and a shabby brown dress coat, and a badly collapsed hat, which he wore well down over his eyes, rushed eagerly out, and was followed by a mellow faced policeman, with a green patch over his left eye and a club in his right hand. Constituting in themselves a committee of reception, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... place. On each scale a ruby of great size sparkled in solitaire setting. The circlet was further provided with four strings of pearls, two by each ear, dangling well down below in front of the shoulders. A loose drab robe or gown, drawn close at the waist, clothed him, neck, arms, body and nether limbs, answering excellently as ground for a cope the color of the cap, divided before and behind into embroidered squares defined by rows of pearls. Boots of purple leather, also embroidered, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... literary programme for a girl over whose head scarcely eighteen years had hung their dripping drab wintry skies, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Gardens, as we were admiring the gorgeous plumage of some beautiful birds, one of our gentlemen opponents remarked, "You see, Mrs. Mott, our Heavenly Father believes in bright colors. How much it would take from our pleasure if all the birds were dressed in drab." "Yes," said she, "but immortal beings do not depend on their feathers for their attractions. With the infinite variety of the human face and form, of thought, feeling, and affection, we do not need gorgeous apparel to distinguish ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... all he desired it to give. He was a creature of a past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a glittering opal in ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do look so lovely!" Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the drab Cooney milieu. Recent progress in the great game had more than blotted out all memory of little mishaps at ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... brown thatch on the roof, a garland of verdant wild creepers drooping from a spot at the gable, the same two small windows without any sashes in the front wall, the same narrow rutty pathway from the road, the same sort of yellow hen cackling heatedly, her legs quivering as she clutched the drab half door, the same scent of decayed cabbage leaves in the air. Denis Donohoe took a sack of hay from the top of the creel of turf, and spread some of it on the side of the road for the donkey. While he did so a woman who wore a white cap, a grey bodice, a thick woollen red petticoat, ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... prevalence of the martial and religious elements. The general costume of the inhabitants is frocks or sacks, loosely made, and rather shabby; often, shirt-sleeves; or the coat hung over one shoulder. They wear felt hats and straw. People of respectability seem to prefer cylinder hats, either black or drab, and broadcloth frock-coats in the French fashion; but, like the rest, they look a little shabby. Almost all the women wear shawls. Ladies in swelling petticoats, and with fans, some of which are highly gilded, appear. The people generally are not tall, but ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... strains the feet of Yerba Buena's first invading army kept uncertain step as sailors and marines toiled through the sand. Half a thousand feet above them stood the quaint adobe customs house, its red-tiled roof and drab adobe walls contrasting pleasantly with the surrounding greenery of terraced hills. Below it lay the Plaza with its flagpole, its hitching racks for ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... Then there was Parson Swift, who sat behind the scenes with mild interest on his face and a sneer in that ugly, gnarled heart of his. "We stood on the stage," he writes to Stella, "and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompting every moment, and the poet directing them, and the drab that acts Cato's daughter (Mrs. Oldfield) out in the midst of a passionate part, and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... is the story; Over and over I listen to murmurs That are always the same in these towns that sleep; Where grey and unwed a woman passes, Her cramped, drab gown the bounds of a world She holds with grief and silence; And a gossip whose tongue alone is unwithered Mumbles the tale by her affable gate; How the lad must go, and the girl must stay, Singing alone to the years and a dream; Then a letter, a rumour, a word ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... was positively come he felt very light-hearted and full of spirits, defying the wind which wrestled with him at every turn. Dolly must be wrapped up well, he said to himself, and old Oliver must put on his drab great coat, with mother o' pearl buttons, which he had brought up from the country forty years ago, and which was still good for keeping out the cold. He ran down the alley, and passed through the shop whistling cheerily, and disdaining to lift the flap of the ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... a drab belltopper, in perfect preservation, with a crown nothing less than a foot and a half high, and a narrow, wavy brim. She proved a perfect fit when I 'bent' her. I wore her afterward for many a week, till one night she rolled ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... tried to shake myself as I have seen a Newfoundland dog do. The shake was not a success—it caused my trouser-leg to flap dismally about my ankles, and sent the streams of loathsome ooze trickling down into my shoes. My hat, of drab felt, had fallen off by the brookside, and been plentifully spattered as I got out. I looked at my ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... rather a drab one as seen through other people's eyes, but it had never seemed so to her till within the last few years. Her own father had been the village doctor, but of him she had no memory. Her mother's second marriage to a venerable country lawyer, ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... some negro troops who were included in the brigade. That they might readily be distinguished the negroes wore wool hats with the brim and lower half of the crown colored black—the remainder being left drab, or the native color. A company or two of these black soldiers were included in a part of the brigade that was one day being drilled by Col. Rignier, the popular French officer, a large, well-made, jovial fellow, who was ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... preparing to leave when Barnes, in a drab jacket and trunks, trimmed with green ribbon bows, came forward like the clown in the circus and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... "yellow-billed cuckoo." It is in no respect behind any of its neighbours of the grove in conjugal and parental affection, for it builds its nest, hatches its own eggs, and rears its own young, Wilson assures us. It is about a foot in length, clothed in a dark drab suit with a silken greenish gloss. A ruddy cinnamon tints the quill-feathers of the wings; and the tail consists partly of black feathers tipped with white, the two outer ones being of the same tint as the back. The under surface is a pure white. It has a long curved ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... post and entered the dim entrance to call up the stairway for one to usher in the Afghan, Hunsa slipped nonchalantly through the gate and stood in the shadow of a jutting wall, his black body and drab loin-cloth ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... of the country which he traversed, was distinctive, or it might have been a certain natural grace that made it seem so. He wore a light-gray, soft shirt made of French flannel, a dark-blue silk scarf, leather chaps over olive-drab khaki trousers, black, hand-sewed riding boots which displayed their polish despite a coating of fine dust, silver spurs, and, strapped to his right thigh, was a worn leather holster, natural color, from which protruded the black ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... Belgium might have been expected. The worship of colour and form had always been a strong characteristic of the race, and even in the drab years of the Austrian regime Belgian painters had never ceased to work. A far more startling development was the appearance, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, of a national Belgian school of literature. In the Middle Ages, Flemish and French letters in Belgium had ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... pretty well"—the indefatigable pamphleteer had not yet done with controversy. In 1842 he published three Letters on the Mismanagement of Railways,[141] and in 1843 two on a tendency displayed by the "drab-coloured men of Pennsylvania" to repudiate the interest on their State's bonds. On the 18th of December ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... "blouses," the police officers' overcoat of the day, several pairs of blue trousers, with the broad stripe of the cavalry, and these as they came were flung on the bed by Barker and "Shoe." Then appeared a suit of evening clothes, carefully handled. Then a brown business suit of tweeds, then a light drab overcoat, and then the closet was well nigh empty, and Lanier faced them with the simple ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... ways fate had of deciding great issues. Four weeks ago he was something of a piece of mechanism, fairly content with his drab-colored life; and now a girl had entered it and brought to him visions too fair and beautiful to be viewed unveiled, and he knew at last the mystery and power of love. Almost a week of her stay had gone before he met her. In those that followed, he had seen ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the front door. She looked on up the street, which ran straight as a bowling-alley between two rows of shabby brick houses,—all low, small, mean, unmistakably cheap,—thrown together