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More "Seedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wilford's intentions being as honourable as she fondly imagined them, when a gig drove up to the door, containing Wentworth and a fellow whom I recognised as one of the billiard-markers in —— Street, dressed in a seedy suit of black for the occasion; immediately afterwards Wilford arrived on horseback. The whole thing was now perfectly clear. Wilford, having made the girl believe he intended to marry her, persuaded Wentworth, who is completely his tool, to carry her off for him; ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... except in hall or chapel or at lecture, where their manners of feeding, praying and studying, were considered alike objectionable; no one knew whence they came, whither they went, nor what they did, for they never showed at cricket or the boats; they were a gloomy, seedy-looking conferie, who had as little to glory in in clothes and manners as in ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... Citizens" devoted to the town of Riverbank. The man was not as young as he appeared to be. His garments were of a youthful cut and cloth, being of the sort generally known as "College Youth Style," but they were themselves no longer youthful. In fact, the man looked seedy. ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... but a narrow aperture, high up in the wall, admitted the feeble glimmer of daylight. There was an iron door, and a water-pipe, and platform on which I lay, and on which reposed several gentlemen of seedy raiment and unwholesome appearance. The place and the company, as dimly revealed by the uncertain morning light, inspired me with emotions of horror; and in my inexperience and ignorance, ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... me and lit a cigarette in his old nonchalant manner. He was dressed in the seedy frock-coat of the book merchant, but the rest of that individual lay in a pile of white hair and old books upon the table. Holmes looked even thinner and keener than of old, but there was a dead-white tinge in his aquiline face which told me that his life recently had not ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... must treat respectfully. No one divines a man's or woman's social status quicker or more unerringly than a servant. The attendant saw at once that the man did not belong to the class which paid social visits to tenants in the Astruria. He was rather seedy-looking, his collar was not immaculate, his boots were thick and clumsy, his clothes cheap ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... and all made you send that telegram? It spoiled my breakfast, and sent me off in a tearing hurry, to find Margery perfectly well. If she'd been seedy or anything I should have been delighted, but there she was, busy about her dresses and what not, and I dare say she thought me a lunatic for coming at that time in the morning. You shouldn't get into the habit of sending telegrams. A telegram is a thing that means something—at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had spent a seedy autumn. The Russo-Turkish campaign, which had been unjustifiably allowed, by foreign Powers, to drain Egypt of her gold and life-blood—some 25,000 men since the beginning of the Servian prelude—not only caused "abundant sorrow" to the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Campbell assessors and the baron bailie might have sent a man to the Plantations on that dittay ten years ago, but we live in different times, Mr. MacTaggart—different times, Mr. MacTaggart," repeated the writer, tee-heeing till his bent shoulders heaved under his seedy, ink-stained surtout coat. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... said, "I am afraid the boy isn't very fit—Jack wires that he seems seedy, and that they have got a man over from York. Don't be anxious, it's probably nothing much—but I think ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... matter though seedy his hat and his coat. That his pantaloons bagged and were ragged and frayed? Still the world by its modern, unanimous vote Says it danced to the tune that his chin-music played! At the touch of his hand, at the thrill of his thought, It leaped on the paths where the greater truths ran, ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... You have taken nothing but the beer, and we have all drunk that. No, it's the tobacco; it always makes fellows rather seedy at first, and I expect you swallowed ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... conjectured. It was the everyday tale of a heedless, inexperienced youth, suddenly cast without guide or Mentor upon the ocean of life, and striking in turn against all the shoals that strew the perilous waters. He had been bubbled by gentlemanly swindlers—none of your low, seedy rapscallions, but men of style and fashion, even of family, but especially of honour, who would have paraded and shot him, had he presumed to doubt their word, but made no scruple of genteelly picking his pocket. He had been duped by designing women, spunged upon by false ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... if you can remember how the women was dressin' as far back as two years ago, and can throw on the screen a picture of a woman who has only the reminders of her good looks left, you'll have her framed up. A pair of seedy thoroughbreds, they was, seedy and down ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... trout Mahnoomin, n. rice Mezheh, adv. everywhere Magwah, adv. while Manmooyahwahgaindahmoowin, n. thankfulness Meshejemin, n. a currant, (fruit) Mahzahn, n. a thistle Mahjegooday, n. a petticoat Menekahnekah, adv. seedy Mejenahwayahdahkahmig, n. pity Mahmahdahwechegawenebun, it was a strange custom Menesenoo, n. a hero Mesquahsin, n. brick, which signifies, red stone Mesahowh, that is Moosay, n. a worm Moong, n. a loon Meene, ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... do you do, Peter? [They shake hands.] I'm sorry to hear you are seedy, but you eat ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... the Rue des Martyrs in a melancholy frame of mind, and in a melancholy frame of mind she also was going up the Rue des Martyrs. He was already old, nearly sixty, with a bald head under his seedy, tall hat, a gray beard, half buried in a high shirt collar, with dull eyes, an unpleasant mouth and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... withering chicken or frost grapes, plump clusters of blue-black berries of the greenbrier, and limbs of the smooth winterberry bending with their flaming fruit. There were bushes of crimson ilex, too, trees of fruiting dogwood and holly, cedars in berry, dwarf sumac and seedy sedges, while patches on the wood slopes uncovered by the sun were spread with trailing partridge berry and the coral-fruited wintergreen. I had eaten part of my dinner with the 'possum; I picked a quantity of these wintergreen berries, and continued my meal with ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... barely been able to get a living from their sterile acres, had become millionaires. The whole region was alive with fortune-hunters, from every quarter of the country. Millions of dollars were in the pockets of men who were ready to purchase. Seedy, crazy, visionary fellows were working as middle-men, to talk up schemes, and win their bread, with as much more as they could lay their hands on. The very air was charged with the contagion of speculation, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... earnestly, "I'm going off to St. Moritz next week to have a look at the Cresta; I wish you'd have a nurse. Drummond will run in and give an eye to you, of course; but you're pretty seedy, and that's a fact. I don't ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... queer fish, beyond question. How had he got into connection with Mother Toulouche and her intimates? That remained a mystery. One fine day this seedy specimen of humanity was found among the "comrades" exchanging vague remarks with one and another. He stuck to them in all their shifting from this place to that: no one had been able to get out of him what his name was, nor where he came from, for ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... suddenly into a lane, a lane with very high, unmortared walls, over which grew a variety of bramble with a particularly luscious fruit. Every connoisseur of blackberries knows what a difference there is between the little hard seedy ones that commonly flourish in the hedges and the big juicy ones with the larger leaves. Nature had been prodigal here, and a bounteous harvest hung within ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... a while longer, Bud decided to telephone Morris's home. But at that moment a thin, seedy-looking man came into the lounge. His close-set eyes and loudly striped suit combined to give ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... Another seedy one softly explained to him that he was a fellow countryman from Indiana. Gordon gave ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... had been a loafing place for seedy politicians, active and retired, who passed their time plotting for the next campaign in the free seats provided by the City Fathers. One morning these individuals found no chairs,—absolutely none except those used by the officials ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... think so," said the seedy party, trying to draw his hand away; "I did not own this ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... ruddy cheeks abounded on this typical winter day. Mr. Trotter possessed no overcoat, but presumably following the fashion set out by other wintry pedestrians, his thin sack coat was buttoned tightly and the collar turned up defiantly. His well-brushed though seedy Derby looked chilly as it topped off his shivering features. His face was blue, not ruddy. Here and there he passed companions in poverty, but their rags were worse than his, their faces more haggard. Never did he feel more like ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... whatever with the house. But there is a rusty old knocker, too— very loose, so that it slides round when you touch it—and if you learn the trick of it, and knock long enough, somebody comes. The brave Courier comes, and gives you admittance. You walk into a seedy little garden, all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard opens; cross it, enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a cracked marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous room with a vaulted roof and whitewashed walls: not unlike ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... did him good. I thought he was a little seedy in the spring —didn't you? Wonderful man! And when I think how he's slandered and abused it makes me hot. And he never says anything, never complains, lives up there all alone, and takes his medicine. That's real ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... stroll leisurely down the long incline. The whole town tips that way. A variety of more or less quaint vehicles move about—cabriolets drawn by donkeys and ponies; sedan chairs; a species of easy-chair on wheels, with a wooden apron, and propelled by a boy or a decayed footman in seedy livery with bibulous habits written on his face. Something of a similar sort was seen at the Centennial, yet utterly unlike this, notwithstanding a resemblance in principle. These invalid go-carts are very convenient at Tenby, as they may be trundled everywhere, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... "Say, 'pon my word, I'll hate to have any soldiers see me when I'm looking as seedy as I'll look at that ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... dark yesterday evening, and I let them in, of course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundered, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... The prisoner reserved his defence. He has been seedy, however; principally sick of the family evil, despondency; the sun is gone out utterly; and the breath of the people of this city lies about as a sort of damp, unwholesome fog, in which we go walking with bowed hearts. If I understand what is a contrite ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... overheard saying to another, he followed him accidentally up a long staircase in King's Bench Walk, 'Ah, yes, I met Le Breton in the Strand yesterday, when I was walking with a Q.C., too; he's married badly, got no employment, and looks awfully seedy. So very embarrassing, you know, now wasn't it?' And the other answered lightly, in the same unconcerned tone, 'Oh, of course, dreadfully embarrassing, really.' Ernest slank down the staircase again with a sinking heart, and tried to get no further hints from ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... on the man's mind. A youth of twenty-three oughtn't to look as he did—married only a year or two also, with a pretty wife and child. I used to talk to them a good deal, and one day I said to him: 'You look seedy; what's the matter?' He flushed, and got nervous. I made up my mind it was money. If I had been here longer, I should have taken him aside and talked to him like a father. As it was, things slid along. I was up in town, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in some corking work with the gloves while I'm here. I box quite a bit at home, and I miss it travelling about like this. What say to a half-hour or so every day? I have the gloves in one of my trunks. I'm getting horribly seedy. I need ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... wild sort of way, and asked if we'd mind excusing him as he had something he wanted to see to before the steamer sailed. At five o'clock he'd never shown up, and I had to hustle our bags ashore and start out to look for him. He'd been awfully seedy for a couple of months and when he got left I knew something serious had happened. I found him late that night in the foreign hospital out of his head with a fever. It seems the letter had told him that his girl was going to ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... his coat and his hat in his hand, and was introduced. His first thought was one of extreme mortification—three days' beard was on his face. His toilet activities had been limited in number. He knew he felt wretched, seedy, groggy—and looked it. Something ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... case of red wine, hot and impulsive, belching forth "sacres" with a velocity well sustained. The phlegmatic German stirred to excitability in quest of a "small cask of lager and large box of cheese;" John Chinaman "Hi yah'd" for one "bag lice all samee hab one Melican man," while a chivalric but seedy-looking Southerner, who seemed to have "seen better days," wished he "might be—if he didn't lay a pe-yor of boots thar whar that blanket whar." Not to be lost in the shuffle was a tall canting specimen of Yankee-dom perched on a water cask that "reckoned ther is right smart chance ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... important in their place, would not, of themselves, suffice to attract young men from without. They had tried the experiment in their forlorn rooms under a machine shop, in an out-of-the-way place, furnished as a miniature chapel, and a very seedy one at that, and the result was that about six months ago the Association was in a fair way to die, and make no sign. Young men would not go to that dismal hole to spend an evening when more attractive places abounded in the city; and I would not if ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... the morning he walked into the lobby of his future workshop, and found no one yet there but two aged seedy messengers. He was shown into a waiting-room, and there he remained for a couple of hours, during which every clerk in the establishment came to have a look at him. At last he was ushered into ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... The seedy-looking stranger, whose name was Alfred Jingle, was a passenger on the same coach that day and entertained the Pickwickians with marvelous stories of his life in Spain. None of these was true, to be sure, but they were all entered in Mr. Pickwick's note-book. In gratitude, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... II.