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More "Musty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said, when his turn came to speak: One of my fields, on the wrong slope of a hill-side and surrounded by trees, scarcely ever sees the sun; and by consequence its crops are short when arable, and when in pasture its grass sour, and the hay musty. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... suspicions proved too correct. He took that box to his private room, and with some trouble unlocked it. A damp and musty smell came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the age of the sheep when he began to die; ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... any way, full of unaccountable noises after dark—rustlings of garments along unfrequented passages, and stealthy footfalls in unoccupied chambers overhead. I never knew of an old house without these mysterious noises. Next to my bedroom was a musty, dismantled apartment, in one corner of which, leaning against the wainscot, was a crippled mangle, with its iron crank tilted in the air like the elbow of the late Mr. ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... reality. How glorious it will be! I can see our little house now nestling among the hills, shaded by great spreading trees with flowers and vines and golden fruit all about it, rich plumaged birds and gorgeous butterflies. Oh! I can hardly wait. Who would live in a musty palace when one has within reach such a home, ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... our reason cannot keep pace with them, and that's why it has been lagging behind a little. Yes, we wish among other things to change the furnishings a little in the churches, and to remove the windows because the air seems so musty. Yes, and there is a lot more we want, but that will have to ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... I have the musty look of a solitary," said Davenport. "That's true, of late. But as to getting about, 'man delights not me'—to fall back on Hamlet again—at least not from my present point ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... he cried, 'did I forsake My native wood for gloomy walls? The silver stream, the limpid lake, For musty books and ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... sir," said Frawley, "I was just thinking—after all, it has been a bit of a while since I've been home—indeed, I should like it very much if I could take a good English mutton-chop and a musty ale at old Nell's, sir. I can still get the two ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... left to wait in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room pervaded by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple of chairs and a praying-stool, and for only ornament a great, gaunt crucifix hanging upon one of ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... thing Fred did was to switch on the light of his torch and inspect the warren in which he had found sanctuary. It was not at all the musty, bad smelling place he had expected it to be. The walls had been plastered and stained a dull grey, which did not reflect the light from his torch appreciably. The arrows appeared, as Boris had said ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... shoulders. There seemed to be many preliminaries to an audience with this Captain Carew. Through the door the Jap held open he saw the outlines of a bed, and a rag of carpet. When he stepped through the door, the musty, sour air of the room smote his nostrils like ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... discontented and arrogant innovators, who affect to call the place by its old name of Morton; but these are the mere vassals of a man who once owned the patent, and who has now been dead these forty years. We are not the people to keep his old musty name, or ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... on, finding history after history of the towns and cities scattered through New England and the Middle States, most of them on a par with those last mentioned, in all styles of print and binding, some decrepit and musty with age, others fresh and enticing, with gaudy covers and scores of illustrations; some like Sewall's History of Woburn with no table of contents or index, and so practically useless; a few like Staples's Annals of Providence, scholarly and creditable; yet none of them ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... hunger; then Boston, with a rusty iron pot from the galley, to which he fastened the end of his rope, dipped up some of the water from over the side. It was warm to the touch, and, aware that they were in the Gulf Stream, they crawled under the musty bedding in the cabin berths and slept through the night. In the morning there was no promise of the easterly wind that Boston hoped would come to blow them to port, and they secured their boat—reeving off davit-tackles, and with ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... almost forgetting young Mistress Oldfield, who is still reading the "Scornful Lady," and putting new life and grace into lines which nowadays seem a bit academic and musty. The captain has not forgotten her, however; on the contrary, he is so charmed with what he hears that he makes some flimsy excuse to get into that room behind the bar whence the silvery voice proceeds. There he first meets Nance, surrounded by what audience we know not, and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... round the large, dull room. Emaciated forms of narrow, antique sofas were seen dimly in the musty-smelling twilight. Screens worked in red and green wools stood in the vicinity of the fireplace, the walls were lined with black pictures, and the floor, hidden in dark shadow and sunken in places, conveyed an instant idea of ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Joe put his plan into execution by applying for and receiving a month's leave of absence, and taking the first train, he arrived early on the second day at Denver. Here he hastened to the court house and had the city clerk search in musty records and when he came close to the date that Joe had calculated tallied with Kansas Shorty's story, they found James McDonald's name, and the sentence the judge had imposed which read: "Imprisonment in the Colorado State Reformatory at Buena ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... evangelist is rather slight. The night is cold. The wind bites and the street has a dismal air. The evangelist stands around the corner from the old book store in whose windows thousands of musty volumes are piled like the bones of hermits. The man who owns this curious book store is a sun-worshipper. And the evangelist on the soapbox is ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... for any building, whether it is the Parthenon or a farm-house. Without it, places lack their intimate personality, as photographs lack the personality of men and women. My memory of the Athenaeum Library is of the familiar, slightly musty smell of books, of the faint creaking of the librarian's boots, and the hum of bees and the whirr of a mowing machine, of the smell of an early summer afternoon, the white glare of the North Walk stretching beside the river, and the reflection ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... her ladyship, "to look up at your window before he goes off; for if he will play Romeo, you, I dare say, will play Juliet, and this old castle is quite the thing for the musty family of the Capulets: I dare say Shakespeare thought of it when ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... ourselves that we are observing life, when we are merely noting the occasions when some musty old notion of ours happens, by chance, to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... all the official institutions of England. But Dickens was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally he even escaped the factory itself. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... sunlight fell across his shoulder upon the superb gems, gleaming and scintillating from the depths of their hiding-place. But he paid little heed to them, for, in a long and narrow receptacle within one side of the box, his keen eye had discovered a paper, yellow and musty with age, the sight of which thrilled him with hope. He quickly drew it forth, and a single glance at its title assured him it was indeed the object of his search. With a low cry of joy, he locked and replaced the metallic ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... our musty books, Grown almost hateful to our eyes; We longed to roam the country nooks, We longed to hear the murmuring brooks, ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... of the sitting-room was an old table, and on it several musty books. The boys looked the books over, but found little to interest them. As relics the volumes were of ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... continental Great Powers always made war on him, but not without his thrashing them soundly until they pleaded in their humility to be allowed to lick his boots. You may search English State papers in any musty hole you like, and you will find no authoritative record that comes within miles of justifying the opinions or the charges that have been stated or written against him. Let us not commit the sacrilege, if he is ever ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... 1915, we are still too close to the eighteen nineties, still too liable to be influenced by their ways, to be able to speak for posterity and to pronounce the final judgment upon those evil years. It is possible that the critics of the twenty-first century, as they turn over the musty pages of the Yellow Book, will ejaculate with feeling: "Good God, what a dull time these people must have had!" On the whole it is probable that this will be their verdict. They will detect the dullness behind the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... board; the windows are never opened; probably the shutters are kept always shut; perhaps some kind of stores are kept in the room; no breath of fresh air can by possibility enter into that room, nor any ray of sun. The air is as stagnant, musty, and corrupt as it can by possibility be made. It is quite ripe to breed small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, or ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... wheat yield per acre has increased more than two bushels since the first edition of this book, but it would not help the garden maker. The increase of possible products tends to counterbalance the increased cost of labor. So only the musty parts have been cut out of the book, which is more ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... mealy-mouthed, and dares not. Sweet smells he cannot abide; wishes that the pure air were generally corrupted; nay, that the spring had lost her fragrancy for ever, or we our superfluous sense of smelling (as he terms it), that his corn might not be found musty. The poor he accounts the Justices' intelligencers, and cannot abide them. He complains of our negligence of discovering new parts of the world, only to rid them from our climate. His son, by a certain kind of instinct, he binds prentice to a tailor, who, all the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... them. "If Helen finds any pleasure in that musty old room," she said, one cold January morning, "I'm sure I'm glad. But she would be a great deal more sensible and cheerful if she'd sit up in the parlor with me, if she didn't do anything more than play patience. But then, Helen never was like ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... catch some glimpses of the moon, Wrapt in a mantle of unearthly white, (The only rapping of an ancient sprite!) Stalked round in silence till the break of day, Then from the Earth passed unperceived away. Now all is changed: the musty maxim fails, And dead men do repeat the queerest tales! Alas, that here, as in the books, we see The travelers clash, the doctors disagree! Alas, that all, the further they explore, For all their search are but confused the more! Ye great departed!