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More "Sweeper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in kitchen and parlor and chamber. Wander where you will about the house, not a glimpse of the earth-born, heaven-aspiring fiend of Etna,—him that sports in the thunder- storm, the idol of the Ghebers, the devourer of cities, the forest- rioter and prairie-sweeper, the future destroyer of our earth, the old chimney-corner companion who mingled himself so sociably with household joys and sorrows,—not a glimpse of this mighty and kindly one will greet your eyes. He is now an invisible presence. There is his iron cage. Touch it, and ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... acquired at Madam Winterbottom's salon had evaporated. He felt as if he were swinging in midair hitched to a scudding aeroplane by a rope about his middle. The mucous membranes of his throat were as dry and as full of dust as the entrails of a carpet sweeper. His vision was blurred and he had no control over his muscles. Weakly he leaned against the table in front of the jury, the room swaying about him. The pains of hell gat hold upon him. He was dying. Even the staff felt compunction—all but the ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... Crescent, and still the awful Sunday solitude spread grimly humid all around him. He next entered a street with some closed shops in it; and here, at last, some consoling signs of human life attracted his attention. He now saw the crossing-sweeper of the district (off duty till church came out) smoking a pipe under the covered way that led to a mews. He detected, through half closed shutters, a chemist's apprentice yawing over a large book. He passed a navigator, an ostler, and two costermongers wandering ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Say that the holidays are drawing nigh, And that to-morrow's sun begins the week, Which will abound with store of ale and cake, With hams of bacon, and with powder'd beef, Stuff d to give field-itinerants relief. Then I, who have within these precincts kept, And ne'er beyond the chimney-sweeper's stept, Will take a loose, and venture to be seen, Since 'twill be Sunday, upon Shanks's green; There, with erected looks and phrase sublime, To talk of unity of place and time, And with much malice, mix'd with little satire, Explode the wits on t'other side o' th' water. Why ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in Saint Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... first sunshine's as seductive as a pretty child—makes one ready to do anything! Why, I saw an old crossing-sweeper just now sweeping nothing at all—for it's as dry as a bone, you see—and I had to fork out a sixpence; encouraged useless industry just because of the change in the weather, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... since you will have it," he began with a laugh, which despite the weariness and anxiety of the past twenty-four hours had forced itself to his lips, "I have been sweeper and man-of-all-work at the Temple for the past few weeks, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... washed their hands clean; nay, he sometimes flogged a boy without ever telling him what it was for; and frequently, while his hand was in, he would, gnashing his large white teeth, which looked white from the same cause that a chimney-sweeper's teeth look so, merely because they were such a great contrast to his black fiend-like visage, he would dart his eye round the different classes to see which boy he should fix upon as his next victim. During these disgusting periods, with the exception ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... resembled in his nastiness as well as greediness. For if he was dressed in the morning as clean as hands could make him, he would, by running into puddles and kennels, and rolling upon the ground, become as black as a chimney sweeper before noon; and I sincerely believe that he thought it as great a punishment to have his hair combed, or to wash his hands and face, as to be whipped; for he would cry and struggle as much to avoid the one as to escape the other. But, to ease his parents of their heavy apprehensions upon his ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... our people have thus come up from the bottom. The head of the factory started as a machinist. The man in charge of the big River Rouge plant began as a patternmaker. Another man overseeing one of the principal departments started as a sweeper. There is not a single man anywhere in the factory who did not simply come in off the street. Everything that we have developed has been done by men who have qualified themselves with us. We fortunately did not inherit ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... When people say that a man "in that position" would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion. Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper? In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... arrived to speak to Roger and Astro, he found them in the tunnel, working as a team of a shoveler and a sweeper. Roger would sweep up a little pile of dirt and Astro would shovel it into ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... autumn I see that old-time schoolboy feat repeated. Mr. So-and-so says, "You make me governor and I will see that you get to be senator. Make me mayor and I will see that you become assessor. Get me the office of street-sweeper and you shall have one of the brooms. You stoop down and let me jump over you, and then I will stoop down and let you jump over me. Elect me deacon and you shall be trustee. You write a good thing about me and ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... would lift us almost level with the rail of the low-built patrol boat and mine sweeper, but the next receding wave would swirl us down into a darksome gulf over which the ship's side glowered like ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... handsome bonus of twenty-five pounds to everyone sending in his coupon or cheque for fifteen sovereigns by twelve o'clock next Tuesday, after which hour it is impossible for any one, be he who he may, from Kaiser to Chimney-sweeper, to participate in the enormous profit which will have been ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... his three antagonists with clamorous insult.[10] It was obvious that the weaker poet must be the winner by this contest in abuse; and Dryden gained no more by his dispute with Settle, than a well-dressed man who should condescend to wrestle with a chimney-sweeper. The feud between them was carried no further, until, after the publication of "Absalom and Achitophel," party animosity added ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... person, nevertheless, not deposed, was suspended from his empire for the day. He was pushed aside; he was forgotten. He was not distinct from the crowd. Like Titus, he had lost a day,—his vocation was gone. This person was the Sweeper of the Crossing! ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a gentlemanly little woolly dog built close to the earth like a carpet sweeper, with legs patterned crookedly—after the model of his master's. Toby has one settled prejudice: he dislikes Indians. You have only to whisper the word "Injun" and instantly Toby is off, scuttling away to the highest point that is handy. From there he peers all round looking for red invaders. ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... making its way over the long sloping roof in front of them. In the summer, when the sparrows built their nests in the tall chimneys on either side, and were perpetually flying to and fro, twittering, caressing, quarrelling—this was quite a society. When a chimney-sweeper once thrust out his black face from one of these chimneys, and shouted aloud to testify the accomplishment of his ascent, it was an event that brought a shriek of surprise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... was out over her face, sparkling forth again after each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women into a tyranny ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... a crowded street, where by turns were to be discovered, justling each other, parsons, lawyers, apothecaries, projectors, excisemen, organists, picture-sellers, bear and monkey-leaders, fiddlers and bailiffs. The barber and the chimney-sweeper were however always observed to be careful in avoiding the touch of each other, as if contamination must be the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... at her. She was not at all her idea of an orphan. In pictures they always wore black and looked sad, and at home there was a crossing-sweeper who said he was an orphan, and seemed to think it a hard thing, and that he was much to be pitied. Then another thought struck her: "If Aunt Hannah's your aunt as well as mine, I suppose we're ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... hooks in the cupboard, and the silver put away in the sideboard drawer. Then Mrs. Fletcher turned her attention to the tidying of the house. She made innumerable circles and criss-crosses with the carpet sweeper over the parlor rug, and was dusting the big rocker by the bay window when a chance glance up the street revealed two small figures playing far at one end of the strip of macadam. Her son, without doubt, was one of them. No one else wore a cap tilted back at quite ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... almost to her rail," said Rob, "and we've broken that already. It's that old grizzly hide that did it, I'm sure. We lit fair on top of that 'sweeper,' and our whole weight was almost out of the water when it came up below us. Talk about the power of water, I should say you could see it there, all right—it's ripped our whole ship almost in two! I don't see how we can fix it ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... passing, I went there myself. Everybody was in military uniform, everybody was shrugging his shoulders, and everybody was in the condition of a London policeman were he to see himself marched off to the station by a street-sweeper. That the Prussian should have taken the Emperor prisoner, and have vanquished the French armies, had, of course, astonished these worthy bureaucrats, but that they should have ventured to interfere with postmen had ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... least an ensign of militia, you are nothing. Make your way into Germany—What do you find there? an aristocracy of functionaries, mobs of nobodies living upon everybodies; from Herr Von, Aulic councillor, and Frau Von, Aulic councilloress, down to Herr Von, crossing-sweeper, and Frau Von, crossing-sweeperess—for the women there must be better-half even in their titles—you find society led, or, to speak more correctly, society consisting of functionaries, and they, every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... The street-sweeper's broom is the genuine besom, made of birch stems, cut out in the country, and brought into town tied up in bundles like fagots; suitable enough for those stalwart men who drag them along so leisurely, but burdensome for the hands of the wretched ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... just as soon as the pressure is removed. Other peas, again, burst at his pressure, and discharge their pollen on him. Now, in the beach pea, and similarly in the vetches, the style is hairy on its inner side, to brush out the pollen on the visitor who sets the automatic sweeper in motion as he alights and moves about. So perfectly have many members of this interesting family adapted their structure to the requirements of insects, and so implicitly do they rely on their automatic mechanism, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... deep ruby, doesn't it?" she said proudly. "You should see Annie circle around it with the carpet-sweeper. She knows one bump would ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... fire, "And now," said old Goody, "I'll have my desire." The flame she saluted, and cried, "Pray be quick, "Assist a poor woman, and burn this vile stick, "For 'twill not beat yon dog, though the cur will not bite "My pig; and I here may remain all the night." In vain to the flame did our sweeper appeal, For her sufferings it would not, or perhaps could ...
— The Remarkable Adventures of an Old Woman and Her Pig - An Ancient Tale in a Modern Dress • Anonymous
... wheels often become so badly worn and streched that they fail to grip the carpet firmly enough to run the sweeper. To remedy this, procure some rubber tape a little wider than the rims of the old wheels, remove the old rubber tires and wind the tape on the rims to the proper thickness. Trim the edges with a sharp knife and rub on some chalk or soapstone powder to prevent ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... to lodge with them. He had started in life as the errand-boy and sweeper-out of a warehouse; had struggled up through all the grades of employment in the place, fighting his way through the hard striving Manchester life with strong pushing energy of character. Every spare moment of time had been sternly given up to self- teaching. He was a capital accountant, a ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... garret. A lamp stood in the window there and the tap of a light hammer informed him that the indefatigable Pole was still at work. In truth, old Paul was bending copper tubing—for a firm which said that he had no equal at the task and paid him a wage which would have been despised by a crossing-sweeper. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... he had discovered the mines of Potosi. Burning with impatience to discuss with the great MacGrawler the feasibility of his project, he quickened his pace almost into a run, and in a very few minutes, having only overthrown one chimney-sweeper and two apple-women by the way, he arrived at ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... headquarters with the twenty men. By the time that we found the guard for the day, the major's two orderlies, my own orderly, the cook and cook's mate, the district gunner (who was busy keeping our three very old guns, mounted in the tower, polished up), the office clerk and the barrack sweeper, the morning parade ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... He was at the corner of Redfern Road and still unaware of her existence. He was leaning against the wall with the habituated pose of one who is frequently obliged to lean against walls for long periods of time, and he was conversing in an elucidatory manner with the elderly crossing-sweeper who still braves the motor-cars at that point. He became aware of her emergence with a start, he ceased ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... holding the girl's hair firmly in one hand, with the other he clutched at one of the branches. He caught it, and the next moment was unexpectedly ducked overhead in the icy water. He came up gasping, and then understood. The tree was what in the voyageur's nomenclature is known as a "sweeper." Still held by its roots it bobbed up and down with the current, and the extra strain of his weight and the girl's had sunk it deeper in the water. It still moved up and down, and he had not finished spluttering when a new danger asserted itself. ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... Khusru Kheyl will sit quiet when they once know? What will the Mahomedan heads of villages say? How will the police—Muzbi Sikhs and Pathans—how will THEY work under him? We couldn't say anything if the Government appointed a sweeper; but my people will say a good deal, you know that. It's ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... the blessed Solomon had in his little country cellar up there in Lebanon. We'll try if this is not a very fair substitute for it, though. Come, my little man-monkey, drink, and forget your sorrow! You shall be temple-sweeper to Beelzebub yet, I promise you. Look at it there, creaming and curdling, the darling! purring like a cat at the very thought of touching human lips! As sweet as honey, as strong as fire, as clear as amber! Drink, ye children of Gehenna; and make good use of the little time that ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... of punch-houses;—but in Cossitollah all castes and vocations are met, whether their talk be of gold mohurs or cowries; here the Sahib gives the horrid leper a wide berth, and the Baboo walks carefully round the shadow of Mehtur, the sweeper. Therefore, reader, Cossitollah is by all means the street for you to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... room means cleaning the floor and the rugs; dusting the walls, the pictures; cleaning, dusting, and sometimes polishing the furniture. Open the windows top and bottom, dust and