for little people to live in. West Laurence Avenue was drab and commonplace,—the heart, the crown, the apex of the commonplace. And the girl knew it.... The April breeze, fluttering carelessly through the tubelike street, caught her large hat and tipped it awry. Milly ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... jingled with coins and beads and barbaric trinkets of all kinds. Her hands were perfectly formed, and so doubtless were her feet, although these last were hidden by heavy laced-up boots. On the whole, she was an extremely picturesque figure, quite comforting to the artistic eye amidst the drab sameness ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... two opposing civilisations. Even the gas light, which Angela could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which was drawn up before a window ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... going to bed. I told Carrie we should have to start for our holiday next Saturday. She replied quite happily that she did not mind, except that the weather was so bad, and she feared that Miss Jibbons would not be able to get her a seaside dress in time. I told Carrie that I thought the drab one with pink bows looked quite good enough; and Carrie said she should not think of wearing it. I was about to discuss the matter, when, remembering the argument yesterday, resolved ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... Inspector was driven westward through the early morning traffic. Fine rain was falling, and the streets presented that curiously drab appearance which only London streets can present in all its dreary perfection. Workers bound Cityward fought for places inside trams and buses. A hundred human comedies and tragedies were to be witnessed upon the highways; ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... and lively. Add to these an approaching sunset of unusual splendor, a broad tumble of clouds, with much golden haze and profusion of beaming shaft and dazzle. In the midst of all, in the clear drab of the afternoon light, there steamed up the river the large new boat, the Wenonah, as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along, all trim and white, covered with flags, transparent red and blue streaming ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... was played by the band: played a second time, special request, conveyed to the leader by Prince Ferdinand. True, most true, she longs to be home across the water. But be it admitted, that to any one loving colour, music, chivalry, the Island of Drab is an exile. Imagine, then, the strange magnetism drawing her there! Could warmer ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a fair, you don't suppose that they are all faultless beauties, or that the men's coats have no rags, and the women's gowns are made of silk and velvet: the wild ugliness of the interior of Constantinople or Pera has a charm of its own, greatly more amusing than rows of red bricks or drab stones, however symmetrical. With brick or stone they could never form those fantastic ornaments, railings, balconies, roofs, galleries, which jut in and out of the rugged houses of the city. As we went from Galata to Pera up a steep hill, which newcomers ascend ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drowsy. Things changed, became unfamiliar, fantastic. Between the stunted trees he could see the afterglow of the sunset like the reflection of a blazing city. The road then was full of silence and shadow. The drab outlines grew faint and the mean houses were merged into the vaster shapes of night. Robert waited, motionless, breathless. He was sure that something was coming to him down the path of fading light. He ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... contained the treasures of the toilet; a writing-table to match served for inditing love-letters on scented paper; the bed, with antique draperies, could not fail to suggest thoughts of love by its soft hangings of elegant muslin; the window-curtains, of drab silk with green fringe, were always half drawn to subdue the light; a bronze clock represented Love crowning Psyche; and a carpet of Gothic design on a red ground set off the other accessories of this delightful retreat. There was a small dressing-table in front of a long glass, and here ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... leafless and bare; the wide, brown fields, wet with the rains of winter; the low farm-houses sitting amid flat stretches of prairie, their low roofs making them look as if they were hugging the ground. The train roared past little hamlets, with cottages of white and yellow and drab, their roofs blackened by frost and rain. Jennie noted one in particular which seemed to recall the old neighborhood where they used to live at Columbus; she put her handkerchief to her eyes and began ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Tory broadsides. The stores on Second street were open and well lighted, and the coffee-house was full of redcoats carousing, while loose women tapped on the windows and gathered at the doors. All seemed merry and prosperous. Here and there a staid Quaker in drab walked up the busy street on his homeward way, undistracted by the merriment and noise of the thronged thoroughfare. A dozen redcoats went by to change the guards set at the doors of general officers. A negro paused on the ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... was exceedingly simple, consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they came nearly up to the man's armpits, and covered his back and chest, while the braces he wore were short in the extreme. To finish the description of an individual who played a ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... books he brought with him,—one most memorable, when the book was a copy of Burns. On Whittier's first visit to Boston, an occasion honored by his wearing "boughten buttons" on his homespun coat, and a broad-brim hat made by his aunt out of pasteboard covered with drab velvet, he ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... of gray, or coat of drab, They trod the common ways of life, With passions held in sternest leash, And hearts that knew ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white Greek colours ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... minister's own darling—Naughty little dear!" he continued, his round good-humored face wrinkled all over with smiles, as he caught up the truant, "what ever do you mean by splashing through every gutter between home and here, making a little drab of yourself? Why your frock is as wet as a ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... was monotonous. There was a shading of individuality in the girls and newly-wed women, but it faded soon into the dull drab that seemed the only possible wearing-colour of the place. Occasionally, though, the sameness had been relieved by a vivid touch, but only for a short hour. The Fate who snips the threads, had invariably clipped ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... yet?" said Bess, still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... a great disadvantage. The stream was thick with red mud, the condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration of beds above full of iron. Except where high water had scoured the walls, there was generally no ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... Romany chi And the Romany chal Shall jaw tasaulor To drab the bawlor, And dook the gry Of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... novelty to us, who had had three months of crowded stations, and, also, about these stations we saw slums, for the first time on this Western continent. After having had the conviction grow up within me that this Continent was the land of comely and decent homes, the sight of these drab areas and bad roads was, personally, a shock. Big and old cities find it hard to eliminate slums, but it seemed to me that it would be merely good business to remove such places from out of sight of the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... building is largely due to the efforts of the local member of Parliament, and the style of architecture varies directly with the square of his popularity with the party in power. Thus a flourishing full-strength battalion may be housed in a dingy, drab wooden structure, and in the next town a very ornate and modern building may be tenanted by a corps that is only struggling for existence, or perhaps not even struggling. It is well, however, to refrain from too much ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... strikes the quibbler dumb. Before a Corot you had better give way, and let its beauty caress your soul. His colors are thin and very simple—there is no challenge in his work, as there is in the work of Turner. Greens and grays predominate, and the plain drab tones are blithe, airy, gracious, graceful and piquant as a beautiful young Quaker woman clothed in the garb of simplicity and humility—but a woman still. Corot coquettes with color—with pale lilac, silver gray, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... my soul— as the black cup, sullen and dark with fire, burns till beside it, noon's bright heat is withered, filled with dust— and into that noon-heat grown drab and stale, suddenly wind and thunder and swift rain, till the scarlet flower is wrecked in the ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... multitude of weak, drab-toned stops, have disappeared, and in their place we have stops of more musical character, greater volume, under perfect and wide control; new families of string and orchestral tones; great flexibility, through transference ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... painted a dull drab, but the passing of many feet had worn the paint away in places. A stove stood in one corner. Over the sink a tall, round-shouldered woman bent trying to get water ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... night."—"Oh, I do not wish to be kept warm at night."