—Greengrocer's yard at side of a seedy house in a shabby street, slimy and straw-bestrewn. Yard is paved with lumpy, irregular cobbles, and some sooty and shaky-looking sheds stand at the bottom thereof. Enter together, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... surrounded the protegee of Mrs. Burrage. This shame was possible to him even while he was conscious of what a mean business it was to practise upon human imbecility, how much better it was even to be seedy and obscure, discouraged about one's self. He had been born to the prospect of a fortune, and in spite of the years of misery that followed the war had never rid himself of the belief that a gentleman who desired ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... out? You'll let her work here, alongside of you?' said the young man eagerly. He had just met Louie, in the dark, walking up Market Street with a seedy kind of gentleman, who he had reason to know was a bad lot. John was off his head about her, and no longer of much use to anybody, and in these few days other men, as it seemed to him, had begun to hang about. The difficulties of his guardianship ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... look pretty seedy this morning. You know you really work too hard, Anstice. I assure you your predecessor didn't take half the trouble with his patients that ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... fellow," said George, "I'm glad you're back again. You're looking rather seedy, though. I suppose you knocked about ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... now. I think it's because he's seen what you've done with it. I know he hadn't the smallest idea of farming it before. It's what he ought to have been doing all his life. And when you think how seedy he was when he came down here, and ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... disorders; that all, degrees of disease and disorder are frequently confounded under the same term; that "run down" may stand for a fatigue of mind or body from which a week or a month of rest will completely restore the over-worked patient, or an advanced stage of a mortal illness; that "seedy" may signify the morning's state of feeling, after an evening's over-indulgence, which calls for a glass of soda-water and a cup of coffee, or a dangerous malady which will pack off the subject of it, at the shortest notice, to the south of France. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... different. We have specimens of the respectable devil in the "long-legged bondholder" who appears to his unfortunate Dutch debtor; the portly, well-dressed little man in the "Gentleman in black"; and the seedy looking old clothes dealer of "Peter Schlemihl." Quite a different devil to any of these is the devil that interviews St. Nicholas, the devil whom St. Medard circumvented, or the simple-minded and unfortunate devil that fell into the clutches ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Tommy Sharpe and Seedy Saunders had saddled their horses and gone in search of the girls as soon as the storm threatened, but not knowing in which direction they had headed, it was like hunting for a needle ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... Cadaverous, lying on a sofa-bed—Mr Seedy, the lawyer, sitting by his side, with papers on the table ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... eaten so much for years, I assure you, Mrs. Basset; but it was impossible to taste all your good things. I am not dyspeptic, thank you, but a little seedy and tired, for I've been working rather ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... latter roused her from her revery. "I say, Amanda, are we going to stay here all night? Why in thunder can't those fools go home so you can lock the door and go! And I say, Amanda, don't you think Martin Landis is letting himself grow shabby and seedy? He's certainly settling into a regular clodhopper. He shuffled along like a hecker to-night. I don't believe he ever has his ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... and in the Mitre I see (but only in imagination) Johnson and Goldsmith talking over the quaint philosophy of wine and letters till three o'clock in the morning, finishing their three or four bottles of port, and wondering why they were a little seedy the next day. ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... do, Douglas?" said Lady Tamworth, an imposing, bejewelled figure standing at the head of the galleried staircase of Tamworth House. "Saw your father yesterday and thought him looking very seedy." ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... either side of the proscenium opening bore the words: "Deputy Turn." On the stage was a gnarled old man with ruddy cheeks and a muffler, a seedy top hat on his head, a coaching whip in his hand, the old horse bus-driver of London in his habit as he had lived. The old fellow stood there and just talked to the audience of a fine sporting class of men that petrol has driven from the streets, without exaggerated humor or pathos. Desmond, ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... scorning told me: 'True, his lines were very sweet, But his clothes, so worn and seedy—scarce for me ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "You look seedy this morning, Mr. Weston," said Williams, as George entered the office on the following day. "The effect of last night's dissipation, I suppose. How did you like ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... both well and older," said May cheerfully. "Think of my responsibilities! There's the baby! And then Alexander's been seedy. And we aren't as rich as we should like to be; you of all people must know that. And there's going to be an election and our seat's very shaky. So the cares of the world are ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... Seedy," a series of eight poems, were published in this year in Punch, as well as "Songs of the Flowers;" and soon his "Ballads of the Briefless" made a considerable stir in Punch's circle. A Beckett had been called to the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... demanded Mrs. Crow, shrewdly and very quickly. She had been inspecting the man more closely than before, and woman's intuition was telling her a truth that Anderson overlooked. Mr. Hawkshaw was not only very seedy, but very drunk. ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... loaned me a very seedy looking overcoat which I wrapped about me. Having deposited my hat inside the cab, I turned up the collar, drew in my chin and began surreptitiously to circle the devious paths leading to a side entrance of the grounds. My heart was palpitating, for the ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... and the sea was a waste of spindrift and low scurrying cloud. Heritage discovered a new anxiety—this time about the possibility of the brig landing at all. He wanted a complete bag, and it would be tragic if they got only the three seedy ruffians now circumambulating ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... don't care," said Tom. "But it's a bore to have been caught in so seedy an affair; if it had been a real good row, one wouldn't have minded ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... himself, failed, and came with a sickening crash against the goal-post. I blew the whistle and rushed to Aspinall; his cheek was bleeding villainously and he was deadly pale. I helped him up, and he said with his usual smile—who could mistake it for a sneer?—"Thanks, old man. Yes, I do feel a bit seedy. That back of yours is an animal, though." He tried hard to keep his senses; I saw him battling against his faintness, but the pain and shock were too much for him; he fell down ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... woman must have been talking," Miss M'Gann proceeded acutely. "I saw her around last year, looking seedy, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Italian, as you call him, has heard some of the best prima donnas in Europe. He is poor, he is seedy—for his voice left him just as he was on the eve of success—but he was the only person in the room who could tell me that I sang as well as the greatest of them." Her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... had run aground, As such young men are apt to do; His creditors swore and his mistress frowned, His breeches pockets held ne'er a sou, His boots were getting out at the toes, His hat was seedy, and so were his clothes, And, as he wandered the city around, He could not think of a single friend Slow to dun and prompt to lend, Whose purse he thought he could venture to sound; In such extremities friends are few; At least I think so, friend, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... from her palatial retirement to spend a fortnight in Mayfair. She was bony, wiggy, and snuffy; wore false teeth and seedy apparel; but she was well-bred and well-informed, and Vixen got on with her much better than with the accomplished Captain. Lady Susan took to Vixen; and these two went out for early walks together in the adjacent Green Park, and perambulated the picture-galleries, before Mrs. Winstanley ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... question the justice of this part of the affair. Having been sent to gaol, however, because he could not deposit L50, Grant was treated as the commonest malefactor in all respects but one—he was allowed to retain his own clothing. The unfortunate old man made a pathetic picture with his seedy clothes, tail coat, tall white hat, and worn gloves, which he punctiliously wore whenever called upon to face the authorities—and it happened rather frequently. He objected to being classed and herded with the thieves ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... elbows on my knees, my forehead on my hands, as I sat and stared down at the bear-skin rug at my feet and saw a vision of fifth-rate existence pass before me. A suburban villa or squalid London lodgings; the hurried early breakfast served by a slavey; the tram or bus to the city; the society of seedy clerks; the pipe instead of the cigar; the public billiard room instead of the club; the omnibus instead of the hansom; the fortnight up the Thames instead of the spring at Cairo. A day of uncongenial work—but at the end ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... overboard like seals, and the sound of a gun in the bush makes them run like hares. Yet an English officer actually proposed to recruit a force of these recreants for field-service in Ashanti. He probably confounded them with the Wasawahili, the 'Seedy-boys' of the east coast, a race which some day will prove useful when the Sepoy mutiny shall repeat itself, or if the difficulties in Egypt be prolonged. A few thousands of these sturdy fellows would put to flight an army ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... northern door of the cathedral. In reply to the rap of our knuckles at the huge portals, it slowly swung back on its hinges, and a grim, surly-looking face appeared. The figure which belonged to the face was clad in a rusty and seedy black robe, from beneath which a hand was thrust forth, and the words, "two-pence each," sounded harshly on our ears. Two-pence each was accordingly paid, and then the surly janitor, or verger, as he is called, ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... emblazoned with the arms of the nations of the earth. These whirligigs of amateur crime are constantly surrounded by eager-eyed men and women, who try their luck for the amusement of the moment, or by broken-down, seedy gamblers, hazarding their last coin for a turn of fortune. Now and then, too, some sweet-faced girl, her arm in her father's, wins a louis with a franc, her childish laughter ringing ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... broad-shouldered wildcat showed himself, coming out of a grove, and crossing the river on a flood-jamb of logs, halting for a moment to look back. The bird-like tamias frisked about my feet everywhere among the pine-needles and seedy grass-tufts; cranes waded the shallows of the river-bends, the kingfisher rattled from perch to perch, and the blessed ouzel sang amid the spray of every cascade. Where may lonely wanderer find a more interesting ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... Earl's Gate, Kensington, Mr. Lancaster had made an indifferent meal of an excellently cooked and temptingly served breakfast. He was feeling dejected, limp, and generally "seedy" after the two nights in the train. He