—men ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid &c 653; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... his own congregation, and been quoted among the godly as a powerful preacher of the word; but in addition to this, he went out of his way to attack Jeremy Bentham, and the town was up in arms. The thing was new. He thus wiped the stain of musty ignorance and formal bigotry out of his style. Mr. Irving must have something superior in him, to look over the shining close-packed heads of his congregation to have a hit at the Great Jurisconsult in his study. He next, ere the report ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... great nervous antidote is passed and replaced, and then, with the lighted lanterns worked around under their arms, they go down the tottering ladder. Down they go into a great, damp, musty cavern, to which their ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... battered books mostly about fishing, and a large Visitors' Book lying on a centre-table, between a Bradshaw and an old guide-book. Shut up, in winter, the little room would smell intolerably close and musty. But with the windows open, and a rainy sun streaming in, it spoke pleasantly of holidays for plain hard-working folk, and of that "passion for the beauty flown," which distils, from the summer hours of rest, strength ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... solicitor comes, he and your man can have an evening over a lot of musty papers and the thing will be done. Again, my boy [taking HORACE'S hand], I welcome you to our family. God ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... Mrs. Betsey. "Your aunt declared it smelled musty from being shut up. She has such a nose," and the little old lady shook ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... reply. His knowledge of the world had long ago opened his eyes to the narrow-minded bigotry which swayed the Russian Jewish people in their prejudices against anything foreign. He, too, deplored the fact that intellects so bright and alert should be content to linger in these musty catacombs. Full well he knew that the constant searching for hidden meanings in the Scriptures was the direct cause of many of the superstitions which had crept into Judaism. He, too, had in his youth yearned ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... avoided red as being the color usually affected by women and girls. At the table he was moderate in his appetite but particular as to the nature of his food and the manner in which it was set before him. Nothing would induce him to touch any meat that was "high" or rice that was musty, nor would he eat anything that was not properly cut up or accompanied with the proper sauce. He allowed himself only a certain quantity of meat and rice, and though no such limit was fixed to the amount of wine with which he accompanied his frugal fare, we are assured that he never allowed himself ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... was foul with dirt and cobwebs, full of a musty odor. The swallows had nested along the ridge-pole. They fluttered out of the door, chattering protest against the invasion. Rat nests littered the corners and the brown rodents scuttled out with alarmed squeaks. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... situation and capabilities went. Young Mrs. Ladbruk, whose husband had just come into the farm by way of inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china. The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either to comfort ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... getten moor nor he could carry, an' tha knows as weel as me 'at he can sup moor nor what ud mak some fowk druffen, an' walk as steady as if he'd swallow'd a church, steeple an' all; an' he ligg'd him daan o' some sheets o' wool 'at wor bi th' rooad side, an' as Musty wor goain past he saw him, an' soa he thowt he'd have a marlock, an' he went an' fun up some ov his chums an' they gate sooit an' daub'd his face wol he luk'd war nor old ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... went away about six, unless it was winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to ice creams, jellies, or sillabubs, or regaled them with 10 musty almonds, moldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy, substantial fare. The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices of fat pork, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... rejoicing in the buzzy silence, the murky glimmer, and subterranean secrecy, which imparted a touch of melodrama to their experiences. All sorts of smells were wafted through the hoarding from the neighbouring cellars; the musty smell of vegetables, the pungency of fish, the overpowering stench of cheese, and the ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... said Clint. They listened. All was silent again. A damp and musty odour pervaded the place. Under their feet the floor boards had rotted and as they made a cautious circuit of the interior they trod as often on soil as on wood. The hut was apparently empty of everything save a section of rusted ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... he might spread his coat for a bed. He stumbled against a ladder, which mounted upward into the cavernous mow of a loft. He climbed the creaking rungs, found footing on the dry floor, and stopped to sniff at the odor of the few wisps of dry, musty hay scattered thinly over the rough boards. He took a step forward, stumbled over a pair of legs and landed headfirst on the stomach ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... in this letter; but I'll call at Charles', and know the shape of his snuff-box, by which I can settle his character. Though indeed, to know his full capacity, I ought to be informed, whether he takes Spanish or musty.[292] ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... above, and a curtain like a shadow, hiding the end. In these passages hung the smoky perfume of incense; and from over tile-topped walls came the fragrance of roses and lemon blossoms, half choked with the melancholy scent of things old, musty and decayed. Beautiful pillars, brought perhaps from ruined Carthage, were set deeply in the whitewashed walls, looking sad and lumpy now that centuries of chalk-coats had thickened their graceful contours. But to compensate for loss of shape, they were dazzling ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... are apt to get reasty, thro' the ill quality of the fruit; and sometimes thro' the badness of the cask will get musty, or fusty. ...
— The Cyder-Maker's Instructor, Sweet-Maker's Assistant, and Victualler's and Housekeeper's Director - In Three Parts • Thomas Chapman
... the front seat of the open wagon. Behind him, his mother and Jim sat stiffly, hand in hand. They gazed dully at the black thing ahead, and sobbed softly, now singly, now together. Both—himself as well—were dressed in complete black; old musty black, gotten out of the dark, hurriedly, and with the close smell of the closet still upon it. Even the horses conformed to the sober shade. They had been supplied by a neighbor on account of ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... take care they are perfectly fresh-gathered when the weather is tolerably dry; for, if they are picked during very heavy rain, the ketchup from which they are made is liable to get musty, and will not keep long. Put a layer of them in a deep pan, sprinkle salt over them, and then another layer of mushrooms, and so on alternately. Let them remain for a few hours, when break them up with the hand; put them in a nice cool place for 3 days, occasionally stirring and mashing them well, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... departure from her usual demeanor. As for myself the long sunshine of a summer day and the conviction that at last the opportunity had come to me to play the role of a minor hero gave me a peace that amounted almost to buoyancy. No need had I of the teachings of the musty old philosophers reposing on my bookshelves. John Stanhope had learned more of life in a few short hours than all his tomes could impart. His books had helped him many times in diagnosing the cases of his friends; when John fell ill they mocked and ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... material things. Not that all this was in the document itself; but by studying it so earnestly, and, as it were, creating its meaning anew for himself, out of such illegible materials, he caught the temper of the old writer's mind, after so many ages as that tract had lain in the mouldy and musty manuscript. He was magnetized with him; a powerful intellect acted powerfully upon him; perhaps, even, there was a sort of spell and mystic influence imbued into the paper, and mingled with the yellow ink, that steamed forth by the effort of this young ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... me marvellous ease to have boxed his ears with it. Had I been Mistress Katherine, it should have gone hard with me but I would have pulled Master Doctor out of his study, and made him lake with little Jack and Maudlin, in the stead of toiling o'er yon old musty commentary. Nell saith she loveth to read it. In good sooth, but I ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... from * *. Have they set out from * *? or has my last precious epistle fallen into the lion's jaws? If so—and this silence looks suspicious, I must clap on my 'musty morion' and 'hold out my iron.' I am out of practice—but I won't begin again at Manton's now. Besides, I would not return his shot. I was once a famous wafer-splitter; but then the bullies of society made it necessary. Ever ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a great deal of this forgotten chivalry. His nursery had been haunted by such musty phantoms; and when he first came to the Northern city, he stayed at a hotel which was frequented by people who lived in this past—old ladies who were proud and prim, and old gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... derived his words as often as he used them,—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... the Bar-O entanglements and complications. It's an old story. Grandaddy knows all about it but he doesn't talk. There are few facts and many rumors. For three generations it's been a sort of a gnaw-bone, to be dug up and chewed on when there's nothing else. It's a musty old tradition, a sort of a remnant of the old days, that present day newsmongers use as a yardstick for comparisons. If a modern domestic complication breaks out, the current gossip outmatches it by the entanglements in ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... barn she wandered, and up the rickety ladder she climbed into the cobwebby loft. A figure moved impatiently at the far end of the loose boards, and as Peace's eyes became accustomed to the dim light, she saw it was Faith, curled up among a lot of ragged papers and coverless magazines, musty and ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... had long since lost heart and passed away. A dwindling remnant of their children, from old association, just kept its doors from actually closing, and made a mournful interruption in its musty silence on Sundays. Life was too low to support a Wednesday prayer-meeting, and Sunday by Sunday that life ebbed lower. New life from the outside must come, and ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... old ladies have thought if she had called it out? As it was, Lady Lavander patted her approvingly, said she loved to see young people modest and humble-minded, and gave her a slice of very highly-spiced, rather musty ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Mrs. Molesworth