brush them inside and out; use a soft brush or a dust mop to take the dust from the floor. Use a carpet sweeper for the rugs unless you have electricity and can use a vacuum cleaner; collect the sweepings ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... remembers well; and it is remarkable, that he performs the daily drudgery of sweeping the gravel-walks, and wheeling water in a barrow! One wonders at the ability to perform such labour, in a Centenarian; that such a one should be allowed to be the sweeper of the hospital; and still more, that his age had not recommended him to the special bounty of the officers. It might be expected, that the successive fathers of these invalids would, at all times, be exempted from ordinary duties, and receive some additional means ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... find my position of dependence upon Aunt Eliza too unspeakably galling. What a monstrous injustice it seems that I—who if I had been born a boy, must have been Earl of Gaverick, should be at the mercy of an ill-tempered, miserly, old woman who may leave the home of my forefathers to a crossing-sweeper if she pleases. I suppose it ought to go to Chris, but one doesn't feel called upon to arraign Fate on behalf of a distant cousin who by rights has no business to ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... tramps, who had not come merely to punish Halfvorson, but also to let their wrath break loose, hardly knew how to begin. There was nothing for an angry man to do here. There was not a dog to chase, not a street-sweeper to pick a quarrel with, nor a fine gentleman at whom to ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... perquisites to be received by the latter (among which regulations I find the following: "Let no man receive anything who has not purchased the office he holds"); the order of precedence of everybody, from the dean of the Sacred College to the last sweeper who enters the conclave with their Eminences,—all subject to minute rules, which would require, one would imagine, a lifetime to make one's self master of, and which, curious as some of them are, it is impossible to find ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... ready to shed tears, and that he possessed a pocket handkerchief, but wanted something more. "J'ai un mouchoir, mais pas de loge," he said. Yet his letter was left without a reply. After waiting a day or two, and still receiving no answer, Vivier engaged the dirtiest crossing-sweeper he could find, made him put on a little extra mud, and sent him with a letter to Mr. Gye demanding "the return of his correspondence." The courteous manager of the Royal Italian Opera could scarcely have known that, besides ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... floors of the bungalow are of hard wood. They are waxed a few times each year, and a little work each morning with dust mop and carpet sweeper keeps them in good order. The washing ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... merchant's office, with the water running out of his boots, and his umbrella carefully tucked under his arm; and we would know very well that he had given the last coppers he had, for his omnibus home, to some beggar or crossing-sweeper, and had then been so delighted with the pleasure he had given, that he forgot to make the best of it by putting up his umbrella. Home he would trudge, in his worn suit of black, with his steel watch-chain ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... fellow slowly appearing at the top, after the manner of a chimney-sweeper, but certainly in a much more elegant form. There! it has unfolded four flower-like expansions, of which the uppermost are much the largest. The animal shows only the upper part of its body, and I can see with my pocket lens that it is somewhat transparent ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... Chimney Sweeper's Day. Sootable occasion for Sweeping Reform Meetings everywhere. N. B.—Edinburgh Exhibition. Scots wha' hae. Reception of Mr. H. M. STANLEY by the eminent Explorer's tailor, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... since you've all been away—sitting on that bench, feeding penny buns to the silly ducks—especially the black one, the one she used to like best. And I make pilgrimages to all the other places we ever visited together, and try to pretend she is with me. And I support the crossing sweeper at Lansdowne Passage because she once said she felt sorry for him. I do all the other absurd things that a man in love tortures himself by doing. But to what end? She knows how I care, and yet she won't see why we ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the stage and all its fictitious allurements. She was now Lady Bountiful: having looked after the simple cares of her household she was now ready to cast her eyes abroad, and relieve in so far as she might the distress around her. The first object of charity she encountered was an old crossing-sweeper. She addressed him in a matter-of-fact way which was intended to conceal her fluttering self-consciousness. She inquired whether he had a wife; whether he had any children; whether they were not rather poor. And having been answered in the ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... become packed and hard it will be necessary to use considerable force in scraping off the inequalities. A metal cutting edge, such as a hoe or scraper, will be found useful. A court should be swept with a coarse broom to distribute the fine material evenly. Another very good sweeper can be made from a piece of wood about six or eight feet long to which several thicknesses of bagging have been tacked or fastened. The final step in making a court consists in marking it out. Most courts are marked so that they will be suitable ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... light cases for Lemnos transferred to a mine-sweeper, and thence to a fleet-sweeper. All the afternoon the vessel steamed across sunlit seas and in the evening entered Mudros Harbour, passing through the great fleet that lay there, transatlantic liners, men-o'-war ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... the first of the kind ever made to me, stung me to the quick. Strange, I had never before considered myself in the light of a beggar; and yet, was I not so, just as much as a sweeper ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... stands in full sun, beside grey boulders under green foliage; cattle finely bred, like deer, feed on either side of her, and the sapling stems draw shadows on their fawn and white hides, and across the withered, short, dry grass. She belongs to R.'s establishment, I suppose—wife of a Sweeper perhaps, but at this distance she might be a Grecian goddess for she is too far off to distinguish features. The golden brown of her face and the blue-black of the hair under the crimson and gold in full afternoon sun are splendid against the depths of green shadow. Her contemplative attitude ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... with passion as she spoke. 'I'll marry Lord Nidderdale, or that horrid Mr Grendall who is worse than all the others, or his old fool of a father,—or the sweeper at the crossing,—or the black man that waits at table, or anybody else that he chooses to pick up. I don't care who it is the least in the world. But I'll lead him such a life afterwards! I'll make Lord Nidderdale repent the hour he saw me! You may tell papa.' And then, having ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the "moral" in the last line, may possibly have ventured to read the "Chimney-Sweeper" at her annual festival to those swart little people; but we have not space to give the gem a setting here; nor the "Little Black Boy," with its matchless, sweet child-sadness. Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems—all written between the ages of eleven and twenty—is without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Foreigners, who do not comprehend the Meaning of such enormous Outcries. Milk is generally sold in a note above Ela, and in Sounds so [exceeding [2]] shrill, that it often sets our Teeth [on [3]] Edge. The Chimney-sweeper is [confined [4]] to no certain Pitch; he sometimes utters himself in the deepest Base, and sometimes in the sharpest Treble; sometimes in the highest, and sometimes in the lowest Note of the Gamut. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... a mine-sweeper, and, home on leave, was feeling a bit groggy. He called to see a ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... many years had done his own and his partner's washing, scrubbing, mending, and cooking, and saw no degradation in it, was somewhat inconsistently irritated by menial functions in men, and although he gave extravagantly to waiters, and threw a dollar to the crossing-sweeper, there was always a certain shy avoidance of them in his manner. Coming from the theatre one night Uncle Billy was, however, seriously concerned by one of these crossing-sweepers turning hastily before them and being knocked down by a passing carriage. The man rose and limped hurriedly ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... Mrs. Mountjoy with the deepest awe. It was not at first borne in upon her to believe that Captain Mountjoy Scarborough, an officer in the Coldstreams, and the acknowledged heir to the Tretton property, had vanished away as a stray street-sweeper might do, or some milliner's lowest work-woman. But at last there were advertisements in all the newspapers and placards on all the walls, and Mrs. Mountjoy did understand that the captain was gone. She could as yet hardly believe that he was no longer heir to Tretton: and in ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... I answered; "I know there is the sort of idea that it is funny, but somehow it does not strike me more with reference to woman than to ourselves. I mean it does not seem more incongruous than that a man like yourself and an offal sweeper belong ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... the same time to mention, that Hugh rarely made use of a crossing on a muddy day, without finding a half-penny somewhere about him for the sweeper. He would rather walk through oceans of mud, than cross at the natural place when he had no coppers — especially if he had patent ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... me tobacco, which I do not use, and rum, which I do not drink. He accepted sweetmeats from me. And he called me a name that would make the sahib gulp, a word that I suppose he had picked up from a barrack-sweeper on the Bengal side of India. Then he slapped me on the back, and after that sat with his arm around me while the entertainment lasted. When we left the tent he swore roundly at a newcomer to the front for not saluting me, who am not entitled to ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... gave a penny to the first crossing-sweeper or match-seller she chanced across after a successful sitting at bridge. This afternoon she had come out of the fray some fifteen shillings to the bad, but she gave two pennies to a crossing- sweeper at the north-west corner of Berkeley Square as a ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... every where. The worst I know is that which blows down the chimney. And that reminds me to tell you what a town-bred chimney-sweeper said, the other day, to a friend of mine, in the valley yonder, who wanted to have a smoky chimney cured. My friend inquired if he could teach it not to smoke. "How can I tell?" said he, "I must take out a brick first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... sure you for one would not be a snob if you had turned chimney-sweeper, and let Tom Underwood nail me to his office; he'll ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was in this very winter, In the summer just passed over, That the pathways had been sighing For the sweeper of the pathways, 190 And the cowsheds nearer drawing To the cleanser of the cowsheds; Songs and dances were abandoned, Till should sing and ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... bring myself to do it. I had long determined that he should have a show for his life if he chose to take advantage of it. Among the many billets which I have filled in America during my wandering life, I was once janitor and sweeper out of the laboratory at York College. One day the professor was lecturing on poisions, [25] and he showed his students some alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from some South American arrow poison, and which was so powerful that the least grain ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... architect, who, when a little sickly boy, was apprenticed to a chimney-sweeper, and was seen chalking the street-front of Whitehall, by a gentleman who purchased the remainder of the boy's time; gave him an excellent education; then sent him to Italy, and, upon his return, employed him, and introduced him to his friends as an architect. Ware was heard ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a sweeper who was always on the look-out for an excuse. He was, so to speak, chained to that broom so many hours a day, and if he had been a galley slave, and the broom an oar, it is morally certain that he would have been beaten with many stripes, for ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the storekeeper is still battling "between calls" with the last of the day's fall, fervently wishing it may be the last of the season's, when whir! comes the big sweeper along the track, raising a whirlwind of snow and dirt that bespatters him and his newly cleaned flags with stray clods from its brooms, until, out of patience, and seized at last, in spite of himself, by the spirit of the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... servant had been seen alive. To the best of my remembrance, this was in 1764; upwards of sixty years, therefore, have now elapsed, and yet the artist is still undiscovered. The suspicions of posterity have settled upon two pretenders—a baker and a chimney-sweeper. But posterity is wrong; no unpractised artist could have conceived so bold an idea as that of a noon-day murder in the heart of a great city. It was no obscure baker, gentlemen, or anonymous chimney-sweeper, be assured, that executed this work. I know who it was. (Here there was a general buzz, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... said Ellis. "Let us take an example. A crossing-sweeper, we will suppose, is suffering from a certain disease about which the doctors know nothing. Their only chance of discovering how to cure it is to vivisect the patient; and it is found, by the hedonistic calculus, that if they do so, a general preponderance of pleasure over pain will ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... learn to be sweeper to all the beasts of the jungle, and you must serve them for twelve years." So for twelve years King Burtal cleared the grass and kept the jungle clean for all the creatures in it—cows, sheep, goats, tigers, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... can do and be: You can be a man and do a man's work, heart gentle, and fearless feet on the earth, but eyes on the stars. And to be a MAN, in our American meaning of that word, is glory enough for this earthly life. Be a man, be you street-sweeper or the Republic's President, and know that emperor on throne of gold can be no more, and is lucky if he is ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Who sees us all die knows that there is far too much of that battle, but we do not, and so continue worshipping the knife that cuts and the wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast sweeper worships Lal-Beg the Glorified Broom that is the incarnation of his craft. But the sweeper has sense enough not to kill himself, and to be proud ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... returned early to the "Hotel La Perla." Its entire force was waiting for me. This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence to ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... ring An Omen Blest is t' bride at t' sun shines on A Charm Tak twea at's red an' yan at's blake A gift o' my finger Sunday clipt, Sunday shorn A Monday's bairn 'll grow up fair A cobweb i' t' kitchen, Snaw, snaw, coom faster Julius Caesar made a law A weddin', a woo, a clog an' a shoe Chimley-sweeper, blackymoor The Lady-bird Cow-lady, cow-lady, hie thy way wum, The Magpie I cross'd pynot,(1) an' t' pynot cross'd me Tell-pie-tit The Bat Black-black-bearaway The Snail Sneel, sneel, put oot your ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that's because you are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of Canterbury's daughter will be married in St George's, Hanover Square, to a crossing-sweeper on ticket-of-leave. You