and Bullard had occupied a double sleeping berth, and Bullard had persisted in discussing many things, and thereafter slumber had proved no match against a host of assaulting thoughts. Perhaps he might have made a better meal had he been left to himself, ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... said Carson, warming up to his subject, "this is an intricate game, this life business. Pretty seedy in spots, but, after all, most people are merely victims of circumstances. And if circumstances place a five-spot in your hand to-day, accept what the gods bring you. To-morrow they ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... and child in his parish; but the squire's acquaintance was more limited. Obviously, said Mr. Ambrose to himself, the squire's best course would be to stay quietly at home until the danger was passed, and to pass word to Policeman Gall to lay hands on any particularly seedy-looking tramps he happened to see in the village. It was Gall's duty to do so in any case, as he had been warned to be on the look-out. Mr. Ambrose inwardly wondered where the man could be hiding. Billingsfield was not, he believed, ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... appropriated this peculiar portion of commercial history, and, describing it, says gravely and graphically: 'A colony of solicitors, engineers and seedy accountants, settled in the purlieus of Threadneedle Street. Every town and parish in the Kingdom blazed out in zinc plates over the doorways. From the cellar to the roof, every fragment of a room held its committee. The darkest cupboard on the stairs contained a ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... "I do feel seedy," he said, in a stronger voice with a new note in it, "but I'm not going to faint. I'm quite well able to go upstairs. I'd rather lie down on my own bed, ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... A.M., and got a miserable meal at Richmond at 12.30. At this little town I was introduced to a seedy-looking man, in rusty black clothes and a broken-down "stove-pipe" hat. This was Judge Stockdale, who will probably be the next governor of Texas. He is an agreeable man, and his conversation is far superior to his clothing. ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... wuz gone, he started frum de city. Whut a change! One shurt wuz all he had, en dat hadn' seen de wash fer two weeks. He wuz seedy en his heart wuz sore; he wuz down an' out, en clean out, en didn't even have chawin' terbacker. He look lack a turkey buzzard ez had lost his wing-feathers. He wundered on; he stop by de bridge whar de water wuz tricklin' ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... where the great square chimney projected its nicked bulk from among loosened bricks scattered on the shingles; and from knife-gnawed "deacon-seat" on the porch to window-blind, dangling from one hinge on the broad gable, the old structure was seedy indeed. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... reproaching anybody with neglect of the gentleman." She had an action, as she talked, of flinging a very seedy-looking black boa back across her neck vindictively. "Wot I mean to say is that gentleman lodgers must take their chance and e's two weeks overdue with 'is rent as it is ... but of course I'm not saying I couldn't ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... had been listening, groaned as Mr. Farrar passed through the door. "Ugh! Call that a way of doing business? Why, if it had been me, I'd have bought the book off of that old chap for a couple o' pounds, I would. Ay, or a sov, so seedy he is, and wants money so bad. And I know who'd have given twelve pound for it, in the trade too. Call that carrying on business? He may well add up his investments every day, it he can afford to chuck such chances. Ah, but he'll retire ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... the lawyer's house straight to his own in Belgrave Square. It was in the hands of a caretaker. A seedy-looking man in a rusty black coat opened the door. He did not ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... live and die in prosperity, and some of the most honest and conscientious are driven into bankruptcy. Perhaps his manner was unfortunate, and he was not really as proud as he looked to be. Some of those who carry their head erect and look imperial are humble as a child, while many a man in seedy coat and slouch hat and unblacked shoes is as proud as Lucifer. You can not tell by a man's look. Perhaps he was not unscrupulous in business, for there are two sides to every story, and everybody that accomplishes anything ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... of him, on the footpath, a man wrapped in a seedy overcoat was walking, with downcast eyes, and with such an air of dejection that Frederick, as he passed, turned aside to have a better look at him. The other raised his head. It was Deslauriers. He hesitated. Frederick fell upon ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... strictly the dancing portion. Stephen sat down on a bench that faced the inner portion, with the determination of a man who was not to be moved from his seat. At the other side of the room was a low raised platform, where some very seedy-looking musicians were sawing out a jerky tune from their feeble violins. The room was fairly full, and a more heterogeneous collection of human beings Stephen thought he had never seen. There were miners in the roughest and thickest clothing, labourers, packers, a few Indians, some youths ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... you're seedy you mightn't be able to find the way alone," he said. "It's all right ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... resided, was, "Well, how are the girls?" "Oh, gloriously. Matty is there." "Ah, indeed! poor thing." "Has Fan sported a new habit?" "Is it the old gray with the hussar braiding? Confound it, that was seedy when I saw them in Corfu. And Mother Dal as fat and vulgar as ever?" "Dawson of ours was the last, and was called up for sentence when we were ordered away; of course, he bolted," etc. Such was the invariable style of question and answer concerning them; and although some few, either ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... nor maravedi Have I got my soul to bless; And I'd feel extremely seedy, Languishing in vile duresse. Therefore listen, ruthless taylzeour, Take my steed and armour free, Pawn them at thy Hebrew uncle's, And I'll ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... the head of a certain sad-faced, seedy-looking young fellow in the piazza, or square, beneath, descended a rattling shower of bonbons, thrown by the hand of the speaker, a brown-faced Venetian lad ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... worse injustice if he married her. Why should he marry her if he doesn't want to, and if she doesn't want it? There she is, perfectly content and happy with her baby. It's been a little seedy lately, but it's absolutely sound. A very fine baby indeed, and Essy knows it. There's ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... not unexpected in spite of the Spanish landscape; for with the exception of one man who might be guessed as a bullfighter ruined by drink and one unmistakable Frenchman, they are all cockney or American; therefore, in a land of cloaks and sombreros, they mostly wear seedy overcoats, woollen mufflers, hard hemispherical hats, and dirty brown gloves. Only a very few dress after their leader, whose broad sombrero with a cock's feather in the band, and voluminous cloak descending to his high boots, are as un-English as possible. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... mountain, a girl in an angry mood at his side, a seedy chaperon on his trail, an erring cook ahead. Good lord! He recalled that a fellow novelist, whose love scenes were regarded as models by young people suffering the tender passion, had once confessed that he proposed ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... me that if I called upon Mr. Sands Cox, at his house in Temple Row, some morning early, that gentleman would give me a letter introducing me to the great Leamington physician. I accordingly presented myself as directed, and was shown, by a somewhat seedy-looking old woman—who evidently looked upon me with considerable suspicion—into a small room in the front of the house, where, seated at a writing-table, I found the subject of ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... author—writes reviewals for eighteenpence a page—edits a Newgate chronicle. At another he wanders the country with a face grimy from occasionally mending kettles; and there is no evidence that his clothes are not seedy and torn, and his shoes down at the heel; but by what process of reasoning will they prove that he is no gentleman! Is he not learned? Has he not generosity and courage? Whilst a hack author does he ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... my lady," he said triumphantly when they were on the platform. "I suppose you thought you were comin' to Rubeville. That don't look so hay-seedy? Eh?" ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... and demands different conditions for its successful growth; in the North, at least two types of the species may be distinguished. Vines are found in the woods of New England which resemble Concord very closely in both vine and fruit, excepting that the grapes are much smaller in size and more seedy. There is also the large-fruited, foxy Labrusca, usually with reddish berries, represented by such cultivated varieties as Northern Muscadine, Dracut Amber, Lutie and others. Labrusca is peculiar amongst American ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... isn't very common. It's just as possible for a bunch of simpletons to set up an organization for one purpose, and have it turn out to be a supercharged, high-frequency k-factor amplifier. That's what's happened with this infernal S.P.N.B. A seedy little social club, dedicated to jingoists with low I.Q.'s. With the war scare they have managed to get hold of a few credits. They have probably been telling the same inflated stories for years about the discrimination against natives of this fair planet, but no one has really ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... duty in the second-hand department. But there had been so many occasions on which he had never done his duty; times when he was tempted to actual defiance of it, when a wistful calculating look in the eyes of some seedy scholar would knock all the moral fibre out of him, and a two and sixpenny book would go for ninepence or a shilling. And such was his conception of loyalty to Rickman's, that he generally paid for these excesses out of his own pocket, so that conscience was satisfied both ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... bushels of ripe fruit, to make one of dry—this when the peaches were big and fleshy. Small, seedy sorts demanded ten bushels for one. Unpeeled, the ratio fell to seven for one. But there was seldom any lack of fruit—beside the orchard, there were trees up and down all the static fence rows—the corner of a worm fence furnishing an ideal seat. Further, every field boasted ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... as far apart as ever, and even Willie could hardly have blamed prosperity for that. He had no deadly vices, but he could not stick to any job for more than a month. He was out of work at present. Having developed into a rather weedy, seedy-looking young man, he was not too proud to sponge on the melancholy maiden aunt who had brought him up, and whose efforts at stern discipline during his earlier years had seemingly proved fruitless. Macgregor was the only human being he ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... now what would he say?" asked the old gentleman, trying to hurry matters along. The pompous official had his eye on the clock. It might go hard for the little, thin clerk in his seedy coat, if he took too much time ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... path cut in the cragged side of Monroe, where a single misstep would hurl the horse and rider down a fathomless abyss, into whose depths the eye dares hardly for a moment gaze. Then appeared a crystal lakelet, and a little plain covered with a seedy-looking grass, where the horses rested and refreshed themselves ere the last desperate trial of their strength and endurance; for the weary band of adventurers had reached at last the base of the mighty Washington, whose summit ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... moral-forcing system which we call 'Protection'? Forced plants, we know, suffer in the process; and the Malay, whose proper place is amidst the conditions of the Thirteenth Century, is apt to become morally weak and seedy, and to lose something of his robust self-respect, when he is forced to bear ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... faces bronzed almost to the colour of the red soil we had walked over, beards untrimmed and grown as nature intended them, clothes showing signs of wear and tear, our heavy oaken sticks with worn ferrules, and our suspicious and seedy-looking bags; our late arrival last night, and, above all, the fact that we had entered the town by the very road on which the murder had been committed! What if we were arrested on suspicion! I had been practically arrested under far less suspicious circumstances the previous year, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... not find Katherine's note till late next morning. He read it twice over with an incredulous air, and put it into the fire. He wrote a short but grateful refusal, saying truly that he was very seedy, and not pleasant company for any ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... the broker remarked. "I was in Liverpool yesterday, and I could have sworn that I saw him hanging around the docks. I should never have doubted it, but Morrison was always so careful about his appearance, and this fellow was such a seedy-looking individual. I called out to him and he ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at his shell-bangle making, plodding on often till midnight. All this cruel toil does not earn, for himself and his family, a bare two meals a day during much more than half the year. His method of eating is to begin with a good filling draught of water, and his staple food is the cheapest kind of seedy banana. And yet the family has to go with only one meal a day for ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... gentle man of about sixty years of age (not unlike in manner and habit Professor Bush, my principal at the Cedar Valley Seminary) received his seedy visitor with a kindly smile. I liked him and trusted him at once. He was tall and very thin, with dark eyes and a long gray beard. His face was absolutely without suspicion or guile. It was impossible to conceive of his doing an unkind or hasty act, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... speculation, nor his Pen, and though amongst Plants it be in bulk one of the smallest, yet it is not the least considerable: For, as to its shape, it may compare for the beauty of it with any Plant that grows, and bears a much bigger breadth; it has a root almost like a seedy Parsnep, furnish'd with small strings and suckers, which are all of them finely branch'd, like those of the roots of much bigger Vegetables; out of this springs the stem or body of the Plant, which is somewhat Quadrangular, rather then Cylindrical, most curiously fluted or lining with small ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... been committed by some one who had got through the open window whilst the two men were out of the room had been generally accepted, for the police had found footmarks on the flowerbeds, over which the murderer must have passed. They had not, however, traced the seedy-looking personage whom Mr. Kitson had seen. This person had disappeared as mysteriously ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... the older readers and sterner critics will look for romantic and rather exaggerated events; but he thinks they will look in vain, for as we grow older we become more reasonable, and do not expect showers of gold to fall upon every seedy hero, or to see nice young gentlemen leap over lofty precipices without sometimes being dashed ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams
... more about it," her husband said anxiously, as she sat staring before her, trying to comprehend the tragedy. "I have arranged to take you on to-morrow. The Colonel writes that your brother Ezra is seedy,—touch of malaria, he thinks. The Colonel is looking forward a ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Pan, II. 52. (March 8, 1794).—The titular general of the revolutionary army was Ronsin. "Previous to the Revolution he was a seedy author earning his living and reputation by working for the boulevard stalls... One day a person informed him that his staff 'was behaving very badly, acting tyrannically in the most outrageous manner at the theaters and everywhere else, striking women and tearing ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Constantly employed in creeping into small holes, and daubing themselves with honey, they often lose all the bright feathers and silky plumes which once so beautifully adorned their bodies, and assume a smooth and almost black appearance; just as the hat of the thievish loafer, acquires a "seedy" aspect, and his garments, a shining and threadbare look. Dzierzon is of opinion that the black bees which Huber describes, as being so bitterly persecuted by the rest, are nothing more than these thieving bees. I call them old convicts, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... the squire's distant manner was that Mr. Temple, though a rich man according to his own account, had a somewhat seedy look. The squire was afraid he intended to ask for help on the score of old friendship. It was with a hesitating voice, ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... silence, the pretty, pleasure-loving young woman to whom life had been only a house of toys, and the rather seedy young man who had been one of the toys. The bond that held them was a slight one; a little more strain and it would have snapped. But the toy man had grown—somehow—into a real man whom she did not want to let ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... and a few small debts to settle, I found when I landed in San Francisco that once more I was flatly broke. I was arrestively seedy, literally on my uppers, for owing to my long tramp my boots were barely holding together. There was no letter for me, and perhaps it was on account of my disappointment, perhaps on account of my extreme shabbiness, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Martha to do as she does," said one neighbor to the new minister's wife. "She jilted the smartest man in town when she was young and she's kept on looking the part, as you might say, ever since. If she'd let herself run down, kind of seedy, everybody'd have said she was disappointed; but he hasn't ever married—it's Judge Trent, you know—and the way Martha holds her head up and wears gold eyeglasses sort of makes folks think he'd be glad to get her any time. It's real smart of Martha. The judge looks the seedy ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... last. Mr. Perkupp has got an appointment for Lupin, and he is to go and see about it on Monday. Oh, how my mind is relieved! I went to Lupin's room to take the good news to him, but he was in bed, very seedy, so I resolved to keep it over ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... his charms was too much even for his admirers. The mental juxtaposition of the seedy poet and the piquant actress in her frills and furbelows set the whole cafe rocking with laughter. Pinchas took it as a tribute to his ingenious method of drawing the soubrette-serpent's fangs. He ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... a seedy-looking fellow over whose whole appearance was written the word "worthless," swung a lantern so that the light fell on a pad of paper before him. Pencil in hand, he took off ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... looked pretty seedy and stupid this morning on my way in. I was up half the night; but I feel ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... something about this seedy rascal that filled me with disgust and suspicion, and he looked at me out of the corners of his evil eyes as if he knew that by some trick of fate he had me in his power and was gloating over it. Even while he was swearing to the paper he had a sickly sneer on his pimply face that ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... see it after it has grown shabby and old-fashioned. Yes, you remember, not without a dull kind of pang, that it is wearing out. You have a neighbor, perhaps, a few miles off, whose conveyance, through the wear of many years, has become remarkably seedy; and every time you meet it you think that there you see your own, as it will some day be. Every dog has his day: but the day of the rational dog is overclouded in a fashion unknown to his inferior fellow-creature; it is overclouded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... can put it all over that Osage country for straight scenery, but I never saw such a contented-looking place as that big prairie-land was that morning. I've seen it with the tears running down its face, and pretty well draggled and seedy; but when we started out with the sun shining against our cheeks and the hills looking so warm and lazy and the hollows kind of smiling to themselves over something, and the prairie-dogs gossiping worse than a ladies' self-culture meeting, I tell you, it all looked ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... to be seedy," was Dick's comment. He could not forget how the former teacher had endeavored to hypnotize the widow Stanhope into marrying him, so that he could gain possession of the money she was holding in ...
— The Rover Boys on the Farm - or Last Days at Putnam Hall • Arthur M. Winfield (AKA Edward Stratemeyer)
... fine!—years indeed! Why, I shall be a seedy old bachelor! That would never do! And Amy Ashe, whom I have had in my eye ever since she was in pinafores, will be married to some ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... leaning against the side of a building, was a tall man in seedy clothes. A card on his breast bore the sad legend, "Help the Blind." The man's eyes were covered with large blue goggles, and in one hand he held his hat, and in the other a couple ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... beak-like nose, and queer slate-coloured eyes with pale lashes; his hair was thin and very fine in colour and texture, strangely like that of a yellow cat; and face, neck, and nose were mottled with patches of small purple veins. To-day he was dressed in a long seedy black coat, a short seedy black vest, and a pair of now moleskins, glaringly white, and much too long and ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... whose only costume was a flannel shirt and a pair of seedy check trousers, but whose eye was as keen as a hawk's, and whose shining "matchlock" had seventeen notches[24] along its ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... bed, at last, and went quickly to sleep, but I woke up, after about three hours, with throbbing temples, and a head which was physically sore, outside and in. I was dazed, dreamy, wretched, seedy, unrefreshed. I recognized the occasion of all this: it was that torrent. In the mountain villages of Switzerland, and along the roads, one has always the roar of the torrent in his ears. He imagines it is music, and he thinks poetic things about it; he lies in his comfortable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... on dress parade or inspection. I took great pleasure in riding around town, wherever the regiment was located, looking wise, and posing as an officer. But the time came when my uniform, which came with me as a recruit, became seedy, and badly worn, and it was necessary to discard it, and draw some clothing of the quartermaster. That is a trying time for a recruit. One day it was announced that the quartermaster sergeant had received a quantity of clothing, and the men were ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... Spencer quoted several times in the park, but one afternoon a disciple of Spencer's appeared, a seedy tramp with a dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the absence of a shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... dowerless[obs3], moneyless[obs3], penniless; unportioned[obs3], unmoneyed[obs3]; impecunious; out of money, out of cash, short of money, short of cash; without a rap, not worth a rap &c.(money) 800; qui n'a pas le sou[Fr], out of pocket, hard up; out at elbows, out at heels; seedy, bare-footed; beggarly, beggared; destitute; fleeced, stripped; bereft, bereaved; reduced; homeless. in want &c. n.; needy, necessitous, distressed, pinched, straitened; put to one's shifts, put to one's last shifts; unable to keep the wolf from the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Why, I had to send you the three hundred and fifty dollars to bring you and your family that I might see them before I die. And look at your daughters; they are dressed in such a shabby way that I am ashamed for my neighbors to see my children's cousins. And look at you with your old seedy, worn suit and your patched shoes; I am ashamed to take you to town day after to-morrow and introduce you to my business associates. What a fool you have been! Now, John, I am not saying this to wound your feelings; for I love you, John. ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... could by no means content himself with the companionship of staid practical persons, who on account of his latent worth would have readily countenanced, and with the least opportunity even served him, but he invariably paid his court to adventurers; such creatures, for instance, as seedy 'professors' of one kind or another, who, in the inevitable shawl and threadbare suit of black, were constantly dismounting at the village tavern, with proposals either to 'lecture' on something, or ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of night, on whatever ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... "that his taboo is still effective. On the platform before he arrived there were three A.P.M.'s bustling about and chasing away the few spectators. As the train came into the station one of them ran up to me and said, 'Are you the interpreter on duty? Well, there's a seedy-looking chap over there, who seems up to no good. Go and tell him from me that if he doesn't clear out immediately I'll have him arrested.' I did so. 'Arrest me!' said the man. 'Why, I'm the special commissaire de police ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... an hour after the young farmer awoke, and looking across the room saw that his friend Georgy had gone away in clothes which didn't belong to him, and had kindly left for himself the seedy ones worn by Georgy. At this he sat up in a deep thought for some time, instead of hastening to give an alarm. "The money, the money is gone," he said to himself, "and that's bad. ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... both been seedy, and Rushden wanted us to go before we play Surrey again. In my last three innings I've made seven runs, and I should think Rushden begins to wish he had never given me my blue. I don't feel as if I ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... wanderer. My parents left me a moderate fortune, and I have travelled pretty well and pretty constantly all over the world during the last twelve or fifteen years. How did I come to Needley? Well, you can call it luck, or something more than that, whichever way it appeals to you. I was feeling seedy, a little off-color, and I started down for a rest and lay-off in Maine. I happened to ask a man in Portland if he knew of a quiet place. He meant to be humorous, I imagine. He said Needley was the quietest place he knew of. I took him at ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... seven years the lady of the house descended the broad, black oak staircase to the hall. A butler of the old-fashioned type bowed to her and announced that dinner was ready. He might have been the butler of an archbishop from his mien and deportment, yet his evening dress was seedy and shiny to the last degree, his patent leather boots had long lost their lustre, his linen was terribly frayed and yellow. Two footmen in livery stood in the hall. They might have been supers playing on the boards of a travelling ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... of the late Mr. Joseph C. Neal's "Charcoal Sketches," he puts into the mouth of a very sad and seedy loafer the expression of a wish that he were a pig, and a statement of the reasons for the wish. These reasons, as I recall them, related to the freedom of the pig from the peculiar trials and troubles of humanity. Pigs do not have to work ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... travail of the historic poet has Mr. Fields known. Of the emaciated face, the seedy garment, the collapsed purse, the dog-eared and often rejected manuscript, he has never known, save from well-authenticated tradition. His muse was born in sunshine, and has only been sprinkled with the tears of affection. Every effort has been cheered to ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the cover of a mug is left up, any individual who chooses may seize it, and drink the contents. At the Hof Brauerei I once saw a newly arrived Englishman, carrying the usual red guidebook, quit the room for an instant, leaving uncovered his just acquired mass of beer. There came along a seedy-looking old gentleman, evidently a Stammgast. A gleam of satisfaction stole over his wooden features as he espied the open mug. Pausing a moment, he lifted it to his lips and slowly drank the contents. ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... you, dear, I haven't time. I only fled back to tell you I am off to Copthorne. I am a little anxious about Eleanor not having written you know. She was rather seedy and done up before she left, and those old people are ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... Macks, with Roseys of a more or less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent, though doubtless never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomes not less; with more reminders in short than I can now gather in. Of those forms of the seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly "genteel," the generally damaged and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, all the marks, I feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as we meet in generally like cases ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... right," he said, taking my hand as we came in sight of the red gables of Okehurst, and speaking in a weak, tired, humble voice. "I don't understand you quite, but I am sure what you say is true. I daresay it is all that I'm seedy. I feel sometimes as if I were mad, and just fit to be locked up. But don't think I don't struggle against it. I do, I do continually, only sometimes it seems too strong for me. I pray God night and morning to give me the strength to overcome my suspicions, or to ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... side of a seedy house in a shabby street, slimy and straw-bestrewn. Yard is paved with lumpy, irregular cobbles, and some sooty and shaky-looking sheds stand at the bottom thereof. Enter together, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... been seedy all day, and the sight of that cake finished her off. I don't wonder. It's enough to upset a strong man. Let's ring for Nanna to take ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... if I don't believe he's fainted for the want of wittles!" cried the cabman. "They keeps up till they drop, sometimes, these seedy swells—walks about, lookin' like so many Dossays, on a hempty stomach. Here, some one bring a plate o' cold meat, and look sharp about ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... that I'm still ill," continued Rogojin to the prince, "but I sloped off quietly, seedy as I was, took the train and came away. Aha, brother Senka, you'll have to open your gates and let me in, my boy! I know he told tales about me to my father—I know that well enough but I certainly did rile my father about Nastasia Philipovna that's very sure, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... States some day, and you'll be in jail." But Model Harry sat around all his life being a model. I believe Mr. Webster defines a model as a small imitation of the real thing. Harry certainly was a successful model. He became a seedy, sleepy, helpless relic at forty. He was "perfectly lovely" because he hadn't the energy to be anything else. It was the boys who had the hustle and the energy, who occasionally needed bumping—and ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... know you were seedy, old man! I'd have come at once," Dan said. "I've been on the spree again, for a day or so. It's the end. I'm not going to play the fool ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... his fate: or, one may say, it was embodied in the Diana who was queen and goddess of the realm. Yes—I shall always be glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very quiet, but it was the coup de foudre. I could see that by the way his hands trembled when he turned away and began to examine the other things. You remember Neave's hands—thin, sallow, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... George, "I'm glad you're back again. You're looking rather seedy, though. I suppose you knocked about a good deal ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... and with a certain intensity, questions she yet hated the trouble of; as whether he were still as moneyless as in the other time—which was certain indeed, for any fortune he ever would have made. His slackness, on that ground, stuck out of him almost as much as if he had been of rusty or "seedy" aspect—which, luckily for him, he wasn't at all: he looked, in his way, like some pleasant eccentric, ridiculous, but real gentleman, whose taste might be of the queerest, but his credit with his tailor none the less of the best. She wouldn't have been the least ashamed, had their connection lasted, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... told you that. Nice fellow—as good a specimen of a young Briton as ever I wish to see; sensible too, and a good companion. Yes, my sister is a bit seedy—a bad sick headache, nothing more. It is in our family; my mother had them, and Leah takes after her. It is hard lines, poor old girl," continued Mr. Jacobi in a feeling tone, "for she was longing to ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... dancing much with the fair Arethusa," he said. "What's the matter, Grid? Feeling anyways seedy?" ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... wonder? They are not expressive of affection, they are difficult to pack into a parcel of any regular shape, they are hard to crack, even in room doors, and they are oily when cracked; yet I feel that they are appropriate to Miss Shepherd. Soft, seedy biscuits, also, I bestow upon Miss Shepherd; and oranges innumerable. Once, I kiss Miss Shepherd in the cloak-room. Ecstasy! What are my agony and indignation next day, when I hear a flying rumour that the Misses ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... genteel people. Why they ever built it in that shape, or why they daubed it with yellow paint, is more than I can tell. But it had gone out of fashion, and now it was, as the boys expressed it, "seedy." Old hats and old clothes filled many of the places once filled by glass. Into one room of this row ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... galley-slaves of chic, the winter passed in this manner, as fatiguing as months of penal servitude, and they went none too soon, when the summer arrived, to breathe the sea air or enjoy the sunshine of the country, in order to restore their frames, wan, worn-out, seedy and "gruelled," as Sabine Marsy said, when she recalled her connection ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... some months afterwards, a seedy-looking individual called at Portland Place with a typewritten ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... That's an easy enough thing to pretend, but a tiresome enough thing, too, for then you'll have to make believe you're urging your tired horse over those heavy roads to the railway station so you can get the old maid there in time for her train. She's quiet enough, in her seedy bonnet and shabby coat, a nice sensible body usually, only very self-willed. You know perfectly well she's going off on a wild goose chase and that she shouldn't be taking that ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... you," said Carson, warming up to his subject, "this is an intricate game, this life business. Pretty seedy in spots, but, after all, most people are merely victims of circumstances. And if circumstances place a five-spot in your hand to-day, accept what the gods bring you. To-morrow they will ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... reading narratives dealing with life in the prairies, which he acquired at a neighbouring shop at cut rates in consideration of their being shop-soiled. It was while he was engrossed in one of these, on the morning following the visit of Mr. Parker, that the seedy-looking man made his appearance. He walked in from the street, and stood before ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... was simple enough. He had endued himself in somewhat seedy clothes, and had visited 37 Raven Street, Blackfriars, which he found to be merely a tenement house. It took some time to make inquiries there, with the necessary caution, because of the number of lodgers; and then the inquiries ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... waistcoat, and duck trousers, with a broad waist-belt of leather. Behind him stood another sailorman, older and more gloomy looking; and behind the pair of them Susannah's eye ranged over half a dozen seedy tide-waiters and longshoremen, all very bashful-looking, and crowded among a bevy of damsels of the sort that you might best describe as ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... expedition. The narrow track through the gorse and fern widened suddenly into a lane, a lane with very high, unmortared walls, over which grew a variety of bramble with a particularly luscious fruit. Every connoisseur of blackberries knows what a difference there is between the little hard seedy ones that commonly flourish in the hedges and the big juicy ones with the larger leaves. Nature had been prodigal here, and a bounteous harvest hung within ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... seedy in appearance, but extremely entertaining, owned to six languages, not counting others of which he had only a smattering. Serb he didn't count as he said he could only talk on easy subjects in that tongue. It is very humiliating, that sort of thing, it is liable to lower the opinion ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... Percy, "it's this way. I've got a brother, you know, called Wally, a seedy Classic chap, and up to no end ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... The number of seedy-looking men with a mysterious air who alighted in my company at —— station and immediately proceeded to make their way up the steep street toward Homewood, warned me that it would soon be extremely difficult for any one to obtain access to the parties most interested in the child's loss. ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... the steamer "Neimen" I had as sailors Malays. The firemen were seedy boys, or Nubians. The steward was a Goa Portuguese. The servants were Chinese, and the cook a Chinese who claimed to be an American, he having been trained by Captain John Parrott, of San Francisco, "a number one American man," who had taught ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... the platform before he arrived there were three A.P.M.'s bustling about and chasing away the few spectators. As the train came into the station one of them ran up to me and said, 'Are you the interpreter on duty? Well, there's a seedy-looking chap over there, who seems up to no good. Go and tell him from me that if he doesn't clear out immediately I'll have him arrested.' I did so. 'Arrest me!' said the man. 'Why, I'm the special commissaire de police entrusted ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... Even Carruthers detached his mind far enough from his editorial desk and the hope of exclusively publishing the news of the Gray Seal's capture in the MORNING NEWS-ARGUS, to tell me I was looking seedy. It's wonderful the way a little paint will metamorphose a man! Well, anyway, here's for a good hot tub to-night, and a ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... paper-packets] As much as is wanted, I see, and what's not wanted I neither see nor perceive! There! Mother Matryna has also been young. I had to know a thing or two to live with my old fool. I know seventy-and-seven dodges. But I see your old man's quite seedy, quite seedy! How's one to live with such as him? Why, if you pricked him with a hay-fork it wouldn't fetch blood. See if you don't bury him before the spring. Then you'll need some one in the house. Well, what's wrong with my son? He'll do as well as another. ...