... stays upon old ships, A weightless cargo in the musty hold, — Of bright lagoons and prow-caressing lips, Of stormy midnights, — and a tale untold. They have remembered islands in the dawn, And windy capes that tried their slender spars, And tortuous channels where their ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... blew, the ocean rolled Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer night collected still, to make The morning precious. Beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of—were closely wed To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit; Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to wear my boots as straight as you. No, I'm damned if I wouldn't give five-and-twenty bob!" We laughed. We had some rolls of smoked beef, which caused the ants to come about the camp, and we had to erect a little table with legs in the water, to lay these on. One roll had a slightly musty smell, and Gibson said to me, "This roll's rotten; shall I chuck it away?" "Chuck it away," I said; "why, man, you must be cranky to talk such rubbish as throwing away food in such a region as this!" "Why," said he, "nobody ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... instead turned her practical mind to consideration of the immediate moment. The so-called parlor was hopeless she knew, and she dismissed it from the list of possibilities at once. It was a sparsely furnished, gloomy room, damp and musty from being tightly closed all summer, and the unpainted, rough boards had ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... line, Where never sun presumes to shine, With straws, and filth, and time beset, Where all is fish that comes to net, That musty film, the Muse supposes Figures the web ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... no reply. Already she was fathoms deep in thought. The musty-smelling lift shot them up to the top floor; Beverley, stepping out ahead of Clo, had the air of having forgotten her existence. The girl's anxiety deepened. The best she could do was to guide her friend through dimly lighted, ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the pretty clothes which she took care to provide at once for herself, spending lavishly out of the diminishing sum her husband had sent her, and thinking not of the morrow, nor the day when the board bills would be due, became well known. The musty little parlor of the ancient relative was daily filled with visitors, and every evening Kate held court, with the old aunt nodding in ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... musketry-firing was a strong contrast to the scream of the bombs. I think all the dogs and cats must be killed or starved: we don't see any more pitiful animals prowling around.... The cellar is so damp and musty, the bedding has to be carried out and laid in the sun every day, with the forecast that it may be demolished at any moment. The confinement is dreadful. To sit and listen as if waiting for death in a horrible manner, would drive me insane. I don't know what others do, but we read ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... proprietors of real-estate in this extraordinary highway of antiquity are never mentioned in public like owners in any other street; but they are shabby, dreary, hopeless-looking old piles, suggestive of having, perhaps, been hurried and tumbled through musty law-suits scores of times, and occupied at last by the robber Law itself for costs. On a certain dark, foggy afternoon in December, one of the seediest of the fallen brick brotherhood presented a particularly dingy appearance, as the gas-lights necessitated ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... said Mrs. Mumpson complacently. "A musty odor exudes from these closed receptercles. Men have no comprehension of the need of such caretakers as ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... into a poet myself—think of that!—me, for these dozen years a musty, cobwebbed groper in philosophies and religions! I have been sitting here by my fire for hours, smoking and dreaming and rhyming, rhyming and dreaming and smoking; and pretty soon the rumble of the first milk-waggons will come up from ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... he made his way at leisure was one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust. There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... merely confined to the Via Giulia; it extended to the whole district, once so fine and fashionable, but now fallen into sad decay, far removed from modern life, and exhaling a faint musty odour of monasticism. Towards San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele has ripped up every olden district, the lofty five-storeyed houses with their dazzling sculptured fronts contrasted violently ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... been the will of the Lord. This had occasioned her to make some reflections, and then to reason upon those reflections; as for instance, that since her husband chose rather to devote himself to his studies, than to the duties of matrimony, to turn over musty old books, rather than attend to the attractions of beauty, and to gratify his own pleasures, rather than those of his wife, it might be permitted her to relieve some necessitous lover, in neighbourly charity, provided she could do it conscientiously, and to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... cripple, sitting crouching in a corner of the room. It was all miserably desolate. The paper shields kept out the light of the sunbeams; and though the place was tolerably clean, it had a close, musty, disagreeable, shut-up smell. But all Daisy thought of at first was the cripple. She went ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... but a toy Filled with duty and with joy; Not too closely should we guard Our brief time from being scarred; Never high on musty shelves Should we hoard it for ourselves. It is something we should share In another's hour of care— Something we should gladly give That another here may live; We should never live it through Keeping ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... the midst of a curious litter. Clusters of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, and all among them were clumps of old boots, shriveled skins, battered pans, scrap-iron, sheep-skins, useless touloupes, and on the floor musty old clothes, moth-eaten furs, and sheep-skin coats that even a moujik of the swamps would not have deigned to wear. Here and there were old teeth, ragged finery, dilapidated hats, and jars of strange ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... hall was filled with sombre shadows; the motionless air was heavy with a musty, choking odor. In the dimness a few tattered hangings were visible on the walls; a rope, with bits of crumbling evergreen clinging to it, trailed from above one of the low windows. The panelled double door of the ballroom was shut; no sound came ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... likes being made love through instead of to—specially on behalf of a musty divinity ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... been considered obscure, and which their explanations do not always clear up; to the temptation to display their proficiency in the ingenious art of manipulating facts and figures culled from a dozen musty volumes into one ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the lines of Lady Macbeth from Mabel's shabby books; and something of millinery from the little Irishwoman who kept a shop on the corner, with "Elise" written across its window. She learned all of Wallace's parts, and usually Mabel's as well. Often she went to the piano in the musty parlour of the Geary Street house and played "The Two Grenadiers" and "Absent." She brimmed with energy; while Wallace or Mabel wrangled with the old costumier, Martie was busily folding and smoothing the garments of jesters and clowns and Dolly Vardens. She had ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... except Jervis and Mr. Clay, the latter of whom, when the bishop's part of the ceremony was done, took the remainder upon himself, and proceeded to make his explanations in a voice which Mary declared made her think of musty ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... afraid you've lived in your musty old books so long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and since women ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... misgivings did the three lads plunge forward in the darkness, feeling their way with outstretched hands as they entered the tunnel. A close, musty smell, as of things long mildewed and moulded, filled the air, and an oppressive silence lay on everything. Unconsciously, since entering this place, their conversation ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... dirty. That's natur! Trim 'er up an' curl 'er 'air an' she's worth looking at. Natur! Lor', Passon, if ye likes wild natur ye ain't got no call to keep a gard'ner. But if ye pays me an' keeps me, ye must 'spect me to do my duty. Wherefore I sez: why not 'ave this 'ere musty-fusty place, a reg'ler breedin' 'ole for hinsects, wopses, 'ornits, snails an' green caterpillars—ah! an' I shouldn't wonder if potato-fly got amongst 'em, too!—why not, I say, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... them, saw the white gleam of a robe that fell down his length in smooth, still folds, saw his hands—greenish skin stretched tight over fleshless bones. Suddenly it seemed to him that the air was musty and fetid. ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... a peace be concluded as soon as that was done; and this with such appearances of religion as might work on the people, and make them impute it to the piety of their prince, and to his tenderness for the lives of his subjects. A third offers some old musty laws, that have been antiquated by a long disuse; and which, as they had been forgotten by all the subjects, so they had been also broken by them; and proposes the levying the penalties of these laws, that as it would bring in a vast treasure, so there might be a very good pretence for it, since ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... commission that placed upon his shoulders a responsibility that encompassed not alone the life of Gahan and Tara but the welfare, perhaps the whole future, of Gathol. And so he hastened them onward through the musty corridors of the old palace where the dust of ages lay undisturbed upon the marble tiles. Now and again he tried a door until he found one that was unlocked. Opening it he ushered them into a chamber, heavy with dust. Crumbling silks and furs adorned the walls, with ancient weapons, and great ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... dusty, musty little shop set in a dingy street, A doorsill old and scarred and worn by many tired feet, A row of cases, vaguely glassed, a safe against the wall, And, oh, the ache of many hearts—the fabric of ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... that were good, and they might have served him for a volume of marine memoirs. But I was with him when we freighted the Kut Sang with adventure and sailed out of Manila, so his musty records of rescues and wrecks lacked life for me. In the old logbooks I found no men to compare with the Rev. Luther Meeker; or Petrak, the little red-headed beggar; or Long Jim or Buckrow or Thirkle. ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... because it is not alike known to all from what stock I am sprung, with the Muses' good leave I'll do my endeavor to satisfy you. But yet neither the first Chaos, Orcus, Saturn, or Japhet, nor any of those threadbare, musty gods were my father, but Plutus, Riches; that only he, that is, in spite of Hesiod, Homer, nay and Jupiter himself, divum pater atque hominum rex, the father of gods and men, at whose single beck, as ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... with the modern passion for efficiency, learned foreign tongues, and browsed in the musty archives, he would have discovered that there was much to unlearn. The early scribes piled fancy upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a profligate, a spendthrift, and so on. "Houbraken's facts," we read, ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... was not empty, in the sense that it was unfurnished. The unknown was using an electric torch of extraordinary brilliancy, and revealed a dilapidated hall-stand and a musty chair. He took ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... allowance for this, it is false. For, if the influence of the twelve signs does not emanate from the stars occupying the space of those signs, it must emanate from nothing—a doctrine well suited, no doubt, to musty old sages of your superstitious Chaldea, but quite out of court in our progressive age—the last decade of our cultured ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... mushroom-flaps, and take care they are perfectly fresh-gathered when the weather is tolerably dry; for, if they are picked during very heavy rain, the ketchup from which they are made is liable to get musty, and will not keep long. Put a layer of them in a deep pan, sprinkle salt over them, and then another layer of mushrooms, and so on alternately. Let them remain for a few hours, when break them up with the hand; put them in a nice cool place for 3 days, occasionally ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... "isn't it nice to find everything in such good condition? I remember after our last long trip it was really dreadful for a week or two—everything yellow and musty; mice and cockroaches camping in the library and bedrooms, and spiders everywhere. By the way, Sara, have you ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... any more rent than where you are, and it would be twenty times pleasanter for you than living up that passage where you see nothing but a brick wall. And then, as it is not far from Paddiford, I think Mr. Tryan might be persuaded to lodge with you, instead of in that musty house, among dead cabbages and smoky cottages. I know you would like to have him live with you, and you would be such a mother ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Peter had come back and that his married life with Clare had been a dream. He was still at Brockett's, still silent, shy, awkward, still poring over pages of "Reuben Hallard" and wondering whether any one would ever publish it—still spending so many hours in the old musty bookshop with Herr Gottfried's wild mop of hair coming so madly ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... again disappeared the heir bent over the curiously shaped bottle in delight, for when the cork was drawn a fragrance filled the musty apartment as ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of drugs. There were comfortable chairs, flowers in a window-box, a table with a book or two and some magazines. Through a half-open door, an inner office showed—all very different from the picture her memory showed her of the musty, cumbered room in which her father had received his dwindling patients. As a child she had hated that room, hated the hideous charts of "people with their skins off," the ponderous books with their horrific and highly ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... quite so musty," said Dicky, reflectively. "Did it ever seem strange to you, Mr. French, that a pretty girl like Deena ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... parts Ill suited law's dry, musty arts! My curse upon your whunstane hearts, Ye Enbrugh gentry! The tythe o' what ye waste at cartes ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... musty chronicles, And muse on usurpations long forgot, And other historied dramas of ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... beggarly account of empty boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds. Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses, Were thinly scattered ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Doctor," said Albert; "The pitcher goes oft to the well.—The proverb, as my father would say, is somewhat musty. But I, too, have some confidence in my own judgment; and, much as I honour the Church, I cannot altogether subscribe to passive obedience. I will tell you in one word what points I must have explanation on; and it will remain with you to give it, or to return a message to the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... is our sitting-room,—just such chairs and tables and carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You mustn't give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors, because they come for you from the coffee-house. This is my little bedroom; rather musty, but Barnard's is musty. This is your bedroom; the furniture's hired for the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should want anything, I'll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall be alone together, but we shan't ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... tell?" He took her seriously, and ransacked all his store of second-hand philosophy for a worthy answer,—a musty store, dead and pedantic, after the thrilling spirit of her words. "Why, I think—it is—is it not all now the sense-manifest substance of our duty? Pardon. I am obscure. 'Das ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... squire, irreverently; "you need not go so far back for an example. It is enough for a Hazeldean that his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather all farmed before him; and a devilish deal better, I take it, than any of those musty old Athenians, no offence to them. But I'll tell you one thing, Parson, a man to farm well, and live in the country, should have a wife; it is half ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone over the ground before to-day. Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no doubt of it. Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... buildings were just won to prohibition and held up their water cups in the first excitement of a novice to pledge the cause. Let hard liquor crouch and tremble in its rathskeller below the sidewalk! In the basement let musty kegs roll and gurgle with hopeless fear! Der Tag! The roof, the triumphant roof, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... Filtering materials require periodical cleaning and renewal, which not only occasion much trouble and mess, but are also frequently inefficiently performed. (2) Experience has shown that the filtering material, whether cloth, charcoal, or other substance, is extremely liable to become mouldy or musty, which makes the wafer both unwholesome and unpalatable. This system is especially adapted for small water supplies and for use in country houses, there being no operation to perform requiring either technical, chemical, or mechanical knowledge, nor ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... was of good size, and smelled shut up and musty, as spare rooms in the country usually do. It was furnished with a bureau, washstand, and two chairs, each painted in a robin's egg blue with sprays of yellow roses. There were several pictures on the walls, their subjects religious ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Library now became my grandiose work-shop. All through the winter from nine till twelve in the morning and from two till six in the afternoon, I sat at a big table in a special room, turning the pages of musty books and yellowed newspapers, or dictating to a stenographer the story of the Reconstruction Period as it unfolded under my eyes. I was for the time entirely the historian, with little time to dream of the fictive material with ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... dreadful!" thought Susie, shivering more violently than ever. "And what a musty smell—it's damp, of course, and I shall be laid up. Poor Hilton! What will she think of this? Oh, how d'you do," she added aloud, as a female figure in a white apron suddenly emerged from the gloom and took her hand and kissed it; "Anna, who's ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... had stirred the musty marshal to a show of feeling. The marshal, who had keyed himself up to make the thrust, was disappointed. He made that mistake, common to his kind, of imagining that he could continue that sort of thing ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... the change of fashion in poetry as in costume. When, therefore, he finally resolved to hazard his own fate and Mira's upon the results of his London adventure, the literary goods at his disposal were already somewhat musty in character. The year 1780, in which he reached London, marks the very nadir of English poetry. From the days of Elizabeth to our own there has never been so absolutely barren a period. People had become fairly tired of the jingle of Pope's imitators, and the new era had not ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... said William, as he shut the door behind them: "certainly, Sir." And then, having placed the musty documents upon the shelf, whence they could be fetched down without difficulty on the slightest sign of a client, that ingenious youth, with singular confidence that nobody would be inconvenienced thereby, put a notice on the door to ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... of History and Biography.—Published by the Virginia Historical Society. Seventeen volumes. The wealth of material contained in these volumes can hardly be estimated. Countless papers, formerly scattered abroad, or hidden in the musty archives of libraries, have been published and rendered accessible to the historian. So vastly important are they that no account of colonial Virginia, no matter of what period, can afford to neglect them. They touch every phase of the life of the colony, political, ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... herself, she maintained an admirable self-restraint. She petted and she cooed over objects dear to her; she loved every inch of everything; she laughed and she exclaimed, and with her laughter sunshine suddenly broke into the musty, threadbare interior for the first time ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... spread themselves over the rotten floor. The boys were all glad when the prow touched the little dock at the lone pueblo where Uncle Sam's flag snapped in a breeze which was coming over the trees, bringing with it a musty ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... stone-built cottage with his guide, and was shown in the little musty front room a bookcase full of books which made his eyes gleam with desire. The half-curbed joy and eagerness he showed so touched the sexton that, after inquiring as to the lad's belongings, and remembering that in his time he had enjoyed many a pipe and 'glass o' yell' with 'owd Reuben Grieve' ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... means rapid. Much of the literature among which he delved, musty with age, written in mediaeval Latin and in obsolete characters, gave up its secrets with reluctance. Nevertheless he found definite replies to the questions which he propounded to himself. A collection of apocryphal Gospels "printed," according to the quaint ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... Adela groaned: "We have been