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More "Shabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for that matter. And, as I was saying, if I had known your ladyship to be your ladyship, I would as soon have burnt my fingers as have affronted your ladyship; but truly where gentry come and spend their money, I am not willing that they should be scandalized by a set of poor shabby vermin, that, wherever they go, leave more lice than money behind them; such folks never raise my compassion, for to be certain it is foolish to have any for them; and if our justices did as they ought, they ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Review," the rival to that of Griffiths, readily made him a small advance on receiving three articles for his periodical. His purse thus slenderly replenished, Goldsmith paid for his warrant; wiped off the score of his milkmaid; abandoned his garret, and moved into a shabby first floor in a forlorn court near the Old Bailey; there to await the time for his migration to the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... common and most visible signs of modesty, and it might easily be supposed that they had thrown out of the window something more than orange-peels. Pepe Rey felt profound pity for them. He noted their shabby dresses, made over, mended, trimmed, and retrimmed, to make them look like new; he noted their broken shoes—and once more he put his hand in ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... haggard with illness and anxiety, tall but bent with age, leaning on his staff and wrapped in black velvet cloak—an imposing magisterial figure; the florid, plethoric Prince in brown doublet, big russet boots, narrow ruff, and shabby felt hat with its string of diamonds, with hand clutched on swordhilt, and eyes full of angry menace, the very type of the high-born, imperious soldier—thus they surveyed each other as men, once friends, between whom a gulf ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with a bright, well-dressed wife, he sees what an "old frump" his mother is. She is shabby and old-fashioned, clinging to obsolete forms of speech, hysterical and emotional. When the mists of love have cleared from her boy's eyes, she may just as well give up, because there is no return, save in that ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... and these trinkets dangled outside and over the riband of the bonnet, which passed under her chin. In her large hands, covered with tight black gloves, she carried a dark red parasol and a somewhat shabby little black leather bag with steel fastenings. The stout lady's face was of the type common among the Roman women of the lower class—very broad and heavy, of a creamy white complexion, the upper lip shaded by a dark ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... adopted sonorous Slav substitutes. But they were most unscrupulous peculators, incapable of taking an interest in the scientific aspect of such matters, and hypnotized by the dreams of lucre which the opportunity evoked. One has only to call to mind some of the shabby transactions in which the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, Kuhn, or Cohen, and Braunstein (Trotzky) of Petrograd, took an active part. The former is said to have offered for sale the historic crown of St. Stephen of Hungary—which to him was but a plain gold headgear adorned with precious ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... it," conceded Mrs. Hattie complacently. "Poor Maggie! She always did contrive to make the most of everything she had. But she's never been ambitious for really nice things, I imagine. At least, she always seems contented enough with her shabby chairs and carpets. While I—"She paused, looked about her, then drew a blissful sigh. "Oh, Mr. Smith, you don't know—you CAN'T know what it is to me to just look around and realize that they are all mine—these ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... his office clasping a hand-valise. "I am about to go away by your train," he said, without waiting for me to speak or remarking my shabby-genteel expression of heroism. He added, as he handed me a great sealed envelope, "There is your passport. Nothing imperative requires my stay here: I shall accompany you, then, as far as the station ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... shabby-looking nests, obviously made of dead materials, old withered and partially-decayed grass, and not with fresh grass; they seem to have measured 3 inches in diameter, and 2.5 in height externally; the cavity was perhaps 1.5 to 1.75 in diameter, ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... knows how often—into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green Arbour Court, and Westminster Abbey. I should like to travel with you, outside the last of the coaches down to Bracebridge Hall. It would make my heart glad to compare notes with you about that shabby gentleman in the oilcloth hat and red nose, who sat in the nine-cornered back-parlour of the Masons' Arms; and about Robert Preston and the tallow-chandler's widow, whose sitting-room is second nature to me; and about all those delightful places and people that I used to walk about and dream of ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... able to keep servants. You'll have to wear old clothes, and I'll go so shabby that you'll be ashamed of me. We'll forget what a bottle of wine looks like, and if we were ever to see a decent dinner, we ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... admirable co-operation of the performers, the potency of trained gesture and studied facial expression. The music, which was written by Victor Holoerder, is excellent in its harmony and appropriateness. The decorative quality of even the shabby scenery used in America is striking. It achieves an artistic, oriental effect without gaudy, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... inmates are in keeping; of the passengers in the street a sad proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are putting you off your guard, there will pass you a woman—more likely two or three—of ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... of learned antiquarian societies or born reliquaries troubled themselves to acquire ancient articles of historic interest because they were old, and served to form the sequence in the fairy tales of Time. Anything "old" was ruthlessly destroyed, as being either past wear, shabby, or old-fashioned, and countless treasures, both in ecclesiastical and secular art, have at all periods been recklessly destroyed for the sake of their intrinsic value in gold or jewels. In the early days of my life I was allowed to pick out the corals and seed-pearls ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... querulous authoritative voice, all revealed a man whom Jean repelled at every point. Years had not refined, they had vulgarized him. His clothing careless and not quite fresh, offended her taste; in fact, his whole appearance was of that shabby genteel character, which is far more mean and plebeian than can be given by undisguised working apparel. As Jean was taking note of these things a girl, with a flushed, angry face, spoke to him. She was evidently making a complaint, and Gavin answered her in a manner which made ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... carefully preserved, very soon gets a shabby tarnished appearance. Where the coachman has a proper harness-room and sufficient assistance, this is inexcusable and easily prevented. The harness-room should have a wooden lining all round, and be perfectly dry and well ventilated. Around the walls, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... from the upper terrace came three figures. There was something familiar about them all, but to see them together made them more than strange. Besides, the two she knew best were strange in another way. Their habit was to be shabby, though neat; now, there was no one on the terrace as beautifully dressed as this tall young woman and the slim little girl. No, it couldn't be Madame Clifford and her petit choux; and yet—and yet—as they came nearer, near enough for Mademoiselle to recognise the man ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson
... queer. His clothes were worn threadbare and, although he had money in his pockets, he did not buy new ones. In the evening when he went through the town streets and saw the smartly dressed clerks standing before the stores, he looked at his own shabby person and was ashamed to enter. In his boyhood Sarah Shepard had always attended to the buying of his clothes, and he made up his mind that he would go to the place in Michigan to which she and her husband had retired, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... the square, as he swung along toward the Academy Theatre that evening, he found himself suddenly confronted by a man who, lounging against the fence of a shabby dwelling, straightened dramatically at his approach and bent a sharp gaze upon him. He was a tall, shambling fellow with a white cloth swathed about the top of his head; and Varney, in the act of passing, suddenly recognized him as the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... all my sorrows. Accordingly a young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some clerk I suppose,—there must have been clerks in the business, though the house was as still as a house in a city of the dead,—came from somewhere up-stairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with ink-stains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and billowy, under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a little too early for the doctor, so I proposed a drink, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... "In mourning—rather poor, almost shabby. But—yes—with extraordinary beauty." I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed this. "Oh, handsome—very, very," I insisted; "wonderfully handsome. ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... performances of feats of strength and rope-dancing. You have seen this kind of women with sharp, yellow, prematurely-aged faces, creatures that are shattered by brutality, poverty, and miserable vices, and who always over-dress in shabby velvet and dirty red. There you have his crew. I don't understand our friend's passion. It is true that his fiancee met with a horrible death, but that does not explain the matter. I must still tell you how he left us. We had a fair a few miles ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... thought, this simple society had its own social habits. If he did not take this well-meant advice, he must justify himself by his own method. He made up his mind to go to the next meeting of the medical society. His clothes were a trifle shabby, but as the meeting was in the evening, he could go in his evening dress—drop in casually, as it were, from an evening entertainment. That silly bit of pride, however, angered him with himself. He went in his shabby everyday suit. The experience was the most ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... valuable papers contained in his wallet. Besides, he had reason to doubt whether any in his line of business lived on that aristocratic street. He took his way to Mott Street, which is considerably less pretentious, and halted in front of a shabby brick lodging-house kept by a Mrs. Mooney, with whose ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... in New Orleans about the effect of Dr. C.'s fine presence on the Confederate officials there came to my mind. They are influenced in that way, I thought; I look rather shabby now, I will dress. I made an elaborate toilet, put on the best and most becoming dress I had, the richest lace, the handsomest