don't do justice to the climbing and aspiring power of our more remarkable citizens. You see a good-looking grey-haired man in evening-dress with a sort of authority about him, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... terrier is Bran,—though he does not closely resemble the great Finn's sweet-voiced, gracefully-shaped, long-snouted hound; the coracle lying on the shore of the little lough—the coracle made of skin, like the old Irish boats—is the Wave-Sweeper; and the faithful mare that we hire by the day is, by your leave, Enbarr of the Flowing Mane. No warrior was ever killed on the back of this famous steed, for she was as swift as the clear, cold wind of spring, travelling ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... relations and neighbours], and courts of justice [for the benefit of their brothers who can talk and write]. He levies the rent of their fields, he fixes the tariff, and he nominates to every appointment, from that of road-sweeper or constable, to the great blood-sucking officers round the Court and Treasury. As for Boards of Revenue and Lieutenant-Governors who occasionally come sweeping across the country, with their locust hosts of servants and petty officials, they are but an occasional nightmare; ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out; and the man showed him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems"[2] lived. There were three tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Arnold's trivial coin, and ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... a patent sweeper daily in rooms which are occupied for sewing and other work, and she says that she does not find it necessary to give her rooms more than a light sweeping oftener than once in six weeks. Of course it would be different if ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... bronzed Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours. Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... ran to the thorn-bush where Darzee was singing a song of triumph at the top of his voice. The news of Nag's death was all over the garden, for the sweeper had thrown the ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... so sure of that. The passion for newspapers excites the minds of the whole republic. Now-a-days your servant reads the news as he works. The clergy peruse the Sunday extras, and the crossing-sweeper begs your worn-out copy instead ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... ten miles off shore; German liner Macedonia, interned at Las Palmas, Canary Islands, slips out of port; British cruiser Amethyst is reported to have made a dash to the further end of the Dardanelles and back; a mine sweeper of the Allies is blown up; Vice Admiral Carden, "incapacitated by illness," in words of British Admiralty, is succeeded in chief command in the Dardanelles by Vice Admiral De Robeck; Germany protests to England against promised harsh treatment of submarine ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... our return from the trenches, we saw them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied. Between standing waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes a sinecure. ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... always thought some day I'd kape a pig and live pritty in me own house," said Mrs. Kilpatrick. "But I'm the old sweeper yet in Number Two. 'Tis a worrld where some has and more wants," she added with a sigh. "I got the manes for a good buryin', the Lord be praised, and a bitteen more beside. I wouldn't have that if Father Daley was as ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... good that I can see in a demonstration of the truth of 'spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... go away as his fashion was, ho, ho, hoh! Oftentimes would he sing at a door like a singing man, and when they did come to give him his reward, he would turn his back and laugh. In these humours of his he had many pretty songs, which I will sing as perfect as I can. For his chimney-sweeper's humours he had these songs: the first is to the tune of I have been a fiddler ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... club swingers an' foreign men goin' around with their legs in mattesses. All I know is this, that I was carried to a ca-ar in a seedin' chair by two men with room enough in the seat of their pants to dhrive a street sweeper. Did y'r never ride in a seedin' chair, George? Then, faith, ye're not in my class. Fol-der-rol, de-rol ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... only saw a boy who looked like a street sweeper, with a hand-brush in one hand and a broom in the other. He had on a sailor's hat, and he touched the brim of it with the broom-handle, as a ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... upstairs," Hossein said, and led the way to a comfortably furnished apartment. "I think that you might stay here, for months, unsuspected. A sweeper comes, every day, to do my rooms downstairs. He believes the rest of the house to be untenanted, and you must remain perfectly quiet, during the half hour he is here. Otherwise, no one enters the ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people's heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last word was uttered—'Remember.' And think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones in ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... my whole life almost has passed away in the delusion that, next to my eldest brother, none but Dietrich was capable of giving me advice where to leave my few relics, consisting of a few books and my sweeper [that is, the seven-foot telescope with which she was accustomed to sweep the heavens for comets]. And for the last twenty years I kept to the resolution of never opening my lips to my dear brother William about worldly concerns, let me ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... According to her, the sixpence which I have occasionally thrown to a beggar to quiet my conscience was only half charity, because I did not add 'kind words,' as she would say. But I wonder what people would say if I were to inquire after the birth, parentage, and education of every street-sweeper I came across? No, my vocation is to defend my Queen and country, and not to act the charitable." Something whispered, "Cannot you do both?" but Edward would not listen, and soon arrived at his destination. ...
— Adventures of a Sixpence in Guernsey by A Native • Anonymous
... are not. Every profession has its unpresentable aspects, which ought not to be seen by out-siders. Think of a sculptor's studio and of the sculptor himself when he is modelling a large figure or group in the clay. He might be a bricklayer or a road-sweeper if you judge by his appearance. This is the tomb I was telling ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... think, complacently and piously, how lovely they look! So they do: and you love them heartily and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right: that is charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also,—it, in its Sunday dress,—the dirtiest rags it has,—that it may beg the better: we shall give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad. But what does Justice say, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... were left on the table, which nobody claimed. He was asked if it was his, and said no. Then they said, let us put it to the cards: there was already a guinea. The Duchess, in an air of grandeur said, as there was gold for the groom of the chambers, the sweeper of the room might have the silver, and brushed it off the table. The Pecquigny took this to himself, though I don't believe meaned; and complained to the whole town of it, with large comments, at ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... correction, in his own house. Astley was, however, but little disposed to remain passive in his imprisonment, and in the wantonness of his ever-active disposition amused himself by climbing up the chimney, and having at length reached the summit, endeavoured, by imitating the well-known tone of the chimney-sweeper, and calling out as lustily as he could, 'Sweep, sweep!' to attract the attention of the people below. Even on his father the incorrigible lad seems on more than one occasion to have tried his little game. One day, while the worthy ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Hurrah! the