hunting that girl all day in vile neighbourhoods. Wilfrid has not spoken more than a dozen sentences. I have had to dine on buns and hideous soup. I am half-dead with the smell of cabs. Oh! if ever I am poor it will kill me. That damp hay and close musty life are too intolerable! Yes! You see I care for what I eat. I seem to be growing an animal. And Wilfrid is going to drag me over the same course to-morrow, if you don't prevent him. I would not mind, only it is absolutely necessary that I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not musty, my pretty St Peter, but produce the keys. I must have the writings out, that ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... much inclined to accede to his request: they both yielded notwithstanding. He conducted them up-stairs, unlocked the musty room, pulled up the blinds, and admitted enough of lingering light for the concluding devotions of the day. He then proceeded to gather his family together, calling them ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... all that was left of a scattered Sunday-school library, that had been in use two generations before. Queer little books they were, time-yellowed and musty smelling, but to story-loving little Betty, hungry for something new, they seemed a veritable gold-mine. She had found that no key barred her way into this little red treasure-house of a bookcase, and a board propped against the wall under the window outside gave her an easy entrance ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Sylvester," said I after a few minutes' silence. "You are young, yet you have seen the world. What is the best refuge, in your view, for a man of delicate sentiments and of ripe age? Would you recommend such a person to shut himself up for ever in a hermitage of musty books, and to flirt there eternally with the memories of his young loves, who are become corpulent matrons or angular maids? Or, don't you think, now, that an autumnal attachment—provided some sweet and healthy intelligence comes in contact ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... the ground was covered with fine dry sand, the numerous grotesque shapes and oddities all around the cavern seemed almost made on purpose for little private habitations and snug corners. It was so large in size that it had nothing of the musty feeling of the little caverns below, but was airy, and even bright with sunshine during part of the day. Every body seemed to find a nook or place in it so suited to their minds, that we called it the "Cavern of Content." We nearly deserted our houses during the hot weather, and lived ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... should take her to my poor log-cabin when she might have a mansion in Boston and all that money can buy. If I were an unselfish man, I should release my claims to her." A silence of several moments ensued, during which Billy drew the leather trunk from under the bed and took a fresh letter from the musty package we have already seen. He drew his chair near to the candle, slipped the letter from its envelope, and slowly read its four pages to himself. After gazing at the fire for several minutes in meditation ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... all events, introduced a wholesome and thorough system of cleansing and cleaning throughout the house, that had been very welcome to the soul of Mrs. Eccles; but into the library they had not penetrated. The old bookshelves remained untouched; the old books, in their musty brown calf bindings, were undesecrated by profaning hands. All sorts of quaint chairs and bureaus, gathered together out of every other room in the house, had congregated here. The space over the mantelpiece was adorned by a splendid portrait by Vandyke, flanked ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... 401.1. V. have a bad smell &c n.; smell; stink, stink in the nostrils, stink like a polecat; smell strong &c adj., smell offensively. Adj. fetid; strong-smelling; high, bad, strong, fulsome, offensive, noisome, rank, rancid, reasty^, tainted, musty, fusty, frouzy^; olid^, olidous^; nidorous^; smelling, stinking; putrid ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... exactly what I want," the professor said. "I'm interested in American Indians, and have always been considered an authority on the subject. But I'm getting old and younger men are stepping into the field. They think I'm just a musty old professor with nothing but a book knowledge of Indian ruins. So I ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... period in her career our illustrious victim applied to the Legislature to change her name from GUMMIDGE to DICKINSON, we are unable to discover. There is no record of the event in the musty tomes we have waded through at the Astor Library in search of reliable data. One thing must be apparent, even to the most violently prejudiced and brutish bigot—namely, that Miss DICKINSON no longer confesses to the name of GUMMIDGE. However disrespectful ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various
... a high musty living room into a small room off this. There was a small hynrane heater in here, and the ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault
... at least have dropped me a note to ask how I am getting along, and whether I am industrious, and all that rot! But did you? No! You took me to the horse show, and back to the hotel, and then vanished as if you had withdrawn yourself into your musty old shell!" ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... Dr. John Gorham Palfrey, which affords in many points, the most careful and faithful picture on record of the time, personal facts, unfortunately, being of the most meager nature. They have been sought for chiefly, however, in the old records themselves; musty with age and appallingly diffuse as well as numerous, but the only source from which the true flavor of a forgotten time can be extracted. Barren of personal detail as they too often are, the writer ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... holes, that dirty line, Where never sun presumes to shine, With straws, and filth, and time beset, Where all is fish that comes to net, That musty film, the Muse supposes Figures the ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... waistcoat, like food stored on cupboard shelves. I took such a dislike to him that I felt inclined to bounce out as quickly as I had bounced in, but the door had banged mechanically behind me, as if to stop the bell at any cost. The shop smelt of moth powder, old leather, musty paper, and hair oil. ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... mantle of ashes over the fair city before the resuscitation arrived. Some antique bronzes and utensils, discovered by a peasant, excited universal attention. Excavations were begun, and Pompeii, shaking off as it were her musty grave clothes, stared from the classic and poetical age of the first into the prosaic modern world of the nineteenth century. The world was startled, and looked with wondering interest to see this ancient stranger arising from her tomb—to behold the awakening of the remote past from the womb ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... suffered long, Mr. Ogilvy," he said. "Father," he added, wringing my hand. I called him son; but it was only an exchange of musty words that we had found too late. A father is a poor estate to come into ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... the party escaped death by poison is a wonder, for they were very venturesome in their essays, and not unfrequently were punished for their boldness by severe vomitings and other unpleasant symptoms. The jerked meat they carried with them often became musty and tainted, having been imperfectly dried, or from the effects of rain. But their greatest difficulty was the frequent scarcity of water, which sadly afflicted their horses, and prolonged their route, compelling them to deviate from the direct course ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... during tea. Carrie almost as full of it as Lupin. Lupin informs me, to my disgust, that he has been persuaded to take part in the forthcoming performance of the "Holloway Comedians." He says he is to play Bob Britches in the farce, GONE TO MY UNCLE'S; Frank Mutlar is going to play old Musty. I told Lupin pretty plainly I was not in the least degree interested in the matter, and totally disapproved of amateur theatricals. Gowing ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... picking our way down the Old Kent Road. A couple of hours later we came to Maidstone, where we had tea; it was a quarter past five precisely when we made a new start for Canterbury, and a good hour and a half later when we entered that musty ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... fairy stories when I was little and when I discovered there were grown-up ones, too, like those in Unknown Worlds and the old Weird Tales, I read them, too. But I hadn't any idea how much there was, until we started buying copies of everything there was on the news-stands, and then ransacking musty little stores for back issues and ones that had gone out of publication, until Paul's office was just full of teetery piles of gaudy magazines and everywhere you looked there were pictures of strange stars and eight-legged monsters and men in ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... us in a private sitting-room, long, oak-beamed, spotlessly clean, and a trifle musty, with that faint but unmistakable mustiness which hangs about old rooms and old furniture. Tea was set out on one half of the oak dining-table. The china was of the old-fashioned white and gold order, the cups very wide at the brim and cramped ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... be taken that no stinking fish, or unwholesome flesh, or musty corn, or other corrupt fruits of what sort soever, be suffered to be sold about the city, or ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... the closet door after a fearful glance into its dark depths. It was a long closet with a strong odour of lovage. The Aunt Harriet had had a habit of eating lovage and had carried it constantly in her pocket. There was very likely some of the pleasant root in the pocket of the musty purple gown which Amanda threw over the ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... looked as if she had slept in them. She went without ruffles, her collar made a band of filth against the skin of her neck, and you felt that she was less clean beneath than above. An odor of poverty, rank and musty, arose from her. Sometimes it was so strong that Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could not refrain from saying to her: "Go and change your clothes, my ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... seeking a place where he might spread his coat for a bed. He stumbled against a ladder, which mounted upward into the cavernous mow of a loft. He climbed the creaking rungs, found footing on the dry floor, and stopped to sniff at the odor of the few wisps of dry, musty hay scattered thinly over the rough boards. He took a step forward, stumbled over a pair of legs and landed headfirst on the stomach of ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... a doctrine as this were advocated by an obscure individual in some secluded hamlet, or found only in the musty volumes of some forgotten author, it surely would be unworthy of notice; but coming as it does from a quite popular writer, and being coupled with a great amount of really valuable truth, it is sufficiently important to deserve refutation. A brief glance ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... must put his hand on the cause and prove what he says by what he does, that he will not get off by the feeble minded trash of stale