ornaments, taking care that all should be appropriate to a morning visit; dressed my hair in the stateliest braids, and took a seat in the parlor ready ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... When people are very poor for their position in life, they can only keep out of debt by stinting on many occasions when stinting is very painful to a liberal spirit. And it requires a sterner virtue than good nature to hold fast the truth that it is nobler to be shabby and honest than to do things handsomely ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... and looked after him. He was only waiting for the processions to start. His coat was beginning to be rather shiny; it was carefully brushed, but shabby; in the left lapel was fastened securely a little silk bow in the ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... The question barked out, brusque and sharp, but never had a voice sounded more welcome in Elliott Cameron's ears. She turned around in joyful relief to encounter a pair of gimlet-like black eyes in the face of an old woman. She was an ugly little old woman in a battered straw hat and a shabby old jacket, though the day was warm, and a faded print skirt that was draggled with mud at the hem. Her hair strayed untidily about her face and unfathomable scorn looked out ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... frequently leads, it is to the credit of the inhabitants of the country that he is not often robbed. It is also to his own credit that he is said to run any risk rather than fail to deliver his mail-bag at its destination. His appearance, as he ambles along in shabby attire with his letter-bag over his shoulder, is not calculated to inspire confidence. But the Yerandawana letters are picked up in the evening by one of these primitive post-runners, and no instance is on record of any letter failing to ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... left off work and were refreshing themselves with lunch and conversation. There was one old worker who had not stirred from his place, but he had put down his brush, and had taken from his pocket a small book, which was like its owner—thin and shabby of covering. He seemed to find pleasure in reading it, for he turned over its pages with all the tenderness characteristic of one who loves what he reads. Now and again he glanced at his unfinished copy of the beautiful portrait of Andrea del Sarto, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... dingy apartment, with a single large horse-hair chair and half a dozen small wooden dittoes, placed with mathematical precision along the walls. A square table in the centre and a shabby mirror over the mantelpiece completed the furniture. With the instinct of an old campaigner the major immediately dropped into the arm-chair, and, leaning luxuriously back, took a cigar from his case and proceeded to light it. Ezra Girdlestone seated himself near the table and twisted his dark ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... honest warmth, that cold applause Which counteracts the fostering breath of praise, And shades with cypress the young poet's bays: Pale and dejected, mark, how genius strives With poverty, and mark, how well it thrives; The shabby cov'ring of the gentle bard, Regard it well, 'tis worthy thy regard, The friendly cobweb, serving for a screen, The chair, a part of what it once had been; The bed, whereon th' unhappy victim slept And oft unseen, in silent anguish, wept, Or spent in dear delusive dreams, the night, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... a surprisingly pretty sight met my eyes. The dim, cool, little interior was set out and richly adorned with an abundance of fruit and vegetables, yellow gourds, apples and plums and golden wheat sheaves, great loaves of bread, and garlands of September flowers. A shabby-looking old clergyman was standing on the top of a step-ladder, finishing the decorations, when I entered. As soon as he saw me he came down, and I spoke to him, praising the decorations, and raising my voice a little, for I noticed ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... the administrationists have used him shamefully, especially in view of their professions and of the chief source of their political strength. Grant went into the White House by means of colored votes, and his shabby treatment of the first member of the dusky army who reached the point of graduation in the country's military school, is a sore disappointment ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... duty to perform, yet all their labours are lofty. But what a fate is ours on this low earth! For, from the cradle to the grave, we are watched by these spiritual spectators—watched with unflinching interest, unhesitating regard. O Angelic Spirits, what is there in the poor and shabby spectacle of human life to attract your mighty Intelligences? Sorrow, sin, pride, shame, ambition, failure, obstinacy, ignorance, selfishness, forgetfulness—enough to make ye veil your radiant faces in unpierceable clouds to hide forever the sight ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... est." The aptness of the quotation will be appreciated by the reader who is in at the death of the Louisiana. We accomplished our object of getting down to the forts about seventy miles below the city, thanks to the current and our two transports; but our artillerists were in a shabby plight while trying to work ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... a shabby little village but a few miles from Florence. In another village near by was born Leonardo. "Great men never come singly," says Emerson. And yet Angelo and Leonardo exercised no influence upon each other that we can trace. The younger man never came under the spell of the older ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... of Cainbury House, a large office building let out to numerous small tenants, and harbouring, as the indicator on the tiled wall of the vestibule testified, some thirty different professions. The man was evidently poor, for his clothes were shabby and his boots were down at heel. He was as evidently a foreigner. His clean-shaven eagle face was sallow, his eyes were dark, his ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... till you are lying flat on your back at the end of your time," he retorted, jumping off the footboard after the other. "Your scurvy, shabby, mangy little bit of time," he continued across the street, and hopping ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... known him since he was a child, and was indeed his foster father. So he was eager to go with Leif upon this adventurous voyage. Tyrker was very little and plain. His forehead was high and his eyes small and restless. He wore shabby clothes, and to the blue-eyed, fair-haired giants of the North he seemed indeed a sorry-looking little fellow. But all that mattered little, for he was a clever craftsman, and Leif and his companions were glad to have ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... black velvet jacket and dark silk skirt, both much the worse for wear, and contrasting sadly with the neat but simple traveling costume of her companion. But about her slender, finely-proportioned figure there was an air of style and grace which lent an elegance even to her shabby and faded finery, and which was wanting in the owner of the fresher and more appropriate attire. Her face was beautiful, with a singular and weird beauty which owed nothing of its fascinations to the ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... in order that he might bear such outward signs of inward grace as would appeal to the perceptions of the Senatus, got a new hat, and changed his shabby tail-coat for a black frock. His shirt ceased to be a hypothesis to account for his collar, and became a real hypostasis, evident and clean. These signs of improvement led to inquiries on the part of the Senatus, and the result was that, before three months of the session were over, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... the whole aspect of the streets was changed. Every few yards one met men in khaki and putties. This cloth looks fairly smart when it is new and the buttons and badges are burnished; but, after a very few weeks at the front, khaki uniforms become as shabby as possible. No one who is going into the firing line has any wish to draw the enemy's fire by the glint of his buttons or his shoulder-badges, and so these are either removed or left to tarnish. Nor does ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... improving the gardens, without allowing any addition to the building, or any change in the furniture, which was very shabby, and remained, in 1789, in the same state as during the reign of Louis XV. Everything there, without exception, was preserved; and the Queen slept in a faded bed, which had been used by the Comtesse du Barry. The charge of extravagance, generally made against ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... ever so many flannel shirts we may be rich by-and-by. I should give mother a new bonnet first of all, for I heard Miss Kent say no lady would wear such a shabby one. Mrs. Smith said fine bonnets didn't make real ladies. I like her best, but I do want a ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... to go. The last she saw of him, as she went up the rue Dauphine, was one broad shoulder still bending over the table, and clad in the shabby, caped coat all covered with snow like an old ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... thing to notice about those curbs is that you will often find on them the paint, sometimes red and sometimes black or yellow, scratched off the wheels of these carriages that are so anxious to cut corners. And the wheels that cut corners soon get to looking shabby from lack ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... married—I told Billy how, when we were at the watering-place, I insisted that it seemed a shame not to be engaged, and how we fixed it to be engaged for a week, and it made him furious! But as good a fellow as I've been, the way you took our joke was shabby. You people may ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... enjoyed its hospitality, but he neglected to invite Lord John to any of his banquets; and this is the cutting comment which the youthful future statesman recorded in his diary: "The Infantado, notwithstanding the champagne and burgundy he got at Woburn, has not asked me. Shabby fellow! It is clear he is unfit for the government of a ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... a plump fresh-faced jesuit and an elderly man, in shabby blue clothes, were dabbling in a case of paints and chalks. The boys who had been painted walked about or stood still awkwardly, touching their faces in a gingerly fashion with their furtive fingertips. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... of young Russia. His clothes are shabby and neglected; he walks with a shuffling, tired movement. But his face is startling. It seems to light up the path with some kind of spiritual fervour. His hair is long and golden, his beard suggests an ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... are going on, —passing from the things which surround us,—advancing into the undefined future, into the unknown land. And I think that sometimes we all have vivid flashes of such a conviction. I dare say, my friend, you have seen an old man, frail, soured, and shabby, and you have thought, with a start, Perhaps there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old lady in shabby black was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow haired madam of the Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great gambling ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... to save money to buy him smart cloaths, and let him go to the Opera, and Ranelagh, and such sort of places, that he might keep himself in fortune's way! and now you see the end of it! here he is, in a little shabby room up two pairs of stairs, with not one of the great folks coming near him, to see if he's so ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... once turned player, and no one must have been more amused thereat than the Oldfield. It happened during the summer of 1723, when the poet, who was in his customary state of (theatrical) destitution, determined to replenish his shabby purse by bringing out a tragedy. While this play, "The Tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury,"[A] was in rehearsal at Drury Lane, Colley Cibber kept the author in clothes, and the Laureate's son Theophilus, then a very young ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... have I fallen!" soliloquized Wellington Bunn, wiping his heated brow. He was wearing a slouch hat, instead of his beloved silk one, and was attired in shabby garments, as befitted his character of a farmhand. "The idea of a man who has played the immortal Shakespearean characters falling so low as to consort with wild bulls. Ah, it is pitiful—pitiful!" ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... it?" cried Chet, jumping to his feet from where he had been kneeling with Billie, examining the shabby trunk. ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... wandering musicians, playing very respectably, as German street-musicians always do. They converted the dark esplanade and the shabby inn-parlour into a fairy picture ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... when Rakitin and Alyosha entered her rooms, yet they were not lighted up. Grushenka was lying down in her drawing-room on the big, hard, clumsy sofa, with a mahogany back. The sofa was covered with shabby and ragged leather. Under her head she had two white down pillows taken from her bed. She was lying stretched out motionless on her back with her hands behind her head. She was dressed as though expecting some one, in a black silk dress, with ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... big, stoutish man, with a fat face, a frock-coat tightly buttoned up, a large umbrella, and a rather shabby hat of the shape called chimney-pot. A somewhat incongruous object, amid that rural scene, and not a very prepossessing one; but apparently a gentleman, though scarcely of the stamp of St Aubyn. ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... you meant," said he, gravely, "more shame for you. It showed some pluck to hang the master; but to hang the poor servant, who only thought to do his duty, careless of what ill-will it brought upon him, was a shabby trick,—so little like the lads of Hazeldean, that I suspect the man who taught it to them was never born in the parish. But let bygones be bygones. One thing is clear,—you don't take kindly to my new pair of stocks! The stocks has been a stumbling-block and a grievance, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as scored with ruts. His long hair and flowing beard were the color of matured hay. His dress was simple and in keeping with his face; moleskin trousers, worn and soiled, a blue serge shirt, a shabby black jacket, and a fiery handkerchief about his neck, while a battered prairie hat adorned the back ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... sepulchre—huddled away from contact with Europe, a narrow street ran like a bridge connecting West with East, to-day with yesterday. Near the entrance to this street, where it started from a fine open place of great shops and cafes, the Hotel Schreiber stood humbly squeezed in between two dull buildings as shabby ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... cancelled all my anxieties. I did not suspect you in earnest. Modest again! Because I don't do a very shabby thing, it seems, I 'don't fear your competition.' If it were reduced to an alternative of preference, I should dread you, as much as Satan does Michael. But is there not room enough in our respective regions? Go on—it will soon be my turn to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... it paltry, but as I was asked to pay for printing the Diploma [from a Society of which he had been made an honorary member], I did not like to refuse, so I send 1 pound. But I think it a shabby proceeding. If a gentleman did me some service, though unasked to do it, and then demanded payment, I should pay him, and think him a shabby dog; and on this principle I send my ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... press has helped me wear out ol' clo'es. I ain't never had on that frock-coat sence I was married in it seventeen year ago; but, sir, ever sence I've knew the moths had chawed it up, th' ain't been a day but I've felt shabby. ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... thatching his well-modelled head, his sanguine colouring, friendly blue eyes and mobile lips suggested Irish lineage; and his hands which, though thin and clouded with smears of ink, were strong and graceful (like the slender feet in his shabby shoes) bore out the suggestion with an added hint of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... at last into a shabby street, recognizable even in the twilight of the scattered lamps as being a place for cheap lodging-houses. There was a light burning in the second-floor windows of No. 19; but all the rest of the front was in darkness. I paid Simmons and dismissed him, saying I would walk home. By the time I ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... about that. Maybe you have and maybe you haven't; I don't remember. How did you teach Brother Bear to keep his hair roached and parted? Mostly when I used to know him, he went about looking mighty ragged and shabby." ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... seems to fill the whole place; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose—the roses of Venice are splendid—has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other side of this small water- way is a great shabby facade of Gothic windows and balconies— balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy water- steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and the whole place ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... place beside the driver to kiss the old lady again and to wave a general good-bye to Florrie and Chess and the group on the porch. As smoothly as if she were launched in air the great car sprang into motion; the storm-blown cottages, the battered dooryards, the great shabby trees over the little post office all swept by. They passed the turning that led to Clark's Bar, and a weather-worn sign-post that read "Quaker Bridge, 1 mile." It was not a dream, it was all wonderfully true: this was Greg beside her, and they were ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... that portion of his life, save the forty sketches, or thereabouts, included in these volumes. Much more, indeed, he wrote; and some very small part of it might yet be rummaged out (but it would not be worth the trouble) among the dingy pages of fifteen or twenty year old periodicals, or within the shabby morocco covers of faded Souvenirs. The remainder of the works alluded to had a very brief existence, but, on the score of brilliancy, enjoyed a fate vastly superior to that of their brotherhood, which succeeded in getting through the press. In ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... gentleman who kept much to their room and paid well in advance for everything; and after that, in the hot rainy night, the flight afoot across weary miles of soaking cross streets and up through ill-lighted, shabby avenues to the one place of refuge left open to them. They had learned from the newspapers, at once a guide and a bane, a friend and a dogging enemy, that the place was locked up, now that the police had got through searching it, and that the coroner's people ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... He wears a black beard, a hat pulled far over his eyes, and old, rough clothes and a very shabby U.S. Army cloak; he has a pack on his back: he looks about, sees only the family, throws down the pack, tearing off his ...
— The Southern Cross - A Play in Four Acts • Foxhall Daingerfield, Jr.
... shrugged. "In the White Turret," he said; then, with a short laugh: "Oy Dieus, yes! The girl has been caterwauling for this shabby rogue all day. She would have me—me, the King's man, look you!—save Hugues at the peril of my seignory! And I protest to you, by the most high and pious Saint Nicolas the Confessor," Reinault swore, "that sooner than see this ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... passage, was to unpack the animal and put him up in the stable which he had built opposite his own cabin door; and it was fully an hour before, having seen the beast comfortably installed, he turned into his own room and struck a light. Here there was only one living thing to greet him, and that was a shabby little black cat that leaped off the bed in the corner and came purring to meet him. One morning he had found this cat lying on his claim with a broken leg and carried it back to his cabin, where he had set the leg and nursed the miserable little creature into ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... the piano. Someone handed Miriam a shabby little paper-backed hymnbook. She fluttered the leaves. All the hymns appeared to have a little short-lined verse, under each ordinary verse, in small print. It was in English—she read. She fumbled for the title-page and then her cheeks flamed with shame, "Moody and Sankey." She was ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... when both boys were surprised by a shabby-looking man suddenly crossing from the other side of the street and taking up his stand directly in their path. The stranger wore a battered brown hat, no necktie, and a suit of clothes which he might ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... back, he locked the door again behind him. He bustled about the room as if preparing to move. He had little to pack; a few shabby clothes were thrown into a small trunk, a pile of letters and papers were hastily torn up and pitched into the untidy grate. All this while he muttered to himself as if to keep himself in company. He said: "I had to take the other shoot—he hadn't the sand to help—I couldn't tell him any ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... or Reformer, who hesitates at becoming a bore, is unworthy of his high office; and Larry, like most of his class, required but little encouragement. He produced a large book, old and shabby, the green and gold of its covers stained and faded, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... from candidates approved by the clergy. The latter insisted more strongly on orthodoxy than on competence. The position of the village schoolmaster was not brilliant. His house usually consisted of two rooms, one for the school and one for the family; his books were few, his clothes shabby. He was paid in part by the scholars, at the rate of three or five sous a month for reading, higher for writing and arithmetic. In some cases a tax of a hundred and fifty livres was laid on the parish for his benefit. But school was ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... shall; but recollect, Peter, that you are an officer and a gentleman—you surely would not be so shabby as to go away without treating us. What money have you got in your pocket?" and, without giving me time to answer, she felt in my pocket, and pulled out my purse, which she opened. "Why, Peter, you are as rich as a Jew," ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... has been merely a shabby causeway with waterways and draws. Shabby,—let me here pause to say that in Virginia shabbiness is the grand universal law, and neatness the spasmodic exception, attained in rare spots, an aeon beyond their Old ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... are. I didn't notice it, though, until we came here into this bright Rome. We seem to have come all at once into spring sunshine and the atmosphere of new clothes; and, Betty, I believe I do feel shabby. I know you have been thinking the same thing, too; for everybody else seems to have new spring dresses, and they are so fresh and pretty that ours look doubly worse. Oh, ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... of paddling away—away from the concert of false notes in the vulgarised hall, away from the amiable American families and overfed German porters. He had in each case made terms for a lodging more private and not more costly, and he recalled with tenderness these shabby but friendly asylums, the windows of which he should easily know again in passing on canal or through campo. The shabbiest now failed of an appeal to him, but he found himself at the end of forty-eight hours forming views in respect to a small independent quartiere, far down the Grand Canal, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... We're just coming to him. It was on the third day that there came a little personage, without horse or carriage, walking quite merrily up to the castle. His eyes sparkled like yours; he had fine long hair, but his clothes were shabby." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... tone relapsed; it was now conspicuous for its want of "success waves"; it seemed to imply a definite cognizance of personal uselessness. He who had brightened a moment before now spoke like an automaton. Mr. Mackintosh looked at him and his shabby garments. He had a contempt for ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... by rail. You saw the town before anything was done and in early spring. You would not know it now. It is green where it was brown, clean where it was dirty, trim where it was shabby. It begins to look like a great park, and the cottages are really ornamental, as well as comfortable. Our homes are to overlook the town and face the park at its broad end—you know it is triangular in shape—and ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... seventy-five. Thus, if I am not an exquisite—which I distinctly am not—I am exceedingly well dressed, and I am glad to be so. If I did not have a fur coat to wear to the opera I should feel embarrassed, out of place and shabby. All the men who sit in the boxes at the Metropolitan ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... so the trio gazed eagerly around them. Just ahead, sat a shop girl in a shabby best dress, with a head of blonde, mismatched hair, and beside her, her escort, an Irish mechanic, who shifted his head from time to time as the unaccustomed collar scraped his neck. Across the aisle was a family of towheaded Swedes, the father self-conscious in his carefully ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... prices. And as the exciting days wore on, uneasily in her room at night she would sit down with pencil and paper and ask, "How much did I spend today?" Her father had left her nothing but the shabby old frame house. This she had sold to a friend of his, and the small fund thus secured she had resolved ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... Fortunately the man on the adjoining chair, and the haughty matron, were so engrossed in their conversation that they did not notice that the air in their immediate vicinity was being polluted by the presence of a man in shabby clothes and heavy boots. ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... attention to something else that was being read, convinced that her son's interests were still under discussion. There was talk of elections, of counting ballots, and the poor mother, leaning forward over the rail in her shabby cap, knitting her thick eyebrows, would have listened religiously to the report on the Sarigue election to the very end, had not the usher who had admitted her come to tell her that it was all over and that she ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... with many of the boards in the porch floors and steps showing decay. The trees in the orchard were older and more gnarled with here and there gaps in their ranks. The fences showed many repairs. The little schoolhouse was almost shabby and, with the wood cleared away, looked naked and alone. The church, too, was in need of a fresh coat of white. And there were many new graves in the cemetery on the hill. As time had wrought changes in the man himself, even so had it altered the scenes ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... in a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation with a maundering lack-a-daisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains almost one by one from his ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... their interest—the "elders" all sat under the pulpit and in the front seats, and many would nod their heads from time to time in approbation, equivalent to the "'zackly" and "jus' so" of their every-day speech. They were all well dressed—a few in gaudy toggery, hoopskirts, and shabby bonnets, but mostly in their simple "head hankerchers" [which] I hope they will never give up. Many of the men on the road had their shoes in their hands to put on when they got to church. Most of them wear none. The women, ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... this costume. Her recent glimpse of Haddon had been somewhat disillusioning. But now, when she finally held the gown itself in her hand—the original "Splendour" second-act gown, a limp, soft black mass: just a few yards of worn and shabby velvet—she found her hands shaking. Here was where she had hugged the toy dog to her breast. Here where she had fallen on her knees to pray before the little shrine in her hotel room. Every worn spot had a meaning for her. Every mark told a story. Her fingers ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... him to smoke, or to buy new clothes before the old ones grew too shabby for so nice a man as a bookkeeper is apt to be. He did not drink or play cards or billiards; he did not belong to ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... old stork looks shabby enough it is true," said Arsinoe, "still I am very sorry he should go away. If you had been at home, perhaps father would ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seated on her throne, surrounded by the lords and ladies of her court, glittering in jewels and dressed in magnificent apparel. Hans felt rather shy as he marched up the splendid room, amongst all these grandly dressed people, in his shabby old clothes; but he put as good a face on it as he could, and when he stopped before the throne and looked into the Princess's eyes, all his shyness vanished. He was conscious of nothing but a strong determination to win her for himself, or to perish in the attempt. The ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... laughed at him—in short, made a fool of Sprigg completely. This discovery brought a twinge to his self-love, far more severe than any pain of conscience he felt at the thought of the foul lie he had told, or of his shabby flight from home; even while he could not help but be aware of the grief and shame and distressing apprehensions he must thereby be causing his dear father and mother. In a pet of wrath, plump down he sat, this poor, vain boy; and, jerking the moccasins from off his feet, flung ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... answered the door, the knocking was repeated twice, much louder each time, and at last one of the jovial young fellows aforesaid jumped up and opened the door, imagining that it was some other merry wag who wanted to surprise them all—and behold! a dry, wrinkled old maid in a shabby black dress stood before the ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... doorway to let me go through first, he carried me off in his custody after all. As we crossed the quarter-deck two shabby individuals stepped forward and in mournful silence offered me business cards which I took from them without a word under his heavy eye. It was a useless and gloomy ceremony. They were the touts of the other ship-chandlers, and he placid at my ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... fleet. She hadn't time to stop now, as lunch would be ready. Anyhow, night was the time for movies. She drove on, and the brick business buildings gave out into a dribble of small frame cottages, mostly shabby. Edith Webb was coming out ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... "she's not out and out shabby; she says she won't tell unless we all wish it. But what is ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... seen making a desperate attempt to penetrate through this teeming, densely-packed, and noisy multitude, a stout figure, with a face ugly, irregular, good-humored. He was dressed in a long and dull-colored and almost shabby ulster. His hat was as rough as if it had been brushed the wrong way, and he wore a suit of tweed that was now very old, but that even in its earliest days would have been scorned by the poorest shopman of ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... her in those days, Paulette—wore unbecoming hats and shabby gowns, and shoes that were full of holes. None the less, she was sought out by several men of note, among them Freron, a commissioner of the Convention. He visited Pauline so often as to cause unfavorable comment; but he was in love with her, and she fell in ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... it was a pretty shabby thing for a woman to go back on her husband in his hour of need, and when there were angels in the house too; but she did it, thereby sustaining her reputation for crookedness and general contrariness as ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... Joseph; taken from him by a necessitous Kaiser Karl, Joseph's Brother, that now is. I know not if his Majesty remembers that transaction, now while in these localities; but know well, if he does, he must think it a shabby one. ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... the wharf. But what was my consternation, when I beheld him advance deferentially to my pestilent visitor, and taking off his hat, respectfully offer to conduct him on board! This was a great lesson to me in life on the subject of "appearances." The shabby old individual was no less a personage than the celebrated William Gray, of Boston, owner of the Galatea and cargo, and proprietor of many a richer craft then floating on ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... "It was shabby to say I would not aid him, and God help me, it was not true. I won't leave him, though he marries a blackamoor," thought George ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... looked about her with pardonable pride and satisfaction. Though the room was on the fourth floor, it looked quite like a parlor. She felt that she should take great comfort in so neat and pleasant a room. It was a great contrast to her dull, solitary, laborious life in the shabby room, for which, poor as it was, she oftentimes found it difficult to provide the ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... to care how they look and ... they do wear shabby gloves and shoes." So her thoughts ran. "But they are the Rockwoods and they don't have to care. It must be so easy for them; they only have to visit the Day Nursery, and the Home for Incurables, and some old, poor, sick people. They never have to meet them ...