old sweeper has lit. Now the cobwebs will fly. Don't hurry back," shouted the man; and a faint, far-off voice answered, "I shall be back again ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... of their country—the Roumanians will bring themselves to adopt a less timorous spirit, and to acknowledge that it is more dangerous to the Fatherland if a Jew as such is prevented than if he is permitted to hold the office of street-sweeper. From such lowly public offices, or from that of University Professor, no citizen should be excluded on religious grounds or admitted to them "by exceptional concession." And if a Jewish cab-driver at Bucharest is so severely flogged by his passengers outside the chief railway-station ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... places. In five years returned home, and, after furlough, joined the Belle Isle in the Irish station. Whisky here again got hold of him, and excess ruined his constitution. On his leave he had married, and on his discharge joined his wife in Birmingham. For some time he worked as sweeper in the market, but two years ago deserted his wife and family, and came to London, settled down to a loafer's life, lived on the streets with Casual Wards for his home. Eventually came to Whitechapel Shelter, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... Italian towns where she had been chiefly educated; the rest she was satisfied to imagine. Above all, she loved to charm those with whom she associated—loved it in a half-unconscious way. Were it to a poor blind beggar woman, or a little crossing sweeper, she would speak as gently and modulate her voice as carefully as to the most brilliant partner or the greatest lady. This might be tenderness of nature, or the profound instinct to win liking and admiration. As yet it was quite instinctive; ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... was at least doing something for the community to earn my right to live, I was forced to pay for the opportunity and also to aid in keeping alive one of the many systems of graft, which unnaturally swallows up the results of honest men's labor. So I began work as a street-sweeper—a position looked upon generally as one of the lowest in the scale of human employment. Why the man who sweeps the streets, making clean and wholesome the thoroughfares, which have to be traveled constantly by the people, and saving the public from filth and disease, should be looked down upon ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... shadows began to creep out over baked sidewalks, broadening to a strip of superheated shade, a few stirred abroad in the deserted streets; here a policeman, thin blue summer tunic open, helmet in hand, swabbing the sweat from forehead and neck; there a white uniformed street sweeper dragging his rubber-edged mop or a section of wet hose; perhaps a haggard peddler of lemonade making for the Park wall around the Metropolitan Museum where, a little later, the East Side would venture out to sit on the benches, or the great electric tourists' busses ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... have said this, and when I say, further, that I can forgive your severe lady, and yourself too, (who, however, are less to be excused in the airs you assume, which looks like one chimney-sweeper calling another a sooty rascal) I gave a proof of my charity, which I hope with Mrs. B. will cover a multitude of faults; and the rather, since, though I cannot be a follower of her virtue in the strictest sense, I can be an admirer of it; and that is some little merit: and indeed all that ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... that is your own, that you are born to, you must bear it, whether it be in sorrow or in joy; whether it be a blessing or a curse. If it be yours, you cannot fling it away from you. You may disgrace it, but you must still have it. Though you were to throw yourself away upon a chimney-sweeper, you must still be Lady Anna, the daughter ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... a cook, a player, if they see his naked legs or arms, thorosaque brachia, [4929]&c., like that huntsman Meleager in Philostratus, though he be all in rags, obscene and dirty, besmeared like a ruddleman, a gipsy, or a chimney-sweeper, than upon a noble gallant, Nireus, Ephestion, Alcibiades, or those embroidered courtiers full of silk and gold. [4930]Justine's wife, a citizen of Rome, fell in love with Pylades a player, and was ready to run mad for him, had not Galen himself helped her by ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... takes a last puff at it, squints into it to make sure all the tobacco is gone, then lays it down with a sigh.] I reckon I'll try making 'em too. I went to the Vestry again, this morning, to see whether they'd take me as sweeper—but they've thirty names down, ahead of me. I've tried chopping wood, but I can't—I begin to cough the third stroke—there's something wrong with me inside, somewhere. I've tried every Institution on God's earth—and there are others before me, and there ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... household equipment which keep causing unnecessary pain, labor, and irritation: that leaky faucet, that worn-out washing machine, that broken light switch, that asthmatic vacuum sweeper, that torn rug, that decrepit snow shovel, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... South Seas—and England, that little kingdom, with a population of not more than forty millions, has had the honour of colonizing half the globe; but "these countries are our colonies no longer." Such are a few of the wonders of 2130! In the Dialogue is an admirable joke with a scientific street-sweeper and a learned beggar, who pleads necessitas non habet legem, and "embraces the profession of an operative mendicant." But here is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... trying to catch him." Oh, no! Santa Claus never allows himself to be caught in that way. You never see even his feet. He never leaves his shoes on the floor, nor dirty old brushes, nor shovels. It is not Santa Claus—it is only a chimney-sweeper. ...
— The Nursery, March 1877, Vol. XXI. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... same weaknesses and appetites. They react in substantially the same way to all chemical and mechanical agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered per ora to the most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and just as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or an ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Cte Rtie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional woman shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as maudlin and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... forrard, and raised her to my arms: spiling thereby a new weskit and a pair of crimson smalcloes. I rushed forrard. I say, very nearly knocking down the old sweeper who was hobbling away as fast as posibil. We took her to Birch's; we provided her with a hackney-coach and every lucksury, and carried her ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heard the stupendous and almost awful British roar which greeted him as he came out of the Nine Elms station, and took his seat in the carriage that was to convey him to Stafford House, he looked completely disconcerted. From the heir to the throne to the crossing-sweeper, all combined to do him honour; where Garibaldi was not, through the breadth of the land the very poor bought his portrait and pasted it on their whitewashed cottage walls. London made him its citizen. The greatest living English poet invited him to plant a tree in his garden: a memory ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... sure of that. The passion for newspapers excites the minds of the whole republic. Now-a-days your servant reads the news as he works. The clergy peruse the Sunday extras, and the crossing-sweeper begs your worn-out copy instead ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... God's babes, who can not help seeing the true state of things. Logic was to her but the smoke that rose from the burning truth; she saw what is altogether above and beyond logic—the right thing, whose meanest servant, the hewer of its wood, not the drawer of its water, the merest scullion and sweeper away of lies from the pavement of ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... hat—but, behold, a very singular revolution had taken place within it, and a mass of tin soldiers, stones, matches, and heaven knows what besides, came rattling down upon his head; and even one little chimney-sweeper fell astride on his nose. Nothing could compare with the immeasurable delight of the children at the astonishment of the Candidate, and the comic grimaces and head-shakings with which he received this their ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... at a glance. Not easily startled or surprised, she bade Puckers walk on, while she took a half-crown from her purse and put it in the sweeper's hand. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... if a character for sanity is of no further use to you," said Paul. "Tell them to anyone you can get to believe you—tell the crossing-sweeper and the policemen, tell your grandmother, tell the horse-marines—it will amuse them. Only, you shall tell them on the other side of my front door. Shall I call anyone to show ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... the National Guard. After the review Louis XVI. met with a child sweeping the street, who asked him for money. The child called the King "M. le Chevalier." His Majesty gave him six francs. The little sweeper, surprised at receiving so large a sum, cried out, "Oh! I have no change; you will give me money another time." A person who accompanied the monarch said to the child, "Keep it all, my friend; the gentleman is not chevalier, he is the eldest of the family."—NOTE ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... shelves, the cups hung neatly on the appointed hooks in the cupboard, and the silver put away in the sideboard drawer. Then Mrs. Fletcher turned her attention to the tidying of the house. She made innumerable circles and criss-crosses with the carpet sweeper over the parlor rug, and was dusting the big rocker by the bay window when a chance glance up the street revealed two small figures playing far at one end of the strip of macadam. Her son, without doubt, was one of them. No one else wore ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... of the bungalow are of hard wood. They are waxed a few times each year, and a little work each morning with dust mop and carpet sweeper keeps them in good order. The washing ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... survival than it has met. Jackeen's Irish terrier is Bran,—though he does not closely resemble the great Finn's sweet-voiced, gracefully-shaped, long-snouted hound; the coracle lying on the shore of the little lough—the coracle made of skin, like the old Irish boats—is the Wave-Sweeper; and the faithful mare that we hire by the day is, by your leave, Enbarr of the Flowing Mane. No warrior was ever killed on the back of this famous steed, for she was as swift as the clear, cold wind of spring, travelling with equal ease and speed on land and sea, an' ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... however, for she says that Jennie is more lady-like, and further advanced in her studies than any of the girls, and that she would choose her for a companion rather than any of them, even if she had once been a street-sweeper." ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... fervently. "It's a mercy to get out of these stiff and starched clothes; but I have to be careful of them, for me tailor—bad cess to him!—will give no credit, and there's little of the riddy knocking about. Without good clothes on me back I'd be like a sweeper ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "It's all the same as a gambling-table," said he. "The jobbers and brokers have got the same odds the bank has at Rouge et Noir, and the little capitalist like me is doomed beforehand." Then he told her that there was a crossing-sweeper near the Exchange who came from his native place, and had started as a speculator, and come down to that. Only he called it rising, and used to speak with a shudder of when he dabbled in the funds, and often told him to look sharp, and get a crossing. And lo! one day when he was cleaned out, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... penny buns to the silly ducks—especially the black one, the one she used to like best. And I make pilgrimages to all the other places we ever visited together, and try to pretend she is with me. And I support the crossing sweeper at Lansdowne Passage because she once said she felt sorry for him. I do all the other absurd things that a man in love tortures himself by doing. But to what end? She knows how I care, and yet she won't see why we can't ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... met with in the streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people's heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last word was uttered—'Remember.' And think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... two bronzed Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours. Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among the hills ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... help. When I was big as her I cooked and baked and worked like a woman. Why, when I was just a little thing, Mom'd tell me to go in the front room and pick the snipples off the floor and I'd get down and do it. Nobody does that now, neither. They run a sweeper over the carpets and wear ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... Mogul Serai my road has been through territory not yet invaded by the revolutionizing influence of the railway, and consequently the dak bungalows are still kept up in form to provide travellers with accommodation. Chowkeedar, punkah-wallah, and sweeper are in regular attendance, and one can usually obtain curried rice, chicken, dhal, and chuppatties. An official regulation of prices is posted conspicuously in the bungalow: For room and charpoy, Rs 1; dinner, Rs 1-8; chota-hazari, Rs 1, and so on through ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... hatched, the wax was riddled with little tunnels, coated with the dirty clothes of the caterpillars. Flannelly lines ran through the honey-stores, the pollen-larders, the foundations, and, worst of all, through the babies in their cradles, till the Sweeper Guards spent half their time tossing out useless little corpses. The lines ended in a maze of sticky webbing on the face of the comb. The caterpillars could not stop spinning as they walked, and as they walked everywhere, they smarmed and garmed everything. Even where it did not hamper the ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... the fellow; "what should that signify? Why, the bien morts, who bing out to tour at you,[*] will think you a chimney-sweeper on Mayday." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Baltimore House, built, towards the northeast of Bedford House, by Lord Baltimore, in 1763, appears to have been the only erection since Strype's survey to this period, with the exception of a chimney-sweeper's cottage still further north, and part of which is still to be seen in Rhodes's Mews, Little Guildford Street. In 1800, Bedford House was demolished entirely; which with its offices and gardens, had been the site where the noble family of the Southamptons, and the illustrious Russells, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... to him—"Well, as you say, it is hard for a poor fellow like you not to be able to get dollars for his notes; hand them out, and I'll give you specie for them myself!" The blackguard had not a cent in his pocket, and walked away looking very foolish. He reminded me of a little chimney-sweeper at the Tower Hamlets election, asking—"Vot vos my hopinions about primaginitur?"