habits that go with doctors of medicine, and by his knowledge he must show his ability to go beyond the musty bread of symptomatology and water his patients made, from the cider of the ripe apples from the tree ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... Another door gave us entrance to the quarter of the squires. We started across it, but in the center of the floor I stopped. In all the other rooms of the castle dust had lain thick, but there was none here. Elsewhere the windows had been closed and the air heavy and musty, but here the soft night breeze was drifting in. On a table, in odd conjunction, stood the remains of a meal, a roll of bandages, and a half-burned candle; and finally, against the wall lay a bed of a sort, a mattress piled ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... closed; and he stood in absolute darkness, hesitating, wondering. He fancied he heard cautious feet stealing across the bare floor of the hall; but not another sound broke the oppressive brooding silence of the close, musty-smelling old house. In another moment he would have spoken, have demanded the meaning of all this, when a faint gleam of light appeared at the end of the hall, and from the lower stairs a man's hand and arm became visible, holding a lamp. A hand was laid upon his arm ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... sir. Some ten years ago, there came to you a man on a secret business. He had an old musty bit of parchment, on which were written some words, hardly legible, in an antique hand,—an old deed, it might have been,—some family document, and here and there the letters were faded away. But this man had spent ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... To Prevent Musty Teapot—When putting away a silver teapot, or one that is not in everyday use, place a little stick across the top underneath the cover. This will allow fresh air to get in ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... excitement in this hide-and-seek game, as you play it, than in the pursuits of a musty pedant," admitted the other, crackling his large knuckles. "But when are we going to spring upon friend Livius and strip ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to a hunter's deserted cabin for the night. The cabin had no door, and I could see the stars through the roof. The old sheet-iron stove was badly rusted and broken. Most of the night I spent chopping wood, and I did not sleep at all. But I had a good rest by the stove, where I read a little from a musty pamphlet on palmistry that I found between the logs of the cabin. I always carry candles with me. When the wind is blowing, the wood damp, and the fingers numb, they are of inestimable value in kindling a fire. I do not carry firearms, and during the night, ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... convivial host discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient features of ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... we lawyers cannot easily throw aside whenever we get a sight of musty parchments. I hope you will pardon ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... was nearly bankrupt and she did write 'Mrs.' to save him! Taking them in retrospect, it's a question if the thing they called sacrifice wasn't plain damn foolishness. Why, hell, Jack, d'you mean to say that the professor and his musty European customs—oh, I can't be profane enough!—the English language is trifling and inadequate! But I'm going to take a hand in this ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Xantippe, and tells me, that she follows the Example of her Name-sake; for being married to a Bookish Man, who has no Knowledge of the World, she is forced to take their Affairs into her own Hands, and to spirit him up now and then, that he may not grow musty, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... few old things in the set that are really new, because they have heretofore been inaccessible to children except in musty books not likely ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... occasioned her to make some reflections, and then to reason upon those reflections; as for instance, that since her husband chose rather to devote himself to his studies, than to the duties of matrimony, to turn over musty old books, rather than attend to the attractions of beauty, and to gratify his own pleasures, rather than those of his wife, it might be permitted her to relieve some necessitous lover, in neighbourly ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... book-shop in Boston was Burnham's, whose fore-name was Thomas Oliver Hazard Perry, shortened into "Perry Burnham" by his familiars. He was a little, pale-faced, wiry, nervous man, with piercing black eyes and very brusque manners. In old and musty books he lived and moved and had his being, for more than a generation. He exchanged a stuffy, narrow shop in Cornhill for more spacious quarters in Washington street, near School street, where he bought and sold books with an assiduous devotion to business, never trusting to others what ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... material in him for a bishop, should have for employ the registration of nasty patience-trying shards, that he should have to pass his life in the garret of a register-office, gravely uncorking stupid bottles, incrusted with all the nastiness of the sea, deciphering musty parchments, like filthy conjuring-books, dirty wills, and other illegible stuff of the kind, was the fault of this Josiana. Worst of all, this creature "thee'd" and "thou'd" him! And he should not revenge himself—he should not ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place—this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey. Of course in reality the work must be written by a man, because they say so at Oxford and Cambridge, and they know everything down in Oxford and Cambridge; but I venture ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... he doesn't want to travel through the street where the worst one stands. We have made some inquiries since coming to this house, and find that it is really the best, or perhaps I ought to say the least bad, in the place. The table is poor, the beds lumpy and musty, and nearly every window has a broken pane or two, while ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... penetrated every nook and cranny. The floors groaned dismally, and the scurrying feet of mice echoed through the walls. Cobwebs draped the windows, where the secret spinners had held high carnival, undisturbed. An indescribable musty odour almost stifled them and the chill dampness carried with it a ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... inside the door they caught a whiff of a grateful odor. Lillian and Eleanor had put a great part of their last rations into a big kettle of soup. The last can of tomatoes had been sacrificed, the last half dozen potatoes. Nothing remained but some musty corn meal, a few teaspoons of tea and a little sugar. Unless relief came soon the houseboat party would truly have ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... Claude went down into the hold where half-a-dozen of his company were lying ill. The hold was damp and musty as an old cellar, so steeped in the smells and leakage of innumerable dirty cargoes that it could not be made or kept clean. There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid with sickness and sweat and vomit. Two of the band boys were working in the stench and dirt, helping the stewards. Claude ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... of dust had accumulated on everything, and the rooms were oppressive with the musty odors that gather in a closed, untenanted house. But apart from that it stood as they had left it thirteen months before. No foot had crossed the threshold. The pile of wood and kindling lay beside the fireplace as Bill had placed it the morning ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the cupboard of thy fancy for musty scraps and flinty crusts to feed thy spleen withal,—inattentive to the dainties which a blue-eyed Hebe had culled in the garden of Hope, and had poured from out her basket ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... inspire her with deadly fear. She returned his gaze steadily and calmly, and held out her hand towards the bag, indicating by a gesture that she wished to handle the serpents. The darweesh, still staring at her, and very slowly, put the bag close to her, holding it under her breast. A curious musty smell, like the scent of something terribly old, came to her nostrils. She hesitated for a moment, then deliberately pulled off her gloves, put them on the divan, stood up, and plunged her right hand into the bag, at the same time ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... I'm glad that I'm not Like others I meet day by day; If my insides get musty, Or mussed-up, or dusty, I get newly ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... bridge, and your device had the effective simplicity of genius. Your plan here was, to be sure, commonplace, but it, too, required caution and good acting, and you and Jane supplied both. It was nicer than popping me into some musty priest's hole, though I expect this ancient ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... usually affected by women and girls. At the table he was moderate in his appetite but particular as to the nature of his food and the manner in which it was set before him. Nothing would induce him to touch any meat that was "high" or rice that was musty, nor would he eat anything that was not properly cut up or accompanied with the proper sauce. He allowed himself only a certain quantity of meat and rice, and though no such limit was fixed to the amount of wine with which he accompanied his frugal ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... he struck off into the cave. Its floor sloped gently upward as he progressed and the walls began to grow narrower. The air, too, rapidly lost its musty odor, and blew fresh and ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... reigning princess, preceded by the captain and followed by the officials, she went over the two decks, entered the galleries of the engine room and the four-sided abyss of the hatchways, sniffing the musty odor of the hold. On the bridge she touched with childish enthusiasm the large brass hood of the binnacle and other steering instruments glistening as ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... come with force. All the old things that did not count, come back to calm and to restore. The school-room, where the light flickered on a special corner of the ceiling, telling the children to come out and play; the tapping of the laurels outside the church windows, and the musty smell of red rep cushions along the pew where the hours were very slow in passing; the white clover in the field behind the garden, got at easily through a hole in the privet hedge. The play of light and shadow over the hills of home, the dusk at nightfall, and the homely cawing of rooks. All the ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... recluse in that distant village, doing his duty exactly, but given over for the most part to his beloved books. He seldom went away. The monotony of his daily round was broken only by the occasional receipt of a parcel of musty volumes, which he had ordered to be bought for him at some sale. He was a man of varied learning, full of remote information, eccentric from his solitariness, but with a great sweetness of nature. His life was simple, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... she was fathoms deep in thought. The musty-smelling lift shot them up to the top floor; Beverley, stepping out ahead of Clo, had the air of having forgotten her existence. The girl's anxiety