— Different Girls • Various
... money to form an endowment fund for the Pope and his court so big that his Holiness and every official in the place might get salaries all round out of the interest that would enable them to live like—well, I was going to say like princes, but there's a lot of princes in Rome that live so shabby that the comparison ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... unbind the wrappings, to look at the old wound. She had gone in spirit to that old, shabby parlour to which Linda and Fred had carried Josephine's crib late every night, and where sheet music had cascaded from the upright piano. She saw, with the young husband and wife, a fiery, tumblehead girl of fifteen or sixteen, who ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... most generous hospitality. It was not so with some of the others, however; and Count Bismarck was particularly unfortunate, being billeted in a very small and uncomfortable house, where, visiting him to learn more fully what was going on, I found him, wrapped in a shabby old dressing-gown, hard at work. He was established in a very small room, whose only furnishings consisted of a table—at which he was writing—a couple of rough chairs, and the universal feather-bed, this time made on the floor in one corner of the room. On my remarking upon the limited ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... nearly a week of travel, the party went into camp near a shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry Mississippi. The river astonished the children beyond measure. Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of trees on ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... a very simple, practical lesson, and it is just this, that if Christian men, in their Christian lives, would practise the virtues that the world practises, in pursuit of its shabby aims and ends, their whole Christian character would be revolutionised. Why, a boy will spend more pains in learning to whistle than half of you do in trying to cultivate your Christian character. The secret of success religiously is precisely the same as the secret of success in ordinary ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... tobacco, and notwithstanding the warmth of the June day, all the windows were tightly closed. Its occupant, a lank man with a smooth but wizened face, straight white hair and dark, piercing eyes, was in accord with his surroundings,—shabby, unkempt, with cigarette ash down the front of his coat, his collar none ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... palms of her hands, her gaze wandering down the road to the little town less than a mile away, and presently she laughed again as if at some dear memory. It was so good to be among the old loved things, the straggling streets and shabby houses, the buttercups and dandelions, and the friends of other days. It was good, and out loud she said again: ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer stamp. They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called "out of a situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of the professional class—shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark. The eye of this species were mostly directed over the parapet upon the running water below. A man seen there looking ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... quicker than Gurdon had expected, for out of the gloom there presently emerged the yellow face of Mark Fenwick. He came in with a furtive air, like some mean thief who is about to do a shabby action. He was palpably looking for something. He made a gesture of disappointment when he saw that the table where he had dined was now stripped of everything except the flowers. He did not seem to see the other two men there at all. Venner took the box from his companion's hand, ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... would be needless to report, and not only needless, but a vast deal worse—shabby, interloping, meddlesome and mean, undignified, unmanly, and disreputably low; for even the tanner and his wife (who must have had right to come forward, if anybody had) felt that their right was a shadow, and kept back as if they were a hundred miles away, and took one another ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... looked to the rest of the caravan! The shabby furniture, the thin, wasted mother, the dirty, torn little frock she had just laid aside, were quite out of keeping with the pretty little white-robed figure ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... during dull, dark, or rainy weather, taking care not to raise the temperature too high—say greenhouse from 50 to 55 by day and from 40 to 45 by night; conservatory 60 by day and 50 by night. Chrysanthemums to be removed as soon as they get shabby, to be succeeded by early Camellias. The Euphorbia jacquiniflora is well worthy of attention now; it requires but a very moderate allowance of water at this season, as the least saturation or interference with the root action will cause the leaves to turn yellow while the plant ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... talkers and eaters, who stared at her indifferently, and it was not until Gretchen Wyker, tow-haired, pimpled, and short-necked like her father, chose to do so, that she finally pointed out a chair at a shabby side table and waved her empty tin waiter toward it. Virginia was passing the long table of staring men to reach this seat, when a man rose from the small table at the other side of the room and crossed hastily ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... show for our pains? We sneak into this Godforsaken hamlet, surrounded on all sides by abominations in the shape of tourists, and at the end of twenty-four hours we discover that the fair Miss Guile has played us a shabby trick. I daresay she is laughing herself sick over ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... dearest to the Indian Christian, with its decorations of palm and asparagus creeper, its carols and rejoicings and new and shining raiment. In the midst sits Jewel and her clothes to the most seem shabby, but to those who know she is the best dressed girl in the whole church, for she is wearing a new spiritual ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... it, since he has not even refurnished the shabby old drawing room at Rockhold in honor of the occasion," ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... grimy face, A muddy boot, A broken lace, And shabby suit; With threadbare knee, And dusty coat, And dirty collar ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... and soft. Over the broad face, seamed with scars from the smallpox, was spread a dark redness. From under the thick, closely compressed eyebrows gleamed a pair of small flashing eyes. The square, broad form of a Cyclops was wrapped in a shabby dressing-gown, much torn about the sleeves.' Beethoven recognised Weber without a word, embraced him energetically, shouting out, 'There you are, my boy; you are a devil of a fellow! God bless you!' handed him at once his famous tablets, then pushed a heap of ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... girl, and in her childish way worked almost as hard as her mother. She helped to sweep the house, and nurse the baby, and mend the clothes, and was as busy as a bee. But she was always tidy; and though her clothes were often old and shabby, I never saw them dirty or ragged. Indeed, I must own that, in point of neatness, Susan was even superior to my old friend Rose. Rose would break her strings, or lose her buttons, or leave holes in her gloves, till reproved by her Mama for untidiness: but Susan never ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... medieval narrowness and mean appearance, the buildings on either hand almost touching one another, and the way dark—were the haunts of masters and scholars and all those depending on them. Students, old and young, of high station and low, are crowded in lodging-houses, many of which are shabby, dirty, and disreputable. Hence they come forth to play their games or carry on their feuds. Some haunt taverns and worse places. Others eke out their means by begging at street corners. All get their teaching by gathering round masters whose rostrum ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... was cast in a different mould. He was tall, spare, almost aesthetic. The clean-shaven face, the well-moulded nose and chin hinted at a refinement which his shabby threadbare suit and his collarless shirt freakishly accentuated. Now and again he would raise his deep-set eyes from the book he was reading, survey the absorbed professor with a speculative glance and ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... which still subsists here upon the most scandalous invasions of private life and reputation. He was doubly detestable, in that he was the corruptor and worst specimen of the editorial calling in Europe and in America. I remember frequently seeing Williams, in the latter part of his life, in his shabby pepper-and-salt dress, in the obscure parts of the city. I believe he died during the first prevalence of the cholera in Brooklyn. Fancy may depict his expression as illustrating Otway's lines, "as if all hell were ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... eat I suffered. One of the most awful situations in life is to have one of your friends be the sort of girl that has a town named after her and wonderful family portraits and such dainty hands and feet that shabby shoes don't even count, and then to know that she is hungry most of the time from being too poor to get enough food. For two days I have had to keep my mind off Roxanne Byrd to make myself swallow one single morsel of anything to eat. I suspected it at the school ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... after another, till the girl found for them the man they wanted, a shabby, sodden-visaged fellow, with a would-be jaunty air of conscious shrewdness and vanity, who stood before the bar, his thumbs in his armholes, and laying down the law to a group of coster-boys, for ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... was. Becky had told her about it. She turned, and mounted up two flights of stairs. The last one was narrow, and covered with shabby strips of old carpet. She felt as if she were walking away and leaving far behind her the world in which that other child, who no longer seemed herself, had lived. This child, in her short, tight ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... moment afterwards it came out between the trees and stood upon the path just below her. It was not only a figure strange to her, but one somewhat strange in itself. It was that of a man still young, and seeming somehow younger than his own clothes, which were not only shabby but antiquated; clothes common enough in texture, yet carried in an uncommon fashion. He wore what was presumably a light waterproof, perhaps through having come off the sea; but it was held at the throat by one button, and hung, sleeves and all, more like a cloak than a coat. ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... doorway, a surprisingly pretty sight met my eyes. The dim, cool, little interior was set out and richly adorned with an abundance of fruit and vegetables, yellow gourds, apples and plums and golden wheat sheaves, great loaves of bread, and garlands of September flowers. A shabby-looking old clergyman was standing on the top of a step-ladder, finishing the decorations, when I entered. As soon as he saw me he came down, and I spoke to him, praising the decorations, and raising my voice a little, for I noticed ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... he look immense? His watch and chain are no his ain His claes cost eighteenpence; Wi' cuffs and collar shabby, 0' mashers he's the daddy; Hats off, stand ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... the ordinary way, and when I get a turn myself. But if I've got to pay every time, and the stakes are to be my earthly happiness plus my future existence—why, I don't play. There was the case of Midas; a nice, shabby trick you fellows played off upon him! making pretence you did not understand him, twisting round the poor old fellow's words, just for all the world as though you were a pack of Old Bailey lawyers, trying to ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs, And he and they together Knelt down with angry prayers For tamed and shabby tigers And dancing dogs and bears, And wretched, blind pit ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... win rich dividends in gold captured from the pirates he was sent to attack. Against these men a political outcry was raised, and as a result Captain Kidd was sacrificed. He was a seaman who had earned honorable distinction in earlier years, and fate has played his memory a shabby trick. ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... excitement, that I have been talking about his father. His father commands a post within forty miles of the place where he is now visiting, but I don't know one soldier from another. They all look alike to me, and I didn't think of the relationship they bore to each other. No matter; he treated me mighty shabby, and I shall always think hard of soldiers ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... job. Women have been raving about that girl's head; and it isn't bad, though I say it. I had to take a studio at a couple of days' notice—couldn't ask Lady Rockett to come and sit at that place of mine in Battersea; a shabby hole. She isn't really anything out of the way, as a pretty woman; but I've made her—well, you'll see it at some exhibition this winter, if you care to. Pleased? Isn't she pleased! And her husband, the podgy old millionaire ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... Shabby and sorry and sorely sick, He slept, and dreamt that the clock's "tick, tick," Was one of the Fates, with a long sharp knife, Snicking off bits ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... nights afterward, and he come right out to the barn without going nigh the house. He had another feller with him, a kind of shabby dressed Italian ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the days of Henri IV in one uniform style, of red brick with white stone dressings, to lodge splendour-loving magistrates, had had their imposing roofs of slate removed to make way for two or three wretched storeys of lath and plaster or had even been demolished altogether and replaced by shabby whitewashed houses, and now displayed only a series of irregular, poverty-stricken, squalid fronts, pierced with countless narrow, unevenly spaced windows enlivened with flowers in pots, birdcages, and ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... make a full confession. I stopped behind the last shrub in the avenue, pulled up my collar, rubbed my shabby hat and my trousers with the cuffs of my sleeves, dusted my coat with the sleeves themselves, and gave them a final cleansing rub one against the other. I buttoned my coat carefully so as to exhibit the inner, always the least worn, side of the cloth, and finally had turned down the tops ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... mostly women, had gathered around a shabby-looking man who was clutching wildly at a lamp post, and yet seemed in momentary danger of falling. His lips were thickly covered with foam, his eyes glaring, and the fellow was talking wildly, in low ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... pupil, one of the heroes of "A Start in Life" (Scenes from Private Life), and his brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter, emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the house of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute and an officer of the Legion ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... behind which he stood was one of those old-fashioned toilet affairs, with the back part, which was turned toward the door, sheeted over with wood, so that his ungartered stockings and rascally old slippers, were invisible. Even so, it was bad enough: he was arrayed in a shabby old silk roquelaire, and there was a towel upon his breast, pinned behind his neck. He had just a second to pop the basin under the table, and to whisk the towel violently from under his chin, drying that feature with merciless violence; when the officious Judy Carrol, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... lighting a cigarette. WALTER is a few years younger than his friend, moderately good-looking, with fine, curly brown hair and a splendid silky moustache. His morning-clothes are conspicuously well-cut—he is evidently something of a dandy; HECTOR wears a rather shabby dress-suit, his boots are awkward, and his tie ready-made. BETTY, a handsome woman of thirty, wearing a very pretty tea-gown, is talking to the maid at ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... neither did he; nor, he noticed, did she disturb his strings or comment on their inconvenience. When twilight came and the hour for her departure drew near Willie stationed himself before the peg from which dangled her shabby wraps and stubbornly refused to have her hat and cloak removed from the nail. There, figuratively speaking, they had hung ever since, the inventor reasoning that life without this paragon of capability was a ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... she had been so kind to me at school just 'cause the dude wouldn't marry her, but I wanted to obey Pa, so I used to walk around a block when I see her coming, 'cause I didn't want to hurt her feelings. Well, last night she came in the store, looking pretty shabby, and wanted a glass of soda, and I gave it to her, and O, how her hand trembled when she raised the glass to her lips, and how wet her eyes were, and how pale her face was. I choked up so I couldn't ...
— The Grocery Man And Peck's Bad Boy - Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa, No. 2 - 1883 • George W. Peck
... literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... again by its change, which now seemed to have settled into permanency. Of course it was only the ridiculous fashion of the world he once knew, but he could not free himself of the fancy that Priscilla was more her real self in the shabby trappings than she had ever been in the absurd costumes of ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... car was not exactly shabby, but it was unkept. It was half filled with travelers of Peter's own color, and these passengers were rather more noisy than those in the white coaches. Conversation was not restrained to the undertones one heard in the other day-coaches or the Pullmans. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... different individuals, who intended either to bestow or receive edification before the fires of the Bold Dragoon on that evening, were collecting, until the benches were nearly filled with men of different occupations. Dr. Todd and a slovenly-looking, shabby-genteel young man, who took tobacco profusely, wore a coat of imported cloth cut with something like a fashionable air, frequently exhibited a large French silver watch, with a chain of woven hair and ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... floated adrift on the sea in the form and likeness of a small shabby pine-cone, a prey to anything that might find him. He had escaped the jaws of the dog-fish, and the jaws of the dog-fish are a very wide door; he had escaped the albicore and squid: his life had been one long series of miraculous escapes from death. Out of a billion like him born in the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... room on to the porch, and began loitering, in an uncertain way, up and down. A lean figure, with an irresolute step: the baggy clothes hung on his lank limbs were butternut-dyed, and patched besides: a Methodist itinerant in the mountains,—you know all that means? There was nothing irresolute or shabby in Gaunt's voice, however, as he greeted the old man,—clear, thin, nervous. Scofield ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... business?"—it was shabby, but the temptation came as a way of escape from the flow of Mrs. Holmes's autobiography—"now that I couldn't put a name on, for why, 'e never speaks about 'is affairs; just 'Good evening, Mrs. 'Olmes; I'll take fish for breakfast to-morrow;' more than that, or another blanket on 'is ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... Christ is being mockingly arrayed in a once gorgeous, now old, shabby robe. Soon he is wearily pulled and pushed back to Pilate's hall, where they strip the Son of God in the presence of that howling mob, and beat him, until the blood streams down his poor, lacerated back. Surely ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... at him with a faint derisive smile. His clothes were worn and shabby, he was badly in need of a shave and a wash. He sat hunched up in a corner of the carriage, the picture of ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nimble fingers of the shabby minstrel with pitiably childish expression of amusement, a half-imbecile morio leaned upon the table. His huge form, for he was a giant among stalwart men, and his great moon-shaped head made him at once an object hideous and miserable ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... know that self-contempt is part of the price? ... I have no money. I know what you have. ... I asked. And it is enough for a man who remains unmarried. ... For I cannot 'make things do'; I cannot 'contrive'; I will not cling to the fringe of things, or play that heartbreaking role of the shabby expatriated on the Continent. ... No person in this world ever had enough. I tell you I could find use for every flake of metal ever mined! ... You see you do not know me. From my pretty face and figure you misjudge me. I am intelligent—not intellectual, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... three hours! As we drove home the bazaars were still busy. One street struck me as peculiarly quiet. There were Japs at balconies of low two-storied doll-houses, silhouetted against lamplight which shone through their red fans and pink kimonos, and other shabby houses with spindle-shanked darker natives, in white draperies, also some larger people dimly seen, on long chairs, who my friend said, were probably French—European at least. One or two groups of ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... replacing collars with handkerchiefs. In the Court-house yard the maple leaves, gray with blown dust and grown to great breadth, drooped heavily, depressing the long, motionless branches with their weight, so low that the four or five shabby idlers, upon the benches beneath, now and then flicked them sleepily with whittled sprigs. The doors and windows of the stores stood open, displaying limp wares of trade, but few tokens of life; the clerks hanging over dim counters as far as possible from the glare in ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... whatever to a castle. The royal lands belonging to this castle consisted of a little plot of cultivated soil, a bit of meadow land here and there, and some heather patches where tiny blueberry bushes and small mountain-cranberry plants grew luxuriantly. The castle's outbuildings were a shabby cow house and a pigsty. The cow house was built against the steep hillside, with three walls of loosely built stone, and its two stalls were dug half their length into the hill. The tiny pigsty was built ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... born at Bagdad in the year 412 of the Mohammedan era as the son of a cobbler. For that matter, I know a man who is only thirty-eight. He has buried two wives and seven children, not to speak of grandchildren. And now he is playing the piano in a shabby little Prater[1] restaurant, while artists of both sexes show off their tights and their fluttering skirts on the platform. And recently, when the pitiful performance had come to an end and they were turning out the lights, he went right on, without apparent reason, ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... or heard ever puzzled her, there was always somebody, young or old, to enlighten her innocent perplexity; and with each illumination she shrank a little less aloof from this shabby wisdom gilded with "art," which she could not choose but accept as fact, but the depravity of which she never was