—We gave him a bit of cotton cloth, not one-third the value of the rug, but it was more highly prized. His people refused to sell their fowls for our splendid prints and drab cloths. They had probably been taken in with gaudy-patterned sham prints before. They preferred a very cheap, plain, blue stuff of which they had experience. A great quantity of excellent honey is collected all along the river, by bark hives being placed for the bees on the ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... splendid full-rigged ships by stumpy, unlovely tramp-steamers in the Hooghly River, to which I have already referred, is only one example of the universal disappearance of the picturesque. In twenty-five years' time, every one will be living in a drab-coloured, utilitarian world, from which most of the beauty and every scrap of local colour will have been successfully eliminated. I am lucky in having seen some ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... which he enjoined. When he was angry with his female disciples, he frequently whipped them; but, being a monstrous coward, he never tried it on a man. The least opposition or contradiction threw him into a great rage, and set him screaming, and cursing, and gesticulating like any street drab. When he wished more clothes, which was pretty often, one of his dupes furnished the money. When he wanted cash for any purpose indeed, they gave ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of a hill on which the city sits looking on the ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... stamped or ribbed or embossed muslin, by another machine. The use of cloth, now so universal for book-binding, dates back little more than half a century. About 1825, Mr. Leighton, of London, introduced it as a substitute for the drab-colored paper then used on the sides, and for the printed titles on the backs. The boards are firmly glued to the cloth, the edges of which are turned over the boards, and fastened on the inside of the covers. The ornamental stamps or figures seen on the covers, both ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... after that to get into the slanting sunlight and checkered linden shadows of the Allee; to see even a tightly jacketed cavalryman naturally walking with Clarchen and her two round-faced and drab-haired young charges; to watch the returning invalid procession, very real and very human, each individual intensely involved in the atmosphere of his own symptoms; and very good after that to turn into the Thiergarten, where the animals, ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... middle of the pit, at considerable risk of broken bones, to see Mr. Kean in one of his early parts, when I perceived two young men seated a little behind me, with a certain space left round them. They were dressed in the height of the fashion, in light drab-coloured greatcoats, and with their shirt-sleeves drawn down over their hands, at a time when this was not so common as it has since become. I took them for younger sons of some old family at least. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony." Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with "formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, of a Benedicite." The French officers must have been ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... immensely rich, owning (it was said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour. Paul remembered him vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a good deal to ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... out, and we counted on it so! Won't be much more chance to go canoeing this season." They sat down listlessly on the veranda steps, and solaced themselves with the last remnants of the cookies. Life appeared a trifle drab, as it usually does when cherished plans are demolished and the sun goes in! Very shortly there were no ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... to 9.5 inches. A little smaller than the robin. Male and Female — General color drab, with faint brownish wash above, shading into lighter gray below. Crest conspicuous. being nearly an inch and a half in length; rufous at the base, shading into light gray above, velvety-black forehead, chin, and line through the eye. Wings grayish ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... kinds and conditions of men were these passers-by. Earthling sailors, white, negro, Chinese and Eurasian, most of them in the drab blue of space-ship crews, but each with a ray-gun strapped to his waist; short, thin-faced Venusians, shifty-eyed, cunning, with the planet's universal weapon, the skewer-blade, sheathed at their sides; tall, ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... there was a call from the road in front of the school hospital, and Miss Shippen was pleased and relieved to see Aunt Dalmanutha mounted on a nag behind John. In her black calico sunbonnet and dress, and long, drab apron, with her hand tightly clutched to John's arm, and dark apprehension written upon her blind face, she was indeed a ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... Practical joking is banished from reputable circles—even Bob Sawyer is ranging himself; and so this primitive appetite seeks its satisfaction in farcical comedies. Poetic tragedies owe their attraction to the dominance in real life of the drab and the unlovely, and the overstrain of the intellect in modern life gives a peculiar flavour to the ineptitudes of Gaiety burlesque. All the primal instincts and passions are still in us, though distorted, exaggerated, diminished, modified, applied to different objects and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... was speaking Eleazer was fumbling in a pocket of his long-tailed drab coat, and presently he brought something forth that gleamed in ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... that we all was still— For one of us was thinkin' of a hill, With pine trees on it black against th' moon— And one of us was dreaming of a town, All drab an' brown— An' one of us was lookin'—far an' high Ter some one who had gone back home too soon To that real home that is ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... made him take a vicious drab to wife, I completed my revenge by inviting her to sit to me as a model, and dealing with her thus. I gave her thirty sous a day, paid in advance, and a good meal, and obliged her to pose before me naked. Then I made her serve my pleasure, out of ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... profession. My friend, John Hallett, suited it exactly. His predecessor, Mr. Simon Saunders, had been a small, wrinkled, spare old gentleman, with a short cough and a thin voice, who always seemed as if he needed an apothecary himself. He wore generally a full suit of drab, a flaxen wig of the sort called a Bob Jerom, and a very tight muslin stock; a costume which he had adopted in his younger days in imitation of the most eminent physician of the next city, and continued to the time of his death. Perhaps the cough might have been originally an imitation also, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... slender throat a key that would unlock the doors of the whole world, and beside her the little boarding-house help, equally young, and with all youth's big demands pent up within her, yet ahead of her only a drab vista of other boarding-houses—some better, some worse, mayhap—but always eating the bread of servitude, her only possible way of escape by means of matrimony with some ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... be good," repeated the drab, a big, fair damsel with puckered eyes and features worn ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... through the branches made strange noises all about. They seemed to be shut in by a wall of blackness on every hand, except ahead where, like great streaming eyes of fire, the powerful lamps shot out their rays making weird color effects in the forest—huge tree-trunks loomed a dead drab, like mute sentinels, grim and ominous, that barred their way; now, in the full glare, the foliage took on the softest fairy shade of green; now, tapering off, heavier in color, it merged into impenetrable black; and, with the jouncing of the car, the light rays jiggling up and ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... London on a Sunday afternoon one beholds some weird and wonderful costumes. On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a Kensington suburb I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a little Cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of his breed. He was presumably going to church, for he carried a large Testament under his arm. He wore, among other things, a pair of white spats, a long-tailed coat ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... baby. But you could spend long, long hours in the summerhouse, reading poetry out of the big Anthology and-this a secret-writing poetry yourself! It was heavenly to write poetry. Something soft and warm seemed to ooze through your being as you sat out there and watched the sorrow of a drab, drab sky; or else, on a bright day, a big shining cloud aloft like some silver-gold fairy palace and, down below, the smell of warm, new-cut grass, and whispers of little live things everywhere! It was then that you felt you'd have died if you ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... is our first day's trek, and we are at a place where we have been before—but not the same billets. I am in a cottage with an earth floor (which looks very odd with a hideous drab-coloured wall-paper), and small children and hens, both dirty, wander in and out of my room. It's too hot to keep the door latched. A swallow's nest in the room next door; and the people say that, although the young have flown, they still return ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... he was in the very act of removing the binoculars from his eyes his keen sight detected what appeared to