deepened. The best she could do was to guide her friend through dimly ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... whatever he thought or did. The lights and the sounds and the scents of Pym's died out. In place of the light there was darkness; in place of the sounds there was silence; and in place of the scent of beef, pork, mutton, fish, veal, cabbage, onions, carrots, beer, and tobacco there was the musty, damp scent of a place underground that has been ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... reader, interested in these complicated affairs which were soon to bring on a sanguinary war on a scale even vaster than the one which had been temporarily suspended, should give close attention to papers never before exhumed from the musty sepulchre of national archives, although constantly alluded to in the records of important state trials. It is strange enough to observe the apparent triviality of the circumstances out of which gravest events seem to follow. But the circumstances were in reality threads of iron which led down to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... am not a king," he said at last, "and if you go to arresting me and throwing me into one of your musty old dungeons you will find that I am a whole lot more important than most ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his present situation. He walked out upon the deck, intending to open it and test its contents. So he sat down, and, taking his knife, he pushed the cork in. Then he smelled the supposed liquor to see what it might be. There was only a musty odor. He looked in. The bottle appeared to be filled with paper. Then the whole truth flashed upon his mind. He struck the bottle upon the deck. It broke to atoms, and there lay a scroll of ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... not an uncommon tragedy of the West. If slightest chronicle of it survive, it must be discovered among the musty and nearly forgotten records of the Eighteenth Regiment of Infantry, yet it is extremely probable that even there the details were never written down. Sufficient if, following certain names on that long regimental roll, there should be duly entered ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... like it, do you?" sneered the bully. "You'll like it still less when you get below. It's beautifully damp and musty." ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... them, I find there more envy, injustice, and malice. Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face; and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that, in growing old, do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay. In observing the wisdom of Socrates, and many circumstances of his condemnation, I should dare to believe that he in some sort himself purposely, by ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Sir Timothy protested. "We look at certain things from opposite points of view. You see, my prospective son-in-law, if ever he becomes that, represents the law—the Law with a capital 'L'—which recognises no human errors or weaknesses, and judges crime out of the musty books of the law-givers of old. He makes of the law a mechanical thing which can neither bend nor give, and he judges humanity from the same standpoint. Yet at heart he is a good fellow and ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... keeps the middle state, And neither leans on this side, nor on that; Nor stops, for one bad cork, his butler's pay; Swears, like Albutius, a good cook away; Nor lets, like Naevius, every error pass, The musty wine, foul cloth, or greasy glass. Now hear what blessings temperance can bring: (Thus said our friend, and what he said I sing) First health: the stomach (cramm'd from every dish, 70 A tomb of boil'd and roast, and ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Turnbull noticed the faint musty odor that told of long-unused and poorly circulated air. The conditioners had been turned down to low power ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... hope in his voice as he observed my face; "let me show you the interior. I brought the keys along. Of course, the rooms may seem a bit musty. No one has lived in it for—some time. It's the old Michell property; been in the family for a couple of hundred years. Last Michell is dead, now, and it's being sold for the benefit of some religious institute ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... safe tomb, at any rate! Whoever Araxes was, he stands little chance of being exhumed if he lies two floors below the Great Pyramid in a sealed-up rocky cavern! Princess, you look like an inspired prophetess!—so much talk of ancient and musty times makes me feel uncanny, and I will, with your permission, have a smoke with Dr. Dean in the garden to steady my nerves. The mere notion of thirty vases of unclaimed precious stones hidden down yonder is enough to upset ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Aye, the shoemaker told me of that comical trick; and his nephew says, that the yeast was musty; and that Ursula [was so] smothered, that she has got a pain in her bones. The thatcher would have given her some doctor's medicine in a tumbler; but he says, she will ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... will not work without a pan of coals under the cylinder. But as no part of the island is more than twenty-five miles from the sea, this continual moisture appears to be quite innocuous, its worst effect being the musty smell which it causes in everything in the mountains, where there is the most rain. Use fortunately takes from us the perception of this, or it would be quite intolerable. Perpetual summer, and the utmost glory of earth, sky, and sea, are not to be enjoyed without drawbacks ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... leaden silence, that seemed part of the musty, choking atmosphere—a silence that weighed down ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... new field—a feat that becomes ever harder and less possible—then they sink down into the class of the wage earners, or of Catilinarians. All efforts to prevent the downfall of handicraft and of the middle class by means of institutions and laws, borrowed from the lumber-room of the musty past, prove utterly ineffective. They may enable one or another to deceive himself on his actual condition; but soon the illusion vanishes under the heavy weight of facts. The process of absorption of the small by the large takes its course with all ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... coward," I said, "all you can think of is your sour old self! If you loved him—if you knew the first faint beginning of love—" I snatched up the letter I had addressed to Dan'l and ran over to the dresser for my purse. "You stay in here with the truth and keep your musty little soul safe! I'm going in there and ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... and any doubts he might have had, born of the dreariness, the odors of stale food and of the musty cellar below, of the shabby room she proceeded to show him, died in an impulse to somehow, some way, lift this small group of people out of the slough of despondency which seemed to be ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... not a reply, it is a question. And the question has become musty because it has been handled so often, and no man has ever been ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... interrupting him, and drew a picture from his pocket—one but just now taken from that musty pile of books, received so many years before. He showed it to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was visible. The sharp crackle of the musketry-firing was a strong contrast to the scream of the bombs. I think all the dogs and cats must be killed or starved, we don't see any more pitiful animals prowling around.... The cellar is so damp and musty the bedding has to be carried out and laid in the sun every day, with the forecast that it may be demolished at any moment. The confinement is dreadful. To sit and listen as if waiting for death in a horrible manner would drive me insane. I don't ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the stars; of Doctor Kane, facing Arctic ice and Northern night; of Doctor Evans, who filed and filled the teeth of royalty and made dentists popular; of Bartram, Gross, or Leidy. Fulton lived here, yet only the searcher in dusty, musty tomes knows it. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... accommodation was to be had, all the inns were literally overrun with sedan chairs and filled with well-dressed officials, already busy with the "hsi-lien" (wash basin). In my dirty khaki clothes, out at knee and elbow, looking musty and mean and dusty, with my topee botched and battered, I presented a most unhappy contrast as I led my pony down the street under the sarcastic stare of bystanding scrutineers. The nights were cold, and in the private house where I stayed, mercifully overlooked ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... as they were, contented with their lot, and receiving all things so unquestioningly and thankfully, filled my life, and brought a great calm to a mind that had, hitherto, been somewhat self-centred and troubled by pessimistic doubts and fantastic dreams culled from musty pages. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... were without a change of clothes, and with no proper sleeping-place, save the wet deck and the wet jackets that they worked in. It often happened that the gun-ports would be closed for several weeks together, during which time the gun-decks became filthy and musty, while the sailors contracted all manner of cramps and catarrhs. In addition to the wet, and the discomfort of such a life, there was also the work, often extremely laborious, incidental to heavy weather at sea. What with the ceaseless handling of sails and ropes, in ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... smell musty up here too?" called out Guermeur to them, passing his bearded face up through the half-open ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... to the place, and found that Colonel Mohun was confined with other officers in the pen, where they had the usual Federal ration of watery soup, bad meat, and musty crackers. For a gentleman, like himself, accustomed before the war to every luxury that unbounded wealth could supply, this was naturally disagreeable, and I determined to omit no exertion to effect ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room pervaded by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple of chairs and a praying-stool, and for only ornament a great, gaunt crucifix hanging upon one ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... old cottage!" she returned, with a shrill rendering of each adjective. "You would have us go and live in that damp, musty, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Boston, with a rusty iron pot from the galley, to which he fastened the end of his rope, dipped up some of the water from over the side. It was warm to the touch, and, aware that they were in the Gulf Stream, they crawled under the musty bedding in the cabin berths and slept through the night. In the morning there was no promise of the easterly wind that Boston hoped would come to blow them to port, and they secured their boat—reeving off davit-tackles, and with the plug out, pulling it up, one end at a time, while the water drained ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... man with the heavy eyebrows had ushered Ben into a parlor furnished with what had once been great splendor; but now the hangings were faded, the furniture warped and aged and over all hung a musty aroma as if the place ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... huge, globular man clad