entirely able ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... replied Coretti; and he sprang out, weighed the fagots, took the money, ran to a corner to enter the sale in a shabby old account-book, and returned to his work, saying, "Let's see if I can finish that sentence." And he wrote, travelling-bags, and knapsacks for soldiers. "Oh, my poor coffee is boiling over!" he exclaimed, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... wharf. Shouldering his portmenteau, which, despite his debilitated condition, felt as light as the feathers at the poulterer's, he scrambled ecstatically up some slippery steps on to the stone platform, and had one foot on the soil of the Holy Land, when a Turkish official in a shabby black ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... change the sentence. While the Mother Superior calmly pronounced her decree, she was taking the measure of this stout foreigner who appeared in behalf of Jacqueline, a woman overdressed, yet at the same time shabby, who had a far from well-bred or aristocratic air. "Out of consideration for Madame de Talbrun," she said, "the convent consents to keep Mademoiselle de Nailles a few days longer—a few weeks perhaps, until she can find some other place ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... parting, for at the moment at which the carriage swept into the barrack square the newly-enlisted recruit was walking towards the orderly room under the guidance of a corporal. The youngster still wore the fluttering ribbons in the shabby old sealskin cap, and that fact and his presence in the barracks told ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... planted, and adorned with all the beauty that taste, wealth, and skill could produce. Orchards and vineyards were set out. Conservatories and pineries were erected. The negroes' squalid log-huts were replaced with neat stone cottages, and the shabby wooden fences by ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... that she had better try the Casino, when down the steps from the upper terrace came three figures. There was something familiar about them all, but to see them together made them more than strange. Besides, the two she knew best were strange in another way. Their habit was to be shabby, though neat; now, there was no one on the terrace as beautifully dressed as this tall young woman and the slim little girl. No, it couldn't be Madame Clifford and her petit choux; and yet—and yet—as they ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson
... Sam was ushered into the den of the war editor, he was surprised to see what a shabby room it was. The great man was sitting at a desk which was almost hidden under piles of papers, letters, telegrams, and memoranda. The chairs in the room were equally encumbered, and he had to empty the contents of two of them on ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... was going on, I felt shabby enough; there I stood, just like a silly sheep, over whom two butchers are bargaining. Nothing that had yet happened so forcibly reminded me of where I was, and what I had come to. I was very glad when they sent ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... say 'poor' Mr. Brand! I don't pity Mr. Brand at all. But I pity your father a little, and I don't want to displease him. Therefore, you see, I want you to plead for me. You don't think me very shabby, eh?" ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... twins of the soul passed from the church amid the sneers, criticisms, and suppressed laughter of the spectators—who united in pronouncing the ceremony a shabby affair, not worth looking at—and, entering a carriage with Mr. Whedell, were driven to the New Jersey Railroad Depot furiously, as if they had been guilty of some crime against society. At the depot, Mr. Whedell kissed his daughter in public, and not without a touch of the melodrama, for which ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... a variation on this theme: old school friends, who formerly had been wrapped up in a great ideal, are now living a life of shabby prosperity, and they feel that they have deteriorated, although they do not dare to ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... me.' His Eminence then told me that he wanted my valet, to place him in disguise in another direction. I therefore called him. He was a very sharp fellow at everything that was required of him; and the Cardinal made him put on a shabby cassock, with a false beard of grizzled hair and eyebrows to match, which were all fastened on with a certain liquid so firmly to the skin that it was necessary to apply vinegar in which the ashes of vine-twigs had been steeped, when they instantly ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... benefactor, John Parrot, paid the expenses of a public performance, the great success of which persuaded McKee Rankin, the actor, to make an elaborate production of both play and music. This ran for three weeks in San Francisco to crowded houses, which is a remarkable record for many reasons. A shabby New York production at an ill-chosen theatre failed to give the work an advantageous hearing; but it has been played by orchestras several times since, and William H. Sherwood has made transcriptions of parts of it for ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... his shabby clothes, at the dirty brownstone hovel he lived in—an antique of a house four ...
— The Happy Unfortunate • Robert Silverberg
... drowsiness, he struck a match on the edge of the box and lighted a cigarette. His flippant manner was touched with the conscious resentment which still lingered in his eyes, and from the beginning to the end of his account he betrayed no hint of a regret for his own shabby part in the affair. When it was not possible to rest the blame upon his grandfather, he merely shrugged his shoulders and lightly tossed the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... adventures into stories for the magazines; here had come to him many an editorial refusal, but here, too, he had received the news of his first unexpected success. All his happiest memories were embalmed in those shabby, badly-furnished rooms. ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... the quarter allotted to his people was near this entrance. He inquired the direction of the sentinel, who did not condescend to answer him. An old man, in shabby robes, who ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... the first autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination that it does on the foliage here about me,—multiplying and brightening its hues; though they are likely to be sober and shabby enough after all." ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... asserted, moreover, that great mischief had been already done by the advocates of such a design, "It"—this design—"has thrown back for the present the chance of any rational improvement in the representation of the people," he cried, "and has betrayed a good reform to the hopes of a shabby insurrection." Proceeding in his own condensed, crystalline antithesis, he thus enlarged on his own opinions: "There are two characters equally enemies to the reform of Parliament, and equally enemies to the government—the leveller of the constitution, and the friend ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... which Alan ordered for their consumption. Particularly she delighted in Alan himself and the way he fitted into the richness and luxury. It was his rightful setting. She could not imagine him in any of the shabby restaurants where she and Dick had often dined so contentedly. Alan was a born aristocrat, patrician of the patricians. His looks, his manner, everything about him betrayed it. Most of all it was revealed in the way the waiters scurried to do his bidding, bowed obsequiously before him, ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... At the shabby door of the apartment house Helen half closed her umbrella and shook it fiercely. Then, as if freeing herself from something as obnoxious as was the rain, she threw back her head and shook that, too. A moment ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... take up a morning paper, half-dread, half-delight, I take it up softly. My whole being trembles in the balance before it. The whole procession of my soul, shabby, loveless, provincial, tawdry, is passed in review before it. It is the grandstand of the world. The vast and awful Roll-Call of the things I ought to be—the things I ought to love—in the great world voice sweeps over me. It reaches its way through all my thoughts, through the minutes of my days. ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... better, now you are seated at table? Your companion eats little because she wishes little. You eat little because you think it is elegant to do so. It is a shabby, second-hand elegance, like your brittle behavior. It is just as foolish for you to play with the meats, when you ought to satisfy your healthy appetite generously, as it is for you, in the drawing-room, to affect that cool indifference ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... to the Piazza Navona. It is to me the most interesting piazza in Rome; a large oblong space, surrounded with tall, shabby houses, among which there are none that seem to be palaces. The sun falls broadly over the area of the piazza, and shows the fountains in it;—one a large basin with great sea-monsters, probably of Bernini's ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... My father sent the carriage for us. The roomy family coach he never allowed to get shabby. The "squabs," i.e. padded inner curtains to exclude the cold in winter, were in, and there were thick shawls and a pillow apiece and two footstoves for our comfort in the thirty-mile drive, and upon the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... compeers. It was by the intellectual part of her beauty that she commanded the admiration—enthusiastic in some cases, in others grudging and unwilling—of her schoolfellows, and reigned by right divine, despite her shabby gowns and her cheap ready-made boots, the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... habiliments were of a much more respectable appearance than any which he had sported on former occasions. His coat and pantaloons, which were of light green, were nearly new. On his head he still wore an Andalusian hat, but the present one was neither old nor shabby, but fresh and glossy, and of immense altitude of cone: whilst in his hand, instead of the ragged staff which I had observed at Saint James and Oviedo, he now carried a huge bamboo rattan, surmounted by the grim head of either a bear or lion, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... long strides—I might well call them bounds, for they seemed the springs of a wild animal rather than the paces of a young girl—with which she covered the ground. Not a word more was uttered until we stopped before a shabby, old-fashioned tenement house in the Seventh Avenue, not far above Twenty-third Street. She pushed the door open with a convulsive pressure, and, still retaining hold of my hand, literally dragged me upstairs to what seemed to be a back offshoot from the main building, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... years. Those years were not altogether happy ones, for Johnson's huge ungainly figure, and shabby, patched clothes were matters for laughter among his fellow- students. He became a sloven in his dress. His gown was tattered and his linen dirty, and his toes showed through his boots. Yet when some one, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Should I return it? Should I communicate with Mr. Semitopolis at once?" he wondered. "No," he concluded finally, "nothing without Mr. Finsbury's advice." And he arose and produced a shabby leathern desk. It opened without the formality of unlocking, and displayed the thick cream-coloured note-paper on which Mr. Pitman was in the habit of communicating with the proprietors of schools and the parents of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and emerged upon the piazza which we had left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The houses which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and, even