be an infinitesimally small moving dot against the bare drab face of the cliff, some two miles away. Focussing his glasses afresh upon the spot, Dick watched it steadily for two or three minutes until he became certain that it was moving. Yes, moving downward along the cliff ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... perhaps I should have reached the 'point proposed' with only a loss equivalent to the proverbial 'year's growth,' had not a hidden snag unluckily lain in the way, which 'by hook or by crook' fastened itself in the part of my trowsers exactly corresponding, when dry, with that 'broad disk of drab' finally seen, after much anxiety, by the curious Geoffrey Crayon between the parted coat-skirts of a certain mysterious 'Stout Gentleman,' and inextricably held me in check ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or twenty feet. Its leaf is somewhat longer than the laurel, and is a little broader at the point; the edges of the leaf are gently curved, and are of a dark sap green color. The nut is of the form and size of a pigeon's egg, and the kernel completely fills the shell. When fresh it is of a white drab color, but, if long kept, becomes the color of chocolate. The kernel, when new, is nearly all butter, which is extracted in the following manner:—The shell is removed from the kernel, which is ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... appreciated this long-standing antipathy as he cast about for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible down the vista of a series ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... hour before that time saw me standing before the Columbus statue in the Piazza Acquaverdi. Weems was such a mighty squeamish little creature about the proprieties that I thought an old dunnage-sack would scandalize him, and so had purchased a drab portmanteau for my kit at the cost of half my remaining capital. I intended to have no more breezes with him if it ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... knitting, and she went over to the beans. Now, never believe me, if she didn't see sitting right before her a bit of an old man, with a cocked hat on his head and a dudeen (pipe) in his mouth, smoking away! He had on a drab-coloured coat with big brass buttons on it, and a pair of silver buckles on his shoes, and he working away as hard as ever he could, heeling a ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the old women hastened, though with infirm steps, across her little garden towards the road, and stood by the edge of it among tall stalks of red valerian and a great plant of periwinkle which hung down over the wall. And there came along the road a tall man with grizzled hair, dressed in drab breeches and gaiters just like any other man, but wearing on his head a flat blue cap, widening out from brim to crown, with a yellow band round the forehead—the watering cap of a Light Dragoon. He walked very erect, though he limped slightly with one leg; and over one shoulder he carried ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... old Skirmish; let this warrant thee, Facilis Descensus Averni, 'tis an easy journey to a Knave; thou mayest be a Knave when thou wilt; and Peace is a good Madam to all other professions, and an arrant Drab to us, let us handle her accordingly, and by our wits thrive in despite of her; for since the law lives by quarrels, the Courtier by smooth God-morrows; and every profession makes it self greater by imperfections, why not we then by shifts, wiles, and forgeries? and seeing our brains ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... exhortation as some of the time may have been, and drab- colored as most of the days certainly were, there were, bright passages here and there, and one reminiscence was related in later years, in her poem "In Honour of Du Bartas," the delight ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... said Bess, still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... feelings of a romantic maiden who, prone to choose her novels by title, has set down on her library list The Price of Love (METHUEN), and finds herself landed with one of Mr. ARNOLD BENNETT'S intimate little guides to "Bursley" and the four other drab towns. And yet if she will set her teeth and read the first fifty pages without skipping she will discover that she is being let into real secrets of real human hearts; that handsome Rachel (penniless companion to a benign ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... her. "Say, yer all right!" He turned, swiftly, and ran through the crowd, and in a moment had disappeared like a small drab-coloured ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... name of the Hotel Esplanade caught my ear. I approached the table and found two flashily dressed bullies and a bedraggled drab from the streets talking in ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... of a sheep-dog—that is, as his class are generally portrayed in coloured prints—might possibly have been brought up as a water-spaniel, or he might have been the darling of a semi-detached villa and have learnt to walk drab, unlovely streets without endangering his life: it is all a matter of education, fortified by environment. As it was, he was brought up with a cottage for a home and learnt the mysteries of sheep, the tending and the care of them, what the stretching ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... bracelets, with gold coins about the forehead —and one was Dicky Donovan. He had done the rare thing: he had trusted absolutely that class of woman who is called a "rag" in that far country, and a "drab" in ours. But he was a judge of human nature, and judges of human nature know you are pretty safe to trust a woman who never trusts, no matter how bad she is, if she has no influence over you. He used to say that the better you are and the worse she is, the more you can trust ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Prussian; who cannot be got to see that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the North-East Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colourless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the grey or the drab. Yet he will explain, in serious official documents, that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master-race and the inferior-race." The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument; and the difficulty here is that ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... morning; there was only one coach on the stand; one Crane drove the coach; I saw the gentleman get out of the chaise into the coach, he stepped out of the one into the other; I opened the door, and let down the step for him; he had a brown cap on, a dark drab military great coat, and a scarlet coat under it; I only took notice of the lace under it. The gentleman ordered the coach to drive up to Grosvenor-square; I do not remember that he told me the street ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... of daylight you are used to being called in, and all were in their own beds. Kathleen had framed the wish most sensibly. The only mistake had been in saying "in our own beds" because, of course, Mabel's own bed was at Yalding Towers, and to this day Mabel's drab-haired aunt cannot understand how Mabel, who was staying the night with that child in the town she was so taken up with, hadn't come home at eleven, when the aunt locked up, and yet she was in her bed in the ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... the ravin'd salt-sea shark; Root of hemlock, digg'd i' the dark; Liver of blaspheming Jew; Gall of goat; and slips of yew, Silver'd in the moon's eclipse; Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips; Finger of birth-strangled babe, Ditch delivered by a drab,— Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Words have been chang'd into the quite contrary, in less than three Months Time; and instead of pleasant Jests at Table, Dishes and Trenchers have flown about. The Husband, instead of my dear Soul, has been call'd Blockhead, Toss-Pot, Swill-Tub; and the Wife, Sow, Fool, dirty Drab. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Drab and dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood. Chairs dressed in pallid chintz, holding out their skirts with an air of anxiety. Stuffed love-birds on a branch under a tall glass shade. On the chimney-piece sand-white pampas ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... failings was an inability to estimate the true value of things. He possessed something of the spirit of adventure and a desire to escape from the drab monotony of his early life, but these found expression in betting on the exploits of others on the football field and the turf, a haunting of the music-halls, and the cultivation of acquaintances on the lowest rung of the dramatic profession. All this offered him some ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... ice traversed the soft snow like a gigantic wall bulging up and towering aloft and, as it were, reaching out with its arms to the right and the left. It was covered by snow on top, but at its sides there were gleams of blue and green and drab and black, aye, even of yellow and red. They could now see to larger distances, as the enormous and unceasing snowfall had abated somewhat and was only as heavy as on ordinary snowy days. With the audacity of ignorance they clambered up on the ice in order to cross the interposing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which he ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along upper ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... was down to breakfast early, leaving Dorothy to be served in her room. The hotel was drab and decayed exteriorly; but the dining room was a continental elegance of marble, gilt, and mirrors. Douglas was not stopping here, as I had already learned. I concluded that he would be at one of the better known hotels on the Prado, and I hurried thither as fast as I could. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... quality of the Roman faith—that its forms and customs, learned in youth, remain in the affections of Papists to their dying day, even after many years of neglect and unbelief; whereas in the severe, Spanish-drab Protestantism to which I was reared, if one once loses interest in the tenets themselves, there is nothing whatever left upon which the mind ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... monument, presented a continuous sea of heads. We marked, among the flags exhibited, the Royal Standard of Scotland, apparently a piece of venerable antiquity, for the field of gold had degenerated into a field of drab, and the figure in the centre showed less of leonine nobleness than of art in that imperfect state in which men are fain to content themselves with semblances doubtful and inexpressive, and less than half the result of chance. The entire pageant was such a one as Sir Walter ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... you stay awhile, and you find that the woman you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab. And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman beside you is pastier ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... distant harbour where his ship has just been signalled. Softly the humming of the priests at worship ceases, and the curtain descends on what must always remain a masterpiece of delicate pathos—a story that will never lose its appeal while woman's trust in man lends its charm to drab existence. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the view, then struck into a bridle-track across the heath, and regained the high-road about a mile from Beechhurst. Scudding along in front of them was the familiar figure of Miss Wort in her work-a-day costume—a drab cloak and poke bonnet, her back up, and limp petticoats dragging in the dust. She turned swiftly in at the neat garden-gate that had a green space before it, where numerous boles of trees, lopt of their branches, lay about in picturesque confusion. A wheelwright's ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... bound by the ties of a common nature, affinity, sympathy or worth, that is the luminary of the moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely be able ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... time the naval aviator had been watching the testing of the cable, a tall, broad-shouldered, well-dressed, clean-shaven, broad-browed young man in a drab tweed golf suit and cap, a man whose great, dark, deep-set eyes wore a keen, intense look, and whose countenance was one which once seen would be easily remembered, lounged into the Old Ship Hotel. He was accompanied by a pretty, dark-haired girl in a summer gown of cream serge and wearing ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... that, at the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for history—and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to live in. The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls—and Jefferson insisted that in this one important particular ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... there soldiers moved in bands at their work of clearing. But the black hat, the drab coat of the civilian had long been left behind —and here the face of a woman was unknown as the flying dragons of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black eagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the large vigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vast multitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigue uniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Here and there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged his attention, and he knew at once it was three of these he had seen on the previous night, taking advantage of the cloud welkin to manoeuvre unobserved. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the contrary is strongly suggested. A gloomy day, in a drab room, sparsely tenanted by listeners, invites platform disaster. Everyone feels it in the air. But let the speaker walk squarely up to the issue and suggest by all his feeling, manner and words that this is going to be a great gathering in every vital sense, and see how the suggestive ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... sailing until our pith helmets arrived on the 26th, when, at 10 o'clock on a clear moonlight night, we steamed away escorted by two T.B.Ds. The Bay was crossed in calm weather. Gibraltar passed on the 30th and Malta reached on the 2nd June. Our clothing, consisting of the ordinary drab khaki, now began to prove ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... political reports, how gradually they grew and grew, until at last the eclipse was complete, and the diplomacy had been thrust into the tiny paragraphs while the war filled the journal. Under July 7th comes the first glint of arms amid the drab monotony of the state papers. On that date it was announced that two companies of Royal Engineers and departmental corps with reserves of supplies and ammunition were being dispatched. Two companies of engineers! Who could have ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and stood looking out at the rain-washed earth and the falling leaves. The sky was heavy and drab. He thought of Betty and her picnic and of how gay and sweet she was, and how altogether desirable, and the thought wrought a change in his spirit. He went downstairs and kissed his mother; then he, too, put on his rubber overshoes ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... load of grain creaked up the hill and stopped at the mill door. The driver, seeing Friend Barton's broad-brimmed drab felt hat against the dark interior of the barn, came down the short lane leading from the mill, past the house ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... and the entrance darkened, and the whispering voices of the hornets, the most frightful robbers and murderers in the insect world, penetrated into the hive, then the faces of the valiant little bees turned pale as if washed over by a drab light falling upon their ranks. They gazed at one another with eyes in which death sat waiting, and those who were ranged at the entrance knew full well that one moment more and all ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... Bartahlinsky's Seagull amongst them. It was not there; but presently she became conscious of some one standing beside her, and on looking up she recognised Black Gard, the Count's confidential man. He was dressed like the fishermen in drab trousers and a dark blue jersey, but wore a blue cloth cap, with the name of the yacht on ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... I had had the devil's own luck in my capture of a post on The Spectator. Indeed, I very much preferred that, to the thought that the good fortune that was mine was the reward of a grinding and ignoble perseverance. I was in no mood for the drab virtues. I hugged the thought that it was not through my merits but because I possessed a conquering star that I ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... wrathfully strode out myself, and tried to shake myself as I have seen a Newfoundland dog do. The shake was not a success—it caused my trouser-leg to flap dismally about my ankles, and sent the streams of loathsome ooze trickling down into my shoes. My hat, of drab felt, had fallen off by the brookside, and been plentifully spattered as I got out. I looked at my youngest nephew with ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... villain! O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a scold, unpack my heart with words, And fall a cursing, like a very drab, A scullion! Fye upon't! fye! About, my brains![72] I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... Allerdyke and Partners, Limited, he had set himself up in two rooms in a Bloomsbury lodging-house. He knew little of London life at that time, or he would have known that he was thus condemning himself to a drab and dreary existence. As it was, he quickly learnt by experience, and within six months, having picked up a comfortable knowledge of things, he transferred himself to one of those well-equipped boarding establishments in ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... "cow-bird." It is also called the "yellow-billed cuckoo." It is in no respect behind any of its neighbours of the grove in conjugal and parental affection, for it builds its nest, hatches its own eggs, and rears its own young, Wilson assures us. It is about a foot in length, clothed in a dark drab suit with a silken greenish gloss. A ruddy cinnamon tints the quill-feathers of the wings; and the tail consists partly of black feathers tipped with white, the two outer ones being of the same tint ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... rapid glances, especially when he was engaged in debate, and his high-toned and thin voice would ring through the Senate Chamber like the shrill scream of an angry vixen. He generally wore a full suit of heavy, drab-colored English broadcloth, the high, rolling collar of his surtout coat almost concealing his head, while the skirts hung in voluminous folds about his knee-breeches and the white leather tops of his boots. He used to enter the Senate Chamber wearing ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... gentleman refused admission to the opera on the score of his imperfect costume, much to his amazement; "for," he writes, "I was dressed in a superfine blue coat with gold buttons, white waistcoat, fashionable tight drab pantaloons, white silk stockings and dress shoes, all worn but once, a few days before, at a dress concert, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern." He proceeds to express his indignation at the idea of the manager presuming to enact sumptuary laws without the intervention ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the next trial!" exclaimed the dwarf, briskly breaking in upon his drab-colored meditations, and bustling past. "We will get it over at once, and ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... this quiet enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round at the vine-fields, framed in purple lines, and dominated by the nest of grey and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape of a crowning rock—"if you think this spot quiet enough, you can speak to him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... hero represents in a fashion the adventures of the whole Italian race coming to America: its natural southern gayety set in contrast to the drab East Side. The gondolier becomes boot-black. The grape-gathering peasant girl becomes the suffering slum mother. They are not specialized characters like Pendennis or Becky Sharp in the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... and vicious creatures who lacked even the sort of tawdry finery that their sisters in western mining camps affect. There was here no shimmer of even the slaziest satin. In dress as in character they were drab. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... scream? Why are her eyes fastened—not on her lover—not on the madman, but upon another object? What is that object? Is it a man? Can any man move as that thing moves? Surely that cannot be a man, that streak of drab color—yonder thing that casts to the ground a garment, then shoots backward twenty feet from the abyss—swifter than a panther, as silent as death, with two balls of living fire glaring from—from a face? Surely not a human face! Yes, it is a human face. She ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... be said of Mr. Willings that his happy smile always walks in front of him. This smile makes music of his life, it means that once again he has been chosen, in his opinion, as the central figure in romance. No one can well have led a more drab existence, but he will never know it; he will always think of himself, humbly though elatedly, as the chosen of the gods. Of him must it have been originally written that adventures are for the adventurous. He ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... "the world goes forward through the heart rather than through the head. Happiness, to my mind, is emotional, not mental. And the movie has brought happiness to millions whose lives were formerly drab and sordid. I love to go into these little halls in out-of-the-way places, and see the men, women, and children packed there of an evening. Theatrical companies never reached the villages, and the men had no place but the saloon, the women no place but the kitchen or the ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... memorable, when the book was a copy of Burns. On Whittier's first visit to Boston, an occasion honored by his wearing "boughten buttons" on his homespun coat, and a broad-brim hat made by his aunt out of pasteboard covered with drab velvet, he purchased ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... snug beneath their lids with well-trained reverence; and this genius of the fire always appeared as soon as the glow began to fade, as if by inspiration. In my large chamber, draped with white muslin over rose color and drab damask, a superb fire glowed. I must make ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... lengthened as I sped along, the tired yellow sun slipped down behind the hills like a penny-into-the-slot machine, and the early April twilight touched all inanimate objects with its own drab lack of coloring. I had no fear of losing my way in the darkness—I had too much locality sense for that—but the possibilities of my being ambushed appeared too many to be pleasant. A hurrying man, who is also heavily-laden, cannot ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... hurriedly along quiet by-streets to the ROSENTAL. But before she had advanced a hundred yards, her courage began to fail, and the further she went, the more her spirits sank. Her surroundings were indescribably depressing: the smirched, steadily retreating snow was leaving bare all the drab brownness it had concealed—all the dismal little gardens, and dirty corners. Houses, streets and people wore their most bedraggled air. Particularly the people: they were as ugly as the areas of roof and stone, off ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... voice from the bottom of one of the long mugs at a street breakfast stall, which the fog almost concealed from their view, and presently an urchin in a drab coat and blue collar came towing a wretched, ewe-necked, hungry-looking, roan rosinante along from where he had been regaling himself with a mug of undeniable bohea, sweetened with a composition of ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... departed, leaving Powers and Mazechazz staring at each other in the council chamber, their gaudy uniforms looking a little dull and drab. ...
— Join Our Gang? • Sterling E. Lanier
... emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short skirts of ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... species. Mentioning this to a friend of large experience, he told me that he had known several instances where the eggs of the two kinds had been found laid in the same nest. The eggs are, of course, easily distinguishable, those of the common partridge being of a greenish drab colour, while those of the red-leg are of a dull, cream colour, covered with small brown spots. I have been informed by another authority that the eggs of the red-leg have also been found in the nest of an outlying pheasant. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... fate had of deciding great issues. Four weeks ago he was something of a piece of mechanism, fairly content with his drab-colored life; and now a girl had entered it and brought to him visions too fair and beautiful to be viewed unveiled, and he knew at last the mystery and power of love. Almost a week of her stay had gone before he met her. In those that followed, he had seen her ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... day. If anybody can see that my tuft is dyed, may I be—" When the door was flung open, and a large lady with a curl on her forehead, yellow shawl, a green-velvet bonnet with feathers, half-boots, and a drab gown with tulips and other large exotics painted on it—when, in a word, Mrs. Crump and her daughter bounced into ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to him by a young lady who liked him very much. It was wrought in a Persian pattern slightly mingled with the Greek, and was embroidered with purple, yellow, crimson, Magenta, sage green, invisible blue, ecru, old gold, drab, and other shaded worsteds, dotted with stitches of shining silk and beads of silver, the tassel alone containing skeins of ecru sewing silk. The young lady lived not very far from Mr. Stimpcett's, and she was that other reason why Mr. St. Clair became ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the soft downy wool growing next the body of the goat. In color it is white, dark gray, or drab; and of this many of the finest India rugs are woven. Large-tailed sheep are common in Kabul, Peshawar, and other districts; these furnish wool from which many a rug is woven. It is possible that the very sheep watched over by the shepherds of Judea ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... the iron arm of the bench. The muscles of his face scarcely moved, but its sallow tint changed, under his father's eyes, to a sickly drab. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... watch—would he be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve he was ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... little from his shock, he went and sniffed curiously at the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two drab animals of the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger lump, and walked round it several times, trying to find a ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... vouchsafing no more, and soon left the breakfast-table, to take up the work she had laid out to do. And she accomplished it, though many times her hands dropped idle and her eyes peered out of her window at the drab slides ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... stopped at one of those frank little restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... under it, and how perfectly darn beautiful she was, and what a shame that it was almost midnight! She and her hub were going to Washington. Everybody was, of course. Why wasn't Marie Louise there? And Polly's husband was to be a major—think of it! He was going to be all dolled up in olive drab and things and— "Damn the clock, anyway; if we miss that train we can't get on another for days. And what's your address? Write it on the edge of that bill of fare and tear it off, and I'll write you the minute I get settled, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... garments and moving from one show to another. Tuesday was Viceroy's Cup Day at the races, a very pretty sight. One side of the ground was crowded by pretty women in lovely gowns, and on the other side the natives sat in their hundreds and chattered, not the drab-coloured crowd we produce, but gay and striking as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... shot bump grab fled ship blot lump drab sled whip spot pump slab sped slip plot jump stab then drip trot hump brag bent spit clog bulk cram best crib frog just clan hemp gift plod drug clad vest king stop shut dash west grit ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... these people passing up and down the river, when employed on a steamer between Natchez and New Orleans, and had heard that they disliked slavery. He, therefore, hastened toward the drab-coated men, who, on his approach, opened the barn-door, and told ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... able yet, during the several hours of their journey, to take any pleasure in the scenery or in her mount. For in the first place there was nothing to see but scrubby