in soiled linens sprawled in a musty Morris chair and sipping a highball. The man's face and neck were of a purplish, apoplectic hue; he seemed to radiate heat-waves like ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... writing, and much of it in Latin, as her husband told her—it was a collection as void of significance as a treatise on conic sections, so far as Mary was concerned. But night after night Darnell shut himself up with the musty rolls, and more than ever when he rejoined her he bore upon his face the blazonry of some great adventure. And one night she asked him what interested him so much in the papers he ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... outwear two of the brothers'. In short, all the mending left Scrub and Spare, and went to the new cobbler. So the brothers were poor that winter, and when Christmas came they had nothing to feast on but a barley loaf, a piece of musty bacon, and some small beer of their own brewing. But they made a great fire of logs, which crackled and blazed with red embers, and in high glee the cobblers sat down to their beer and bacon. The door ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... negations went deeper than the doorway and the pigeons; and the faithful of his diocese, being untrammelled by the State, politely dismissed him from his charge. In England steady-going Christians had been not less perturbed by that queer collection of rather musty discourses which was called Essays and Reviews; and the Church of England had made an attempt to rid itself, by synodical action, of all complicity in the dubious doctrine. But the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had justified the essayists, and had done its best to uphold Colenso. By so ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... indifference to me, for the game will go on all the same. Lusus enim suum habet ambitum, says the pious singer Meissner, (chap. 9, p. 24,) and also the pious Ascenditor, patron of singed coffee, musty lemonade, milk of almonds with no almonds in it, and, above all, strawberry ice full of lumps of ice, being himself a great connoisseur and artist in ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... hardly saw anything but Molly. Her eye wandering over the strange place, was presently caught by the cripple, sitting crouching in a corner of the room. It was all miserably desolate. The paper shields kept out the light of the sunbeams; and though the place was tolerably clean, it had a close, musty, disagreeable, shut-up smell. But all Daisy thought of at first was the cripple. She went ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... our masters?" she screamed out in her lisping voice. "What is it to you that they took me in, brought me up, and gave me meat and drink? Can't you bear to see another's good fortune, eh? Who asked you to come here? You fusty, musty, black-faced villain with a moustache like a beetle's!" Here Pufka indicated with her thick short fingers what his moustache was like; while Nurse Vassilievna's toothless mouth was convulsed with laughter, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... buds was in the air about them; and wafted out on this, as though it might have been just now brought up from the musty depths of some old cedar chest, they heard the thin voice of Miss Liz scolding one of the servants. Otherwise, the morning seemed to have no life except the lazy drone ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... He half remembered some of his sporting stories, and supplemented these by gleanings from his own commonplace book. The result is a curious medley, which testifies clearly to learning and wit, and also to the turning over of musty old books of facetiae ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... you know as little from the musty volumes of the Museum as of 'Ultima Thule'—the people indeed practice it. The old gods are necessary to them. They are the bread of life to them. But instead of those you have offered them sour, unripe fruit, with a glittering rind-from your own garden, of your own growing. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... correct. He took that box to his private room, and with some trouble unlocked it. A damp and musty smell came forth, as when a man delves a potato-bury; and then appeared layers of parchment yellow and brown, in and out with one another, according to the curing of the sheep-skin, perhaps, or the age ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... foot-sore and dragging, the legs of their skin boots eaten to the ankle, and the taste of dog meat still in their mouths. Broken and dispirited, these had fared as well through that desperate winter as their brothers from up-river, and received pound for pound of musty flour, strip for strip of rusty bacon, lump for lump of precious sugar. Moreover, the price of no single thing had risen ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Mr TOMKINS fear my reproaches for his dilatoriness, for there is a somewhat musty proverb that "Procrastination ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... true to myself, Walter. For what pray do we toil over dry and musty law books in a confined office, months and years, if not to gain the power of rising in the world? I have served my dreary apprenticeship—I have learnt the art and mystery, and now for the best and most certain mode of ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... seem a little bit musty," said the girl, softening a little. "I, should think that I saw the ghosts of dead and gone players sitting round the table. I remember reading a story ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... I said firmly. I saw nothing wrong with it. Roofed with woven bark, carpeted with moss which was planted on the floor, the place was abandoned, somewhat a bit musty, but weathertight and seemed ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... background. The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly eradicated, to make way for a blazing parterre after the manner of the suburban villa—gay in the summer, in the spring a wilderness of clay, in the autumn a howling desert of musty evergreens.. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... and uncovered his head, for here, once, SHE had stood, she who was for him the only woman in all the world. So having paused awhile to look about him, he presently went on into the gloom of the barn, a gloom damp and musty with years and decay. ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... was a bleak and musty cellar, beneath an old stable of dingy, brick construction. The building had been modernized to the extent of one single decoration on the street front, an electric sign: "Garage." On the floor, level with the sidewalk, stood half a dozen automobiles of ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... was a grewsome old shell any way, full of unaccountable noises after dark—rustlings of garments along unfrequented passages, and stealthy footfalls in unoccupied chambers overhead. I never knew of an old house without these mysterious noises. Next to my bedroom was a musty, dismantled apartment, in one corner of which, leaning against the wainscot, was a crippled mangle, with its iron crank tilted in the air like the elbow of the late ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... feeling that "Riders of the Purple Sage" was true. My dream people of romance had really lived there once upon a time. I climbed high upon the huge stones, and along the smooth red walls where Pay Larkin once had glided with swift sure steps, and I entered the musty cliff-dwellings, and called out to hear the weird and sonorous echoes, and I wandered through the thickets and upon the grassy spruce-shaded benches, never for a moment free of the story I had conceived there. Something of awe and sadness abided with ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... stories that were good, and they might have served him for a volume of marine memoirs. But I was with him when we freighted the Kut Sang with adventure and sailed out of Manila, so his musty records of rescues and wrecks lacked life for me. In the old logbooks I found no men to compare with the Rev. Luther Meeker; or Petrak, the little red-headed beggar; or Long Jim or Buckrow or Thirkle. I never found in their pages a cabin-boy like Rajah the Malay, strutting about with ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... Aunt Lydia was already in full possession of Cecile's and Maurice's attic. She was standing on tiptoe, and taking down some musty ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... quantum sabis on this one the man to the left would give the same signal. The maintainance was on an equal scale. Today bacon and peas—peas and bacon tomorrow. Once in a while this menu was broken by porridge or peeled barley, and as an occasional great feast by pudding. This pudding was made of musty flour, half salt and half sweet water and of very ancient mutton suet. The bacon could have been from four to five years old, was black at both outer edges, became yellow a little farther on and was white only in the very centre. The salted beef was in a very similar condition. The biscuits ...
— The Voyage of The First Hessian Army from Portsmouth to New York, 1776 • Albert Pfister
... eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out — Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest — they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... skies, they were ashen and sober, The lady was shivering with fear; Her shoulders were shud'ring with fear, On a dark night in dismal October, Of his most Matrimonial Year. It was hard by the cornfield of Auber, In the musty Mud Meadows of Weir, Down by the dank frog-pond of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... memory with exploded systems and useless names. Good God! In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand years old and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected, in this enlightened and scientific age, to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. My dear sir, you must begin your studies ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... brimming with the modern passion for efficiency, learned foreign tongues, and browsed in the musty archives, he would have discovered that there was much to unlearn. The early scribes piled fancy upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a profligate, a spendthrift, and so on. "Houbraken's facts," we read, "are interwoven with ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... well stocked. But in mid-winter, being naturally of a delicate habit of body, he sickened, and in two weeks, in spite of the nursing and tireless care of his devoted wife, he died. The snow was six feet deep, and only a peck of musty corn and a bushel of potatoes were left as their winter supply. The fuel also was short, and most of the time Mrs. Noble could only keep herself and her children warm by huddling in the bedclothes on bundles of straw, in the loft which served them for a sleeping room. Below ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... painted walls faintly lighted from above, and a curtain like a shadow, hiding the end. In these passages hung the smoky perfume of incense; and from over tile-topped walls came the fragrance of roses and lemon blossoms, half choked with the melancholy scent of things old, musty and decayed. Beautiful pillars, brought perhaps from ruined Carthage, were set deeply in the whitewashed walls, looking sad and lumpy now that centuries of chalk-coats had thickened their graceful contours. But to compensate for loss of shape, they were dazzling ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
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