in this Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge crossed a vile canal to another open space, where once congregated the merchants who sell antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of vertu. They are now, however, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... habiliments of shabby gentility in that bare little room with the American flag over the door and portraits of two or three notable advocates of World Peace and the American League of Neutrality on the wall, had all the outward ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the yard. Knock at the door of such a house, and the chances are in favor of your being met by a quiet, motherly woman—one who will instantly make you think of your own mother. Some very well constructed houses look surly, and some shabby ones look kind, somehow. If you have ever been a book agent or a tramp, how you will revel in this seeming digression! God grant that no man in need may ever look wistfully at your house or at mine, and pass on with a shake of the head. It is a subtle compliment to have ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... clinic, and Heaven knows how many hundred employees. No hospitals are owned and run by the Mayos; all these are private, outside affairs. The side tracks are filled with private cars of the wealthy. Scores of residences, large, small, fine, and shabby are little hospitals. The town has grown 5,000 in five years, all on account of the Mayos, these two sons of a great country doctor who without a college education have gathered the world's talent ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... quaint conceit of the forgotten scrivener who had thus adorned his habitation—a law-writer perhaps, or an author, or perchance even a poet—when I perceived the number that I was seeking inscribed on a shabby door in a high wall. There was no bell or knocker, so, lifting the latch, I pushed the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... made his way to the counter, his companion to a table near, where he took a seat and ordered a drink. Sir Timothy did the same. He was wedged in between a heterogeneous crowd of shabby, depressed but apparently not ill-natured men and women. A man in a flannel shirt and pair of shabby plaid trousers, which owed their precarious position to a pair of worn-out braces, turned a beery ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... septimo. Seventeen dek-sep. Seventy sepdek. Sever disigi. Several diversa. Several multaj. Severally diverse. Severe severa. Severity severeco. Sew kudri. Sewer defluilego. Sewing machine stebilo. Sex sekso. Sexton servisto de pregxejo. Sexual seksa. Shabby (worn out) eluzita. Shabby malnobla. Shackles malhelpoj, baroj, katenoj. Shade (screen) lumsxirmilo. Shade ombrajxo. Shade (tint) nuanco. Shade nuanci. Shadow ombro. Shadowy hximera. Shaft (of vehicle) timono. Shaggy harplena. Shake sxanceli. Shake (jolt) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the hospital, the boy with the crooked leg was just leaving; but his leg was not crooked any longer; his face was bright and healthy, and safely buttoned up in his coat he carried a shabby old pocket book, in which lay a withered flower, with one word written underneath in ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... Douw, And the Suffolk Gallery will not do—it's not a Suffolk Cow: I wish you'd seen him painting her, he hardly took his meals Till she was painted on the board, correct from head to heels: His heart and soul was in his Cow, and almost made him shabby, He hardly whipped the boys at all,—or helped to nurse the babby, And when he had her all complete and painted over red, He got so grand, I really thought him going off his head. Now hang it, Mr. Hilton, do just hang it anyhow, Poor ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... emphatic oils, representing a large blue wagon drawn by a stout white animal—evidently a horse. A background of lush scenery enhanced the forceful technique of the limner. The walls were stuffed with books. Two shabby, comfortable chairs were drawn up to the iron fender, and a mustard-coloured terrier was lying so close to the glow that a smell ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... It must be allowed, that any young Fellow that affects to dress and appear genteelly, might with artificial Management save ten Pound a Year; as instead of fine Holland he might mourn in Sackcloth, and in other Particulars be proportionably shabby: But of what great Service would this Sum be to avert any Misfortune, whilst it would leave him deserted by the little good Acquaintance he has, and prevent his gaining any other? As the Appearance of an easy Fortune is necessary towards making one, I dont know but it ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... be touched by so much as a finger-tip. The oak table with three sound legs and a halting fourth, supported by an ancient volume of Good Words, was Vie's property; John and plain Hannah shared the dining-table, covered with the shabby green baize cloth, which stood in the centre of the room. There were a variety of uncomfortable chairs, an ink-splashed drugget, and red walls covered with pictures which had been banished from other rooms as they acquired the requisite stage of ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sorrow had gone far to rob her of her fresh young beauty; and the privations which she confessed to having experienced during the last few days had hollowed her eyes, sharpened her features, and bowed her slender form. Her dress was travel-stained and shabby; her boots were down at heel and her thin hands were glove-less. Lettice noticed that she still wore a wedding-ring. But the neat trim look that had once been so characteristic was entirely lost. She was bedraggled and broken down; and Lettice thought with a thrill of horror of ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... off to the "Barn" a few hours after her aunt had passed away, and never again entered "Heidelberg." The funeral was large, expensive, and imposing, and included a crowd of rather unexpected and decidedly shabby mourners, who brought with them offerings of cheap, home-made wreaths and crosses, and wore faces of sincere and unaffected grief. Strange to say, the grave prepared to receive Mrs. Krauss was next to that in which lay the remains of Richard ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... locks, presented himself at the door for admission. The driver shouted through the sky-light, "Room for one more, there, inside;"—but the gentlemen looked at the old man and frowned, and the ladies spread out their ruffled skirts, for his hat was shabby, and his coat very threadbare. He saw how it was, and why there was "no room," and meekly turned about to go down the steps, when a fine-looking young man, who sat next to me, sprang to the door, and seizing him by the arm, said, "Take my ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... us on the end of the wharf, which, by the by, was terribly out of repair, yet they all appeared ill clad, and in no way so well furnished as the blackies in Jamaica; and when we marched up through a hot, sandy, unpaved street into the town, the low, one—story, shabby looking houses were falling into decay, and the streets more resembled river—courses than thoroughfares, while the large carrion crows were picking garbage on the very crown of the causeway, without ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... received the money, Catriona kept it close at hand, in a little worn black leather purse, in a shabby bag hanging from her arm, and not out of sight for ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... part as he is sitting now—in a shabby, leathern arm-chair, stooping a little forward, and doing nothing. Sometimes he wrote a few necessary letters, sometimes he made a feint of reading the paper; but oftenest he did nothing, only sat still, staring before him with a hopeless misery in ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... in painting at the rather shabby house of Rossetti in Portland Street, he was introduced to Rossetti's favorite model—a young woman of rare grace and beauty. Rossetti had painted her picture as "The Blessed Damozel," leaning over the bar of Heaven, while the stars in her hair ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... end of the counter, and reviews the other; whilst the shelves are parcelled out between books, and dolls, and ginger, bread. It is a question, by which of his trades poor Matthew gains least; he is so shabby, so threadbare, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... hair—She wears horn rimmed spectacles with yellow glasses in them so I can't see her eyes at all. I judge people by their eyes. Her hands look as if she had done rather a lot of hard work—they are so very thin. Her clothes are neat but shabby—that is not the last look like French women have—but as if they had been turned to "make do"—I suppose she is very poor. Her manner is icily quiet. She only speaks when she is spoken to. She ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... indifferent, and the worshippers, if such a name can properly be bestowed upon the congregations, were grossly irreverent. Nor was any improvement in the conduct of the Church service noticeable until after the Revolution, and when legislation had conceded a somewhat shabby measure of toleration to those who by that time had become rigid, traditional, and hereditary dissenters. Then indeed some attempts began to be made to secure a real uniformity of ritual in the public worship of the Church of England.[104:1] How far success has rewarded ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... and with brown nimble fingers found and readjusted the pin that affixed a shabby felt hat to her hair. Then she folded her arms and looked at the tips ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... boy brought nothing from America but wretchedly shabby clothes, and we had to clothe him from head to foot. We were obliged to economize, and a little tailor in the Avenue de Clichy, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the Trial Men In a suit of shabby grey; A cricket cap was on his head, And his step seemed light and gay; But I never saw a man who looked ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... to whom this earthiness and wildness are repulsive, to whom old Martin Doul's love pleading to Molly Byrne is unendurable. A dirty "shabby stump of a man," a beggar, blind and middle-aged, is asking a fine white girl, young, and as teasing as an ox-eyed and ox-minded colleen may be, to go away with him. Not an exalting situation, exactly, as you read of it or see it on the stage, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... conversation with Miss Huntingdon on the moral courage exhibited by Colonel Gardiner, he was rather glad of an opportunity that presented itself of exhibiting his brother in an unamiable light, and "trotting him out with his shabby old horsecloth on," as he expressed it, for the amusement of himself and friends. It was on a summer evening, and very hot, so that Miss Huntingdon, her two nephews, and two young men, friends of Walter, were enjoying tea and strawberries in a large ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... gentle, palm-covered rise about five hundred yards from the thickly clustering houses of the native village. He was a tall, thin man with a scanty brown beard, and his face wore a wearied, anxious expression. His long, lean body, coarse, toil-worn hands, and shabby clothing indicated, too, that the lines of the Rev. Wilfrid had not been cast in a pleasant place when he chose the wild, unhealthy island of Mayou as the field of his labours. But if he showed bodily traces of the hard, continuous toil he had undergone during ...
— The Tapu Of Banderah - 1901 • Louis Becke
... man, having rather the look of a shabby tropical traveller, with a grey moustache and a lively and alert eye. But the most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered with a multitude of shining metallic emblems ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
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