little gnarled cedars and drab-looking rocks; and in the second this Indian pony she rode had discovered she was not an adept horsewoman and had proceeded to take advantage of the fact. It did not help Carley's predicament to remember that Glenn had decidedly advised ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... drops and all. How can those roots send up the golden tints, the snowy white and the red, and never have the colors mixed? Close by is a Plutarch, deep brilliant red. The roots intermingle. How is it possible to pick out of the dull soil, Nature's eternal drab, that brilliant color for your peony? There are your iris, the new sorts absolutely undescribable. There are a dozen different shades in a single bloom. But those blind artists at work in their subterranean studios never make a mistake. The standards must have just such colors, the ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... dishevelled drab, Who there doth scratch herself with filthy nails, And crouches now, and ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Land, Paradise, and what not; while the minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... of narrow, winding streets, we came to Poplar Workhouse. On a low stone wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief put all his worldly possessions, with the exception of the "bit o' baccy" down his sock. And then, as the last light was fading from the drab-coloured sky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with our pitiful little bundles in our hands, a forlorn ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... On the spot where Tom Idle (for whom I have an unaffected pity) made his exit from this wicked world, and where you see the hangman smoking his pipe as he reclines on the gibbet and views the hills of Harrow or Hampstead beyond—a splendid marble arch, a vast and modern city—clean, airy, painted drab, populous with nursery-maids and children, the abodes of wealth and comfort—the elegant, the prosperous, the polite Tyburnia rises, the most respectable district ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the bystanders were very varied regarding them. Some were full of tender pity and compassion; some denounced the system as a cruel and oppressive tyranny; others deplored it as an unhappy necessity; and a few well-to-do-looking old citizens, in drab shorts and wide-brimmed hats, grew marvelously indignant at the recreant poltroonery of "the scoundrels who were not proud to fight ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... beating his horse—a white man, for no Indian used such language, no Indian beat an animal that served him. We-hro looked up. Stuck in the mud of the river road was a huge wagon, grain-filled. The driver, purple of face, was whaling the poor team, and shouting to a cringing little drab-white dog, of fox-terrier lineage, to "Get out ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... dazzling morning nearly five weeks after the dispatching of Ma Sampson's letter to Rosebud. The heralds of spring, the warm, southern breezes, which brought trailing flights of geese and wild duck winging northward, and turned the pallor of the snow to a dirty drab hue, like a soiled white dress, had already swept across the plains. The sunlight was fiercely blinding. Even the plainsman is wary at this time of the year, for the perils of snow-blindness are as real to him as to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... a short, stout man, in drab-coloured breeches, and gaiters to match; a black coat and waistcoat; he wore a large watch-chain, with a prodigious bunch of seals, alternated by small keys and old-fashioned mourning-rings. His complexion was pale and sodden, and his hair short, dark, and sleek. The bookseller valued himself on ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Master Raymond was sitting in the porch of the Red Lion, thinking over a sight he had just seen;—a man had passed by wearing on the back of his drab coat a capital I two inches long, cut out of black cloth, and sewed upon it. On inquiry he found the man had married his deceased wife's sister; and both he and the woman had been first whipped, and then condemned to wear this letter for the rest of their lives, according ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab 'uniform' paint ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... supper Hugh arrived at the Cooks', and the two boys accompanied by Harold set out. They felt very proud to be walking with a real live soldier, a man in the olive drab uniform of the American Army. Harold carried a rifle, with an ugly looking bayonet affixed to the barrel, the whole thing being nearly as ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... in his many-caped drab overcoat, and fox-skin cap and gloves, sat upon the coachman's box with the proud air of a king upon his throne. And why not? It was Oliver's very first visit to the city, and the suit of clothes he ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... The eggs are greenish-drab in color, spotted, blotched, and dotted irregularly and thickly with yellowish and umber brown. The eggs are two or four, abruptly ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... and honor is humbug; and Gentlemanhood is an extinct folly; and Ambition is madness; and desire of distinction is criminal vanity; and glory is bosh; and fair fame is idleness; and nothing is true but two and two; and the color of all the world is drab; and all men are equal; and one man is as tall as another; and one man is as good as another—and a great dale betther, as the Irish ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... low-ceilinged room above a baker's shop in the village, and had strewn it about with books and photographs and nick-nacks until the drab surroundings seemed to reflect a little of her dainty personality. Thither, later in the day, she took Betty off to tea and introduced her to a tall fair girl with abundant hair and a gentle, rippling laugh that had in it the quality of ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... to repeat; "Morleena, child, my hat! Morleena, my hat!" until Mrs. Kenwigs sunk back in her chair, overcome with grief, while the four little girls (privately instructed to that effect) clasped their uncle's drab shorts in their arms, and ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... stare! but such is absolutely the rubbish which has been shot from the Chiswick Press. Next—hear it, ye powers of impudence!—Allan Cunningham's beautiful ballad of Lady Anne, makes its appearance as "Lady Nell." We need scarcely add that in such hands the virgin degenerates into a drab. The other remodelments are trash. The "Merchant's Garland" is a new version by Sheldon of a street ditty called the "Factor's Garland," of which we happen to have a copy in a collection of penny histories. It is as much an ancient ballad as the Murder ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... beneath the bushes and undergrowth, appearing again farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... swarthy features; eyes like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand francs ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... it is, here in the great German out-of-doors, on the border of the Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble kellner at my elbow, with the plain, homely German people to the right and left of me, with the stars beginning to silver in the silent water, with the band lifting me, a drab and absurd American, into the spirit of this kaiserwelt, and with the innocent eyes of the fair fraeulein under yonder tree intermittently englishing their coquettish glances from the eisschokolade ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... one the plumper, and one decidedly the younger of the three; then, although they were dressed so exactly alike,—according to what be, I suspect, a sumptuary law in England—and although their stout travelling-dresses, drab cloaks, thick boots, the shaggy shawls severally carried by each on one arm, the faded blue cravats tied round their throats, were so precisely alike and had been subjected to so exactly the same amount ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... Rupert the most especial dandy I had ever seen; but that, evidently, was my limited experience: even Rupert cannot display so perfect a fit in bottle-green coats, so faultless a silken stock, buckskins of such matchless drab!" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... hotels, however, there is great temptation. On the north-eastern coast, in particular, when the weather has, as the phrase goes, 'broken up,' and the sky and sea have both become one durable drab, the best of women grow irritable, the men morose. At the table d'hote, which even the most exclusive are driven to frequent for company, as sheep huddle together in storm, Dislike ripens to Hate with frightful rapidity. Our ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... called in question, we think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable tho not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist"—as Shakespeare has been well called—do not exhibit the drab-colored Quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from "The Whole Duty of Man" or from "The Academy of Compliments!" We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... phrase about Greeley's old white coat had some foundation in fact, but not much. He did wear a light drab overcoat when I first saw him, with the full pockets spreading out on each side. As it suited him he wore it many years afterward, and when it was quite worn out he had another one made just like it which he wore many years more. I doubt if he ever had more than two of these ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... the Siward story suggested the further development of the story in the Hrlfssaga. Olrik says: "I n henseende bar Sivard den digres kamp dog noget eget. De almindelige