— The Power of Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... travel-stained appearance, faces bronzed almost to the colour of the red soil we had walked over, beards untrimmed and grown as nature intended them, clothes showing signs of wear and tear, our heavy oaken sticks with worn ferrules, and our suspicious and seedy-looking bags; our late arrival last night, and, above all, the fact that we had entered the town by the very road on which the murder had been committed! What if we were arrested on suspicion! I had been practically arrested under ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... nooks and niches; the goldfinches find something to their taste in the buds of the trees and also make many a meal of thistle and sunflower seeds; the juncos and tree sparrows, forming a joint stock company in winter, rifle all kinds of weeds of their seedy treasures; the blue jays lunch on acorns and berries when they cannot find enough juicy grubs to satisfy their appetites, and so on ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Douglas?" said Lady Tamworth, an imposing, bejewelled figure standing at the head of the galleried staircase of Tamworth House. "Saw your father yesterday and thought him looking very seedy." ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to you after your base desertion the other night," she said, smiling. "But you do look rather seedy and I prefer to flatter myself that you ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... several minutes, and my friend tells me I rolled about as if very faint and weak. He also informs me that the first thing I did was to fall against him, asking if I looked seedy. He most wisely answered, "No, you look very well." I don't think he thought so, for his own face was as white as a ghost; I recollect this much. He tells me my face was of a greenish-yellow color. After walking or rather staggering ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Having been sent to gaol, however, because he could not deposit L50, Grant was treated as the commonest malefactor in all respects but one—he was allowed to retain his own clothing. The unfortunate old man made a pathetic picture with his seedy clothes, tail coat, tall white hat, and worn gloves, which he punctiliously wore whenever called upon to face the authorities—and it happened rather frequently. He objected to being classed and herded with the thieves and murderers and others whose crimes ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... Omnibus one evening with Rocjean, was accosted by a very seedy-looking man, with a very peculiar expression of face, wherein an awful struggle of humor to crowd down pinching poverty gleamed brightly. He offered for sale an odd volume of one of the early fathers of the Church. Its probable value was a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... as Punch, or Paul Pry, or Pierrot. He is a gravely comic personage with a bandage over one eye, a battered hat considerably inclining to the back of his head, a coat with a high collar and long tails, and a tout ensemble indescribably seedy—something between a street preacher and a travelling showman. But here we are. Take care how you come ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... however much you may admire it. Have the courage to speak your mind when it is necessary that you should do so, and hold your tongue when it is better you should be silent. Have the courage to speak to a poor friend in a seedy coat, even in the street, and when a rich one is nigh. The effort is less than many people take it to be, and the act is worthy of a king. Have the courage to admit that you have been in the wrong, and you will remove the fact in the mind of others, putting a desirable impression ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... cherubic smiles the continuous maledictions of the establishment. There he soothed his hours of servitude by dreams of vast ambitions. He would become the manager of a great hotel—not a contemptible hostelry where commercial travellers and seedy Germans were indifferently bedded, but one of those white palaces where milords (English) and millionaires (American) paid a thousand francs a night for a bedroom and five louis for a glass of beer. Now, in order to derive such profit from the Anglo-Saxon ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... hack author—writes reviewals for eighteenpence a page—edits a Newgate chronicle. At another he wanders the country with a face grimy from occasionally mending kettles; and there is no evidence that his clothes are not seedy and torn, and his shoes down at the heel; but by what process of reasoning will they prove that he is no gentleman? Is he not learned? Has he not generosity and courage? Whilst a hack author, does he pawn the ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the master to let me go with him to help to carry back his bedding and parcels. We went from shop to shop until he had got everything on his list; last of all he visited a draper and bought cloth. On getting back to the ship he was tapped on the shoulder by a seedy looking fellow who was waiting for him, and who said, 'You are my prisoner.' The man started and his face grew white. I thought it strange he did not ask what he was a prisoner for. 'Will you go quietly or ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... was the exception and not the rule. We were generally satisfied with much milder pastime; our visits rarely exceeding the interval between tea and "supper" time, when we partook of a friendly, though seedy, abernethy and glass of wine or beer; and then ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... whacked beneath his waistcoat! There, standing in front of him, was the very figure of his dreams! Looking down upon Jeremy was a gentleman of middle-age whom experienced men of the world would have most certainly described as "seedy." ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... slate-coloured eyes with pale lashes; his hair was thin and very fine in colour and texture, strangely like that of a yellow cat; and face, neck, and nose were mottled with patches of small purple veins. To-day he was dressed in a long seedy black coat, a short seedy black vest, and a pair of now moleskins, glaringly white, and much too long ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... sorry, Miss Grant," he said, "but I can't give you back your money now, for the simple reason that I banked most of your capital and mine this afternoon. I felt rather seedy, and didn't mean to play seriously to-night. If only you'd spoken in time, it would have been all right enough. But now I'm afraid the best I can do for you, until to-morrow, will be a few hundred francs. My wife and I must see ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... that the crown was well ceded by this time, and the poet's remark seems at this time far grander and more apropos than any language of the writer could be: so it is given here,—viz., "Uneasy lies the head that wears a seedy crown." ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... du Pan, II. 52. (March 8, 1794).—The titular general of the revolutionary army was Ronsin. "Previous to the Revolution he was a seedy author earning his living and reputation by working for the boulevard stalls... One day a person informed him that his staff 'was behaving very badly, acting tyrannically in the most outrageous manner at the theaters and everywhere else, striking women and tearing their bonnets to pieces. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... beat the toe of her boot on the deck floor. "It's a perfect shame. And that horrible old man, he's so seedy and common —just think of ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... had given out, and had to be put on the army wagons. I was getting to look rather fagged and seedy, and was much annoyed at my appearance. Not being acquainted with the vicissitudes of the desert, I had not brought in my travelling-case a sufficient number of thin washbodices. The few I had soon became black beyond recognition, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... having first made fast our boat. A lean Mexican priest, with an enormous shovel hat and particularly shabby cassock, came toward us, followed by a motley crowd of Mexicans, prominent among whom was a pompous old man clad in a seedy Mexican uniform and wearing a trailing rapier at his side. The rest of the procession was brought up with a crowd of shy women, dark-eyed and tawny and all poorly clad, though otherwise comfortable enough in condition. These hung back ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... You have read it twice, Mr Seedy, and you may leave me now. I am ill, very ill, and ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... neither looks nor understands the character. FANNY MORANT can't play LADY MACBETH as perfectly as it should be played; but she tries to do her best, and is quite respectable. Nobody else plays any part with common decency. But then the scenery is good; the Scottish nobility look sufficiently hungry and seedy, and MOLLENHAUER is superb." ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... Philip had discovered by accident. He had been attracted by the Gallic look of the window, in which was generally an uncooked steak on one plate and on each side two dishes of raw vegetables. There was one seedy French waiter, who was attempting to learn English in a house where he never heard anything but French; and the customers were a few ladies of easy virtue, a menage or two, who had their own napkins reserved for them, and a few queer men who came ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... at the turning of the path, just where Middleton had met Eldredge, the new-comer appeared in sight. It was Hoper, in his usual dress of velveteen, looking now seedy, poverty-stricken, and altogether in ill-case, trudging moodily along, with his hat pulled over his brows, so that he did not see the ghastly object before him till his foot absolutely trod upon the dead man's hand. Being thus made aware of the proximity of the corpse, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bedroom window, on the floor above, I happen to behold two cabs racing down the street, the one doggedly pursuing the other. The foremost stops, perforce of a fagged horse. There alights a young gentleman looking, if you'll pardon me, uncommonly seedy; he is followed by a young lady, if she will pardon me," with another little bow, "uncommonly pretty. With these two old eyes I observe that the gentleman does not pay his cabby. Ergo—I intelligently deduce—he is ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... room, with his feet wide apart, is Mr. Adams, like he was waitin' impatient. You'd hardly call him sick abed. I expect it would take a subway smash to dent him any. But, if his man fails to look the part of better days gone by, Ham Adams is the true picture of a seedy sport. His padded silk dressin'-gown is fringed along the cuffs, and one of the shoulder seams is split; his slippers are run over; and his shirt should have gone to the wash last week. Also his chin is decorated in two places with surgeon's tape and has a ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... observed of all observers. He was dressed in the coarsest kind of homespun, seedy, and dirty at that. He wore an old hat which any Northern beggar would consider an insult to have offered him. In his general appearance he was in no respect to be distinguished from the mongrel barefoot crew who followed ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... I'm all right," laughed Miss Clifford agreeably. "It's this tiresome brother of mine who's been bothering us a bit. He's been feeling seedy for ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... wearing rough country clothes, brown knickerbockers and gaiters, and looked something like a stout and seedy ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... their eagerness to buy. That was his stern duty in the second-hand department. But there had been so many occasions on which he had never done his duty; times when he was tempted to actual defiance of it, when a wistful calculating look in the eyes of some seedy scholar would knock all the moral fibre out of him, and a two and sixpenny book would go for ninepence or a shilling. And such was his conception of loyalty to Rickman's, that he generally paid for ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... make it a rule not to employ anyone who looks seedy, or slovenly, or who does not make a good appearance when he applies for a position. The man who hires all the salespeople for one of the largest retail stores in ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... me before, that if I could obtain the services of a few men acquainted with the ways of white men, and who could induce other good men to join the expedition I was organizing, I might consider myself fortunate. More especially had I thought of Seedy Mbarak Mombay, commonly called "Bombay," who though his head was "woodeny," and his hands" clumsy," was considered to be the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... themselves with honey, they often lose all the bright feathers and silky plumes which once so beautifully adorned their bodies, and assume a smooth and almost black appearance; just as the hat of the thievish loafer, acquires a "seedy" aspect, and his garments, a shining and threadbare look. Dzierzon is of opinion that the black bees which Huber describes, as being so bitterly persecuted by the rest, are nothing more than these thieving bees. I call them old convicts, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... few days told me that if I called upon Mr. Sands Cox, at his house in Temple Row, some morning early, that gentleman would give me a letter introducing me to the great Leamington physician. I accordingly presented myself as directed, and was shown, by a somewhat seedy-looking old woman—who evidently looked upon me with considerable suspicion—into a small room in the front of the house, where, seated at a writing-table, I found the ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... think that Joicey knows or remembers whether he did see Heath. My Superintendent swears that he did go down Paradise Street on the night of the twenty-ninth, but Joicey is ill, and he said he wasn't in Mangadone then. He has been seedy for some time and may have ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great, flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a welter of strange people we then ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... at Yinretlen had the means of indulging in a general fuddle, and that even their friendly disposition gives way under the effects of the intoxication we had a manifest proof, when the day after they came on board with blue and yellow eyes, not a little seedy and ashamed. In autumn a tall and stout Chukch giantess, who then paid us a visit, informed us that her husband had been murdered in ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... good woman, or vanithee, had got the pot of water warmed, in which Jemmy was made to put his feet. She then stripped up her arms to the elbows, and, with soap and seedy meal, affectionately bathed his legs and feet: then, taking the praskeen, or coarse towel, she wiped them with a kindness which thrilled ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... always impatient to move on, always hoping to arrive at some place so familiar that my lost memory would return to me. The work I have mentioned was nearly all secured during the first year. After I became seedy and disreputable in appearance people were more apt to suspect me and work was ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... go back again," said Master Ben Jonson; "we've sucked the sweet from Stratford town—be off with his seedy dregs!" ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... the servant he opens his eyes, and stares about him all ways—looking for the gentleman, as it struck me, for I don't think anybody but a man as was stone-blind would mistake Fixem for one; and as for me, I was as seedy as a cheap cowcumber. Hows'ever, he turns round, and goes to the breakfast-parlour, which was a little snug sort of room at the end of the passage, and Fixem (as we always did in that profession), without waiting to ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Helen McIntyre," continued the clerk, "against—" and his pointed finger indicated the seedy looking ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... those mysterious hotels in the narrow streets near the Battery, which appear to be usually appropriated to foreigners, and about which dark-whiskered, sallow-faced individuals may be seen lingering at all hours of the day, their very faded, seedy appearance calling up images of duns, scant dinners, and a whole ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... o'clock, one evening some years ago—when heads now grey were brown, when eyes now dim were bright—the Strand was in its usual state of turmoil. Carriage followed carriage. Seedy clerks hustled past portly merchants—not their own masters, bien entendu, but those of other seedy clerks. Carriages and foot-passengers were alike going westward. All were leaving behind them the day and the busy city—some after a few hours devoted to the perusal of ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... guests were old Gabriel Hamburg, the scholar, and young Joseph Strelitski, the student, who sat together. On the left of the somewhat seedy Strelitski pretty Bessie in blue silk presided over the coffee-pot. Nobody knew whence Bessie had stolen her good looks: probably some remote ancestress! Bessie was in every way the most agreeable member of the family, inheriting some of her father's brains, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... eat, and the Peacock showed me all his new feathers. I asked him about the theft of the coat and what the prince was going to do; but he did not know much about it; he said that for his part he thought people made a very ridiculous fuss about a seedy old coat. But just then we were joined by the Rabbit. The Peacock rather despised him; he whispered to me—so loud that I am sure the Rabbit must have heard—'Did you ever see such an absurd tail?' But I am sure the Rabbit is very beautiful and much more intelligent. The Peacock ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... down saw a march past of claqueurs and retailers of tickets. It was an ill smelling squad, attired in caps, seedy trousers, and threadbare overcoats; a flock of gallows-birds with bluish and greenish tints in their faces, neglected beards, and a strange mixture of savagery and subservience in their eyes. A horrible population lives and swarms upon the Paris boulevards; selling watch guards ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... fare and a few small debts to settle, I found when I landed in San Francisco that once more I was flatly broke. I was arrestively seedy, literally on my uppers, for owing to my long tramp my boots were barely holding together. There was no letter for me, and perhaps it was on account of my disappointment, perhaps on account of my extreme shabbiness, but I found I had quite lost heart. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... life. They were rarely seen except in hall or chapel or at lecture, where their manners of feeding, praying and studying, were considered alike objectionable; no one knew whence they came, whither they went, nor what they did, for they never showed at cricket or the boats; they were a gloomy, seedy-looking conferie, who had as little to glory in in clothes and manners ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... pretty seedy-looking lot when we boarded the train for London, where we debarked at the Victoria Station about half-past nine o'clock, still looking much the worse for wear and like a collection of invalids than a party of representative ball players. Getting into carriages we were ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... with the gloves while I'm here. I box quite a bit at home, and I miss it travelling about like this. What say to a half-hour or so every day? I have the gloves in one of my trunks. I'm getting horribly seedy. I need stirring up." ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... extraordinary recuperative power that I do hope for the best. I am as tired as man can be. This is a great trial to a family, and I thank God it seems as if ours was going to bear it well. And O! if it only lets up, it will be but a pleasant memory. We are all seedy, bar Lloyd: Fanny, as per above; self nearly extinct; Belle, utterly overworked and bad toothache; Cook, down with a bad foot; Butler, prostrate with a bad leg. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drown thought and do good, was wandering through a Colorado town one evening, he found himself face to face with Major Mailing. The major looked seedy, and some years older than he did a month before, but his pluck was unchanged. Seeing that an interview could not be avoided, he assumed an ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... I dutifully submitted, but even port was powerless to keep me well at Oxford. I always felt "seedy"; and the nervous worry inseparable from a time of spiritual storm and stress (for four of my most intimate friends seceded to Rome) told upon me more than I knew. An accidental chill brought things to a climax, and during the Christmas vacation ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the general mix-up (there was considerable good-natured fooling among the members as they left, relieved as they were from the strain of the meeting) Whittier was given my hat by mistake. When I came to go, there was nothing left for me but a rather seedy gray derby with a black band, containing the initials "J.G.W." As the poet was visiting in Cambridge at the time I took opportunity next day to write ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... been talking," Miss M'Gann proceeded acutely. "I saw her around last year, looking seedy, as if ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... on the mountain, a girl in an angry mood at his side, a seedy chaperon on his trail, an erring cook ahead. Good lord! He recalled that a fellow novelist, whose love scenes were regarded as models by young people suffering the tender passion, had once confessed that he proposed to ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... of a scrape; and, like David in the mountains, "every one that is discontented, and every one that is in debt, gather themselves to her." The strangest people, on the strangest errands, run over each other in that cosy little nest of hers. Fine ladies with over-full hearts, and seedy gentlemen with over-empty pockets, jostle each other at her door; and she has a smile, and a repartee, and good, cunning, practical wisdom for each and every one of them, and then dismisses them to bill and coo with ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... miss—pass this way," said the automatic officer in a voice of brass. She passed, and passed, and finally found herself in a lobby, among a crowd of people of all sorts—seedy political touts, Irish priests and hurrying press-men. At one side of the lobby were more policemen and messengers, who were continually taking cards into the House, then returning and calling out names. Insensibly she ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... closely watched by a man who occupied the next cot on the left. He was a seedy individual, with a face that ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... to which Billy listened with great attention and some little awe, he examined Mr. Wrangler carefully. Mr. Wrangler's clothes were harmoniously seedy. In the degree of their wornness his hat was a match for his coat, and his coat a match for his trowsers, and his trowsers a match for his boots. Although the weather was desperately cold, and a heavy Christmas snow had fallen, he had on neither overcoat nor overshoes. He did not appear ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... of lair or nest, very soft and comfortable, was thus made ready for our religious humbug, just as he wanted it worst; for in these days he was but seedy. He heard something of Pierson, I don't know how; and on the 5th of May, 1832, he called on him. Very quickly the poor fellow recognized the long-bearded prophetical humbug as all that he claimed to be—a possessor and teacher of all truth, and as ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... way of accounting for his want of success. He did not write books, to be sure. He only wrote poetical advertisements. But they were printed and paid for, and this gave him a sort of prestige among his less lucky friends. He was seedy; only moderately clean, and wholly unshaven, thus avoiding, by one happy invention, both soap and the barber. Fierce he was to look at, with his rugged beard and eyebrows, and fierce in his resentment of the world's indifference. A Christmas invitation to the ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... and Chatham on a certain Sunday. Afterwards, when he had found a home and a protecting providence with his aunt, he met with his "first fall in life" on the Canterbury coach, being asked by the coachman to resign the box seat to a seedy gentleman, who proclaimed that "'Orses and dogs is some men's fancy. They're wittles and ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... sure. Maybe I'll be a cowgirl and learn to ride like Kit, and rope a steer like her friend, Seedy Saunders. There are heaps of things I'd like to do. I'd like to meet a western bad man that you ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... baffled the police. We had found Dawson wild with excitement over the affair, and here again Tracy was the topic of the hour. Entering the hotel with some fellow passengers, I took up a Seattle newspaper and carelessly glancing at the portrait of a seedy-looking individual of ferocious exterior, passed it on to a neighbour, remarking (with reference to Tracy), "What a blood-thirsty looking ruffian!" "Why, it's yourself!" exclaimed my friend, pointing to ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... the newspaper; the other was seated at the table, with a mass of papers before him, on which he laboured as though correcting exercises. They were much of an age, and that about thirty, but whereas the idler was well dressed, his companion had a seedy appearance and looked altogether like a man who neglected himself. For half an hour they ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... hair off the cool?' 'That depends,' I replied; 'there are some things, and there may be more, at which any but an idiot might well be scared; but some fools are such fools they can't shiver! What's the matter? I give you my word I'll not make game of it.' The fellow looked so seedy, don't you know, I couldn't but be brotherly, or, at least, cousinly to him!—that don't go for much, does it, Lufa? 'Well,' he said, 'I will tell you. Last night, I had been in bed about five minutes, ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... mere barroom. Sounds of revelry and the odor of stale beer come out of it. In front are teams of burden, abandoned, for a time, by their drivers, and sundry human signs of decay loafing in the shadow of the old lindens. Among them are the seedy remnants of a once noble race. They are fettered by 'rheumatiz' and the disordered liver. They move like boats dragging their anchors. To make life tolerable their imaginations need assistance. They are like the Flub Dubs of ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... bear her lot. And yet you tell us a man is the stronger. I tell you, my dear, I know a dozen women who could discount any soldier that ever fought in the Crimean wars, for downright heroism and pluck. Where do you find the man who is willing to wear shabby clothes and old boots and a seedy hat that his boys may go fine as fiddles? Where do you find a man who will get up cold mornings and make the fire, tramp to work through snow, pick his way through flooding rain, weather northeast blasts and go hungry and cold that he may keep the children together ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... us not! for all that splendour Can scarce have been more moving to the heart Than our glad rites, the Princess not so tender As was myself, who always took that part; I cannot think the KING, Nor gorgeous Lords, nor Officers of State, Nor seedy people peering through the gate, Felt half so proud or so affectionate As those far friends when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... importance who stand and listen at the sides was one tall enough to show with a little prominence; a slight mean figure, dressed in seedy black, lean and dark of visage. He had just handed a letter to the crier, before he caught ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... in, shabby, seedy, empty of pocket but full of hope, and little suppers were given in dingy coffeehouses where success ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... he had something to say, and allowed him to lead the way to a saloon a little way down the road. 'Simpson's Pioneers' Symposium' was the legend above the door. A small, pimply-faced man in seedy black—whom I guessed at once, and correctly, to be 'Huz-and-Buz'—lounged by the bar inside; and across the counter the bar-keeper had his banjo slung, and was gently strumming the ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... girl?" demanded Mrs. Crow, shrewdly and very quickly. She had been inspecting the man more closely than before, and woman's intuition was telling her a truth that Anderson overlooked. Mr. Hawkshaw was not only very seedy, but very drunk. ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... becomes an Ancient Briton (mark the pleasantry)—he goes without clothes. When my tailor proposes something in the way of a change of raiment, I laugh in his face. My blue coat and brass buttons will last these ten years. It is seedy? What then? I don't want to charm anybody in particular. You say that my clothes are shabby? What do I care? When I wished to look well in somebody's eyes, the matter may have been different. But now, when I receive my bill of 10L. (let us say) at the year's end, and contrast it with ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Master Brown, with a grin, calls the house Victoria Villa, and the paste-board mask his papa. Now enters the rat, to eat the good things that lay in the house that John built, represented by a stealthy seedy gentleman, who, after reading a board intimating that apartments were to let, crept slyly past the sleepy Bull, to mount the house-steps; and there deliver himself of the following ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... impersonation of Venice. There are the long, slender and rather delicately-cut features terminating in a long, narrow and somewhat protruding chin; the high cheek-bones, the lank and sombre cheeks, the high nose, the dark bright eye under its bushy brow. He is very thin, very seedy, and evidently very poor. But he salutes you, as you take your seat beside him, with the air of an ex-member of "The Ten;" his ancient hat and napless coat are carefully brushed; his outrageously high shirt-collar and voluminous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... receipt of the inspector's letter another cablegram was handed in to me. This time it purported to be from Farnham himself, merely saying, "Many thanks for kind enquiries. Have turned up here smiling, but too seedy to write at present. Glad to ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... broke in, "I can't stand on the street. I'm beginning to feel seedy again. I think I'll ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... of the story of the Haunted Man proposed for his next Christmas book, he told me he must finish it in less than a month if it was to be done at all, Dombey having now become very importunate. This prepared me for his letter of a week's later date. "Have been at work all day, and am seedy in consequence. Dombey takes so much time, and requires to be so carefully done, that I really begin to have serious doubts whether it is wise to go on with the Christmas book. Your kind help is invoked. What ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... chicken or frost grapes, plump clusters of blue-black berries of the greenbrier, and limbs of the smooth winterberry bending with their flaming fruit. There were bushes of crimson ilex, too, trees of fruiting dogwood and holly, cedars in berry, dwarf sumac and seedy sedges, while patches on the wood slopes uncovered by the sun were spread with trailing partridge berry and the coral-fruited wintergreen. I had eaten part of my dinner with the 'possum; I picked a quantity of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... wrinkle worth knowin'. I've observed that you didn't bring the children to the country to be like weeds—just ter grow and run ter seed, ye know. It's 'stonishin' how soon weeds, whether they're people or pusley, get seedy. Well, now, call the children and come ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... with his coat and his hat in his hand, and was introduced. His first thought was one of extreme mortification—three days' beard was on his face. His toilet activities had been limited in number. He knew he felt wretched, seedy, groggy—and looked it. Something ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... for years, I assure you, Mrs. Basset; but it was impossible to taste all your good things. I am not dyspeptic, thank you, but a little seedy and tired, for I've ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... alone. He had a companion, and this companion was an acquaintance whom he had made that morning. This companion was very tall, very thin, very sallow, with long, straggling locks of rusty black hair, white neck-tie, and a suit of rather seedy black clothes. In fact, it was the very stranger who had been arrested almost under his eyes as a Garibaldian. His case had come under the notice of the Baron, who had visited him, and found him not to be a Garibaldian at all, but a fellow-countryman in distress—in short, no less a person than ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... a bit seedy? By Jove! I don't wonder. I'm not so fit myself. I fancy, you know, it must have been that beastly anchovy paste we had on ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... the goal-post. I blew the whistle and rushed to Aspinall; his cheek was bleeding villainously and he was deadly pale. I helped him up, and he said with his usual smile—who could mistake it for a sneer?—"Thanks, old man. Yes, I do feel a bit seedy. That back of yours is an animal, though." He tried hard to keep his senses; I saw him battling against his faintness, but the pain and shock were too much for him; he fell down again in ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... his shoes in the narrow hall and put on his seedy-looking dark overcoat, quite unconscious that Mrs. Fletcher had had the collar mended since he had taken it off. Then he went out into the damp November night, unlit by moon or star. But to Stewart the darkness of night, on whatever corner of ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... make our fortunes on the high card. Some of us was dead broke, but them that hadn't the stuff borrowed from them that had, sure of better luck next time. They was all so deep in the game that none of 'em noticed a seedy-lookin' chap who come in, kinder quiet like, and set down to the faro table and began to play. I guess I was the only one who noticed him, and at first, I couldn't make him out, but after a bit, I remembered him as 'Unlucky Pete.' That man had a history. When I first saw him, ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... Mr. Gibney was on his way to the Marigold Cafe for breakfast, he was mildly interested, while passing the Embarcadero warehouse, to note the presence of fully a dozen seedy-looking gentlemen of undoubted Hebraic antecedents, congregated in a circle just outside the warehouse door. There was an air of suppressed excitement about this group of Jews that aroused Mr. Gibney's curiosity; so he decided to cross over and investigate, being of the opinion that possibly one ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... spare man, and, physically, an ill-conditioned man, but at first glance scarcely a seedy man. The indications of reduced circumstances in the male of the better class are, I fancy, first visible in the boots and shirt; the boots offensively exhibiting a degree of polish inconsistent with their dilapidated condition, and the shirt showing an extent of ostentatious ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... with a face that looked pinched, and who was dressed in a seedy black coat and a much-battered stovepipe hat, stopped at the same doorway, and, with one hand on the latch, appeared to hesitate between hunger and a sense of ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... English tourists of what he had done when in Parliament, especially for the rights of married women; how he poked his 'Honourable' card in every one's way, and lugged Lord Gaberlunzie into all conversations; how his face became pimply and his wardrobe seedy; and how at last his wretched life will ooze out from him in some dark corner, like the filthy juice of a decayed fungus which makes hideous the hidden wall on which it bursts, all this is unnecessary more particularly to describe. He is probably ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... after mid-day the next morning, Wyck awoke with the unpleasant sensation that his head was of abnormal size, his throat very dry, and altogether he felt and looked extremely seedy. A brandy-and-soda and a cold tub eased him somewhat, and he managed to get through his dressing and lounge daintily through his breakfast. A knock at the door was followed by the entrance ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... snuffy suit, In seedy glove, and blucher boot, Uncomfortably big. Particularly commonplace, With vulgar, coarse, stockbroking face, ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... have—in his seedy coat, his old-fashioned spectacles on the tip of his nose, one would have taken him for a country advocate whose wildest dreams were of a practice of two thousand thalers a year, with an old gig and wheezy mare to haul him around the country side from ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... nine hours a day, three hours in the evening; I thought the papers very hard; we had no Latin elegiacs or lyrics, which was rather a bore for the Eton lot. I am very glad I have been up now, but I confess it was the longest week I ever recollect. I feel quite seedy after a whole week without exercise.... The very first paper, the Latin Essay (for which we were in six hours), was the worst of all my papers, and must have given the examiners an unfavourable impression to start with. The rest of my ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to follow and study him in his privacy. Ah, my dear, when big and little men come to be measured rightly, and great and small actions to be weighed properly, and people to be stripped of their royal robes, beggars' rags, generals' uniforms, seedy out-at-elbowed coats, and the like—or the contrary say, when souls come to be stripped of their wicked deceiving bodies, and turned out stark naked as they were before they were born—what a strange startling sight shall ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... indignation, and was perhaps unconscious himself of experiencing that nameless, shadowy satisfaction which Rochefoucauld says we find in the adversity of our best friends. Certainly Richard looked very seedy in his suit ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... it; eyebrows, beard, whiskers, all heavy, and black as night. He was attired in loose fustian clothes with a red handkerchief wound round his throat, and a low slouching hat—one of those called wide-awake—partially concealed his features. By his side stood another man in plain, dark, rather seedy clothes, the coat outrageously long. He wore a cloth hat, whose brim hid his face, and he was smoking a cigar. Both men were slightly built and under middle height. This one ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the same as bodies do, and they need exercise," agreed Bruce thoughtfully. "I know lots of fellows who are failures through having too much money. It's a dangerous thing to let your soul get seedy." ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... its face, and put on a clean shirt for a shocking length of time. It was dark when I reached it; having walked twelve miles after three p.m. There was only one inn, properly speaking, in the town, and since the old coaching time, it had contracted itself into the fag-end of a large, dark, seedy-looking building, where it lived by selling beer and other sharp and cheap drinks to the villagers; nineteen-twentieths of whom appeared to be agricultural laborers. The entertainment proffered on the sign-board over the door was evidently limited to the tap-room. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... farmers and dealers examining samples on market days. Presently, two constables come across carrying a heavy, clumsy box between them. They unlock a door, and take the box upstairs into the hall over the pillars. After them saunters a seedy man, evidently a clerk, with a rusty black bag; and after him again—for the magistrates' Clerk's clerk must have his clerk—a boy with ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... youth of seedy aspect, but a cheerful countenance, who had come up with him, and was engaged in the perusal ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... I was not in a state to stand much more joking, he altered his tone. 'Yes, he has arrived, looking rather seedy, but he is alive. He has been closeted with the governor for the last two hours, giving an account of himself. I hope it is all fair and square, but he won't let us into his secrets, though I told him his conduct had ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... have liked to refuse, for he suddenly recalled—oh! the torture and suffering of poor young men! that his Sunday coat was almost as seedy as his everyday one, that his best pair of shoes were run-over at the heels, and that the collars and cuffs on his six white shirts were ragged on the edges from too frequent washings. Then, to go to dinner in the city, what an ordeal! What must he do to be presented ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... continued the old man, "who always preaches in a silk gown, though he is a Congregationalist. 'It saves my coat', said he to me once in explanation. 'I can wear a seedy coat in the pulpit and no one is the wiser.' 'But,' said I, 'how about the silk gown?' 'Oh!' said he, 'the ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... had barely been able to get a living from their sterile acres, had become millionaires. The whole region was alive with fortune-hunters, from every quarter of the country. Millions of dollars were in the pockets of men who were ready to purchase. Seedy, crazy, visionary fellows were working as middle-men, to talk up schemes, and win their bread, with as much more as they could lay their hands on. The very air was charged with the contagion of speculation, and men seemed ready to believe ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... coffee-room first, and have a glass of hot brandy-and-water. So the hot brandy-and-water was brought to him, and a cigar, and as he smoked and drank he conversed with the waiter. The man was a waiter of the ancient class, a grey-haired waiter, with seedy clothes, and a dirty towel under his arm; not a dapper waiter, with black shiny hair, and dressed like a guest for a dinner-party. There are two distinct classes of waiters, and as far as I have been able to perceive, the special ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... There were rows of chairs in front of the windows and along the walls, and in the chairs were the queerest-looking lot of men he had ever seen. He didn't pay any attention to them, though, but went up to the seedy individual behind the desk, and asked him if he could get a bed for the night. "Sure, Mike," the man replied, and Archie signed his name in a dirty book with torn pages. He paid the man ten cents, and asked if ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
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