norrne dragekampe lige fra Sigurds drab p Fvne har stadig til ml at vinde dragens guld. For Sivard digre eksisterer dette motiv ikke; han vil frelse de hjemsgte mennesker. Af alle de islandske dragekampe har kun Bjrn Hitdlekmpes noget tilsvarende, og her er det nppe tilfldigt at ogs den er henlagt til de engelske ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest his ability to maintain her in idleness. The house is the physical expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world with a small drab ugliness. A dwelling house is rarely a beautiful object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural relations; or grow in larger beauty ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... small door in the yard gate was opened, and a sturdy-looking grey-haired man in snuff-coloured coat and cocked hat, drab breeches and gaiters, entered unseen by the pair, who ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... Lark and Sandy Rowl came to the crest of Black Cliff, a drizzle of rain was falling in advance of the fog. The wind was clipping past in soggy gusts that rose at intervals to the screaming pitch of a squall. A drab mist had crept around Point-o'-Bay and was spreading over the ice in Scalawag Run. Presently it would lie thick between Scalawag Island and ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... atmosphere that comes in the smoke of burning oils,—an atmosphere that is never to be found outside the low walls of a dressing-tent. He experienced a sudden feeling of suffocation. The whole world seemed to have closed in upon him; a drab sky almost touched his head; the horizon seemed to have rushed up to within ten feet ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... madrigal in slow and dirge-like tones. "She" was still wayward and unkind, and "He" was setting out on the morrow in search of treasure to lay at a maiden's feet. The young fellow's visions of the Indies were no longer rosy, but drab as November skies. He was pledged to set his face westward ho! but the zest was gone out of the enterprise. He leaned over a gate, and watched the gulls ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... further slope by a narrow gulley. Here the shell-holes were less frequent. A miry path led through an abandoned camp—a chaos of riddled and shattered boards and contorted iron sheeting. Dead Frenchmen were lying everywhere. From a drab heap of mud and clothing a human arm projected. The terminal finger-joints had dropped off. The blackened skin was drawn tightly over the back of the hand which seemed to clutch ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... hairdresser himself, that he and his family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn't bear to have the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... stands the sullen drab figure of a girl who tries to show how loyal she is to the vagabond in the hands of the law. It all began with a misguided idea of liberty. The youth is the one who told his father he had had all the education he needed and promptly became a street corner type, and the girl, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... weather came in the night. That day he started to clean-up. A chill wind was blowing from the east and the sky was dark with drab, low-hanging clouds when Bruce put on his hip-boots and began to take up riffles. A thin sheet of water flowed through the boxes, just sufficient to keep the sand and gravel moving down as he took up the riffles one at a time and recovered the ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... hero. She could see him now in the glow of the fire as he had been when in the holidays he had come and snatched her away from a home already drab and difficult for a matinee and an orgy of cream cakes at Gunter's afterwards. He was then a long, slim, handsome boy of irrepressible spirits and impulsive generosity which usually left him, after the first few days of his ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... rise, And daily where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; 'Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear: He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian's five-foot sword, nor rascal's stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... creature of a past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a glittering opal in ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 'She' was a drab belltopper, in perfect preservation, with a crown nothing less than a foot and a half high, and a narrow, wavy brim. She proved a perfect fit when I 'bent' her. I wore her afterward for many a week, till one night she ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... with red mud, the condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... his blue eyes were round and earnest. He wore a blouse waist, a short jacket, and knickerbockers. Under his arm he held an old umbrella that was as tall as he was. Its covering had once been of thick, brown cloth, but the color had faded to a dull drab except in the creases, and Trot thought it looked very old-fashioned and common. The handle, though, was really curious. It was of wood and carved to resemble an elephant's head. The long trunk of the elephant was curved ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... which were distributed small cut pieces of very yellow cake with very black currants, sandwiches, made of rather warm thin bread and butter, pink and white cocoanut biscuits, and constant relays of strong dark tea made in a drab china teapot. On crowded afternoons—in fact, every other Thursday—little coffee cups containing lumpy iced coffee were also handed round. When they had music there were lemonade, mustard and cress ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... loveliness of the spring-time found a hiding-place anywhere in the well-ordered chambers of his heart, it never relaxed or softened the straight, inflexible lines of his face. As easily could his collarless drab coat and waistcoat have flushed with a sudden ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... over and staring down into the swift black waters of the river, he planned out his drab ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... notorious for the unaccountable noises which disturbed the peace of mind of the new tenants. Not only were there violent knocks, hammerings, groanings, and sounds of footsteps in the ceilings and walls, out strange sights frightened the servants out of their wits. A ghostly visitant dressed in drab would appear and disappear mysteriously, a female figure was often seen to rush through the apartments, and other supernatural occurrences at length became so intolerable that the inmates of the house sought refuge in flight. ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... thick about the sand, Aim them, fling them, And, as my idle arm resumes the knack, Score a hit and laugh To see her stumble hurt, behind the pine trunks. "Unless you work, I throw again, To it and steady at it. Mark me, drab, we Camilli Mean what we say." Stone after stone still flies, But aimed to knock chips from the pine-boles now; For she is busy gathering sticks, increasing Her distance as she may. The noon is sultry, Heated and clammy, I, Towards the live waves turning, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Mrs. Green had already called up the staircase that dinner was nearly ready before Mopsey had commenced to clothe himself in such garments as he supposed Richard the Third wore. First he put on a thin pair of cotton pants that had once been white, but were now a drab, and which fitted quite closely to his skin. On the outside seams of these he pinned a strip of gilt paper, and then drew on a pair of boots, the tops of which came up quite as high on him as the rubber ones did on Paul. Around these boots was ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... one of these colloquies. He was a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant, as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught at school. His thoughts flew from ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... distance, through the avenue of elms to church, with their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with gold buckles, strode along, while Cato, dressed in some of the Squire's old clothes, walked close behind him like his shadow. You would have thought my master ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... trees the ding of the old church bell, reminding Mr. Bumpkin that he must "goo and smarten oop a bit" for church. He already had on his purple cord trousers, and, as Joe termed it, his hell-fire waistcoat with the flames coming out of it in all directions; but he had to put on his drab "cooat" and white smock-frock, and then walk half a mile before service commenced. He always liked to be there before the Squire, and see him and his daughters, Miss Judith and Miss Mary, ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... white sails of the fishermen winging across the sapphire waters, leaving ribboned pathways behind that crossed and recrossed like a chart of the stars; proud white pleasure-yachts, great vessels from all ports in the world; and an occasional battle-ship, drab and stealthy. And the hundred pink and white villages, the jade and amethyst of the near and far islands, the smiling terraces above the city, the ruined temples, the grim ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... odious to Friends. As I smiled, hearing her, I was aware of my father in the open doorway of the sitting-room, tall, strong, with much iron-gray hair. Within I saw several Friends, large rosy men in drab, with horn buttons and straight collars, their stout legs clad in dark silk hose, without the paste or silver buckles then in use. All wore broad-brimmed, low beavers, and their gold-headed canes rested ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
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