—a very important point to him certainly, he having no parents, and having been brought ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... children playing among the trucks set one of them rolling down into a cellar, and three or four of the little ones were crushed. That was the end. The trucks disappeared. Even Tammany has not ventured to put them back, so great was the relief of their going. They were not only a hindrance to the sweeper and the skulking-places of all manner of mischief at night, but I have repeatedly seen the firemen baffled in their efforts to reach a burning house, where they stood four and six deep in the wide ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... their hands clean; nay, he sometimes flogged a boy without ever telling him what it was for; and frequently, while his hand was in, he would, gnashing his large white teeth, which looked white from the same cause that a chimney-sweeper's teeth look so, merely because they were such a great contrast to his black fiend-like visage, he would dart his eye round the different classes to see which boy he should fix upon as his next victim. During ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... name and sometimes they've got all of $6.50 in their pocket at one time. And if you're out some evening with a friend—a regular fella, they pop in the next day and say, 'Hello, Peewee, who was that street sweeper I see you palling with last night? Oh, he wasn't! Well, I had him pegged either as a street sweeper or ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... rigid justice if I had done so, but I could not bring myself to do it. I had long determined that he should have a show for his life if he chose to take advantage of it. Among the many billets which I have filled in America during my wandering life, I was once janitor and sweeper out of the laboratory at York College. One day the professor was lecturing on poisions, [25] and he showed his students some alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from some South American arrow poison, and which was so powerful that the least grain meant instant ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a yell was heard o'er head, Like a chimney-sweeper's lofty summons; And lo! a devil right downward sped, Bringing within his claws so red Two statesmen's characters, found, he said, Last night, on the floor of the House of Commons; The which, with black official grin, He now to the Chief Imp handed in;— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... distinguished by the mortifying title of Tony Pig; an animal which he perfectly resembled in his nastiness as well as greediness. For if he was dressed in the morning as clean as hands could make him, he would, by running into puddles and kennels, and rolling upon the ground, become as black as a chimney sweeper before noon; and I sincerely believe that he thought it as great a punishment to have his hair combed, or to wash his hands and face, as to be whipped; for he would cry and struggle as much to avoid the one as to escape the other. But, to ease his parents of their heavy apprehensions ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... into the drawing-room. In the old days all five sitting-rooms had been in use. Now four of them were closed, and the drawing-room was everybody's meeting place. Dolly was there working a carpet-sweeper languidly. ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and that he possessed a pocket handkerchief, but wanted something more. "J'ai un mouchoir, mais pas de loge," he said. Yet his letter was left without a reply. After waiting a day or two, and still receiving no answer, Vivier engaged the dirtiest crossing-sweeper he could find, made him put on a little extra mud, and sent him with a letter to Mr. Gye demanding "the return of his correspondence." The courteous manager of the Royal Italian Opera could scarcely have known that, besides ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... had discovered the mines of Potosi. Burning with impatience to discuss with the great MacGrawler the feasibility of his project, he quickened his pace almost into a run, and in a very few minutes, having only overthrown one chimney-sweeper and two apple-women by the way, he arrived at the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Flo', with her industry and skill in 'translating' old boots and shoes, her motherly instincts and efforts to keep her young brother Dick, the crossing-sweeper, honest, because mother had made them promise to be so when she died; the good-natured, agreeable, clever young thief Jenks, the tempter and beguiler of poor Dick; and, above all, the dear dog Scamp, with his knowing ways and soft brown ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... Duke of Cumberland, then a child, being carried to big grandfather on his birthday, the King asked him at what hour he rose. The Prince replied, "when the chimney-sweepers went about." "Vat is de chimney-sweeper?" said the King. "Have you been so long in England," said the boy, "and do not know what a chimney-sweeper is? Why, they are like that man there;" pointing to Lord Finch, afterwards Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham, of a family uncommonly swarthy and dark-"the black funereal ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... "the chimney-sweeper of Savoy," that is, the duke of Savoy, who joined the allied army against France in the war of the Spanish Succession.—Dr. Arbuthnot, History ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and preach. That's what we go there for. If we should cook or do any work of that kind, we should die; so we employ the natives, who are accustomed to the heat, to do these things for us. Then, these servants will each do only one kind of work. That is, the sweeper wont do any cooking or washing; the man who buys the food and waits on the table wont ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... Rikki-tikki ran to the thorn-bush where Darzee was singing a song of triumph at the top of his voice. The news of Nag's death was all over the garden, for the sweeper had thrown the body on ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... table, a chief carver and ten waiting men, a butler of the pantry with an assistant, a butler of the wines, six head grooms, a marketer with an assistant, a storekeeper, a cellarer, a carver for the serving gentlemen, a chief cook, an under cook and assistant, a chief scullery man, a water carrier, a sweeper,—and last in the list, a physician, whom the author puts at the end of the list, 'not because a doctor is not worthy of honour, but in order not to seem to expect any infirmity for his lordship or ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Oftentimes would he sing at a door like a singing man, and when they did come to give him his reward, he would turn his back and laugh. In these humours of his he had many pretty songs, which I will sing as perfect as I can. For his chimney-sweeper's humours he had these songs: the first is to the tune of I have been ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... three antagonists with clamorous insult.[10] It was obvious that the weaker poet must be the winner by this contest in abuse; and Dryden gained no more by his dispute with Settle, than a well-dressed man who should condescend to wrestle with a chimney-sweeper. The feud between them was carried no further, until, after the publication of "Absalom and Achitophel," party animosity added spurs to ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... old chimney sweeper, He has but one daughter and cannot keep her, Now she has resolved to marry, Go choose the one and do ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... reposing in her lap, and which now skulked off resentfully, with a swollen tail, to hide its indignation under a chair, 'you are as bad as an oracle. I have yards and yards of frilling to sew on before I dress—my sleeves—my neck—my sweeper.' ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... sempstress employed in a milliner's shop was as truly in a state of slavery as the negro who at that time was working in the fields of Georgia or Carolina. In a sense, of course, it may be said that every one who works for his living, from a Cabinet Minister to a crossing-sweeper, is a slave, for he has to conform to certain rules, and unless he works he will be deprived of many advantages which he wishes to acquire, and may even be reduced to a state of starvation. But speculations of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... I returned early to the "Hotel La Perla." Its entire force was waiting for me. This consisted of Juan, a cheery, slight fellow in a blue undershirt and speckled cotton trousers of uncertain age, who was waiter, chambermaid, porter, bath-boy, sweeper, general swipe, possibly cook, and in all but name proprietor; the nominal one being a spherical native on the down-grade of life who never moved twice in the same day if it could be avoided, leaving the establishment to run itself, and accepting phlegmatically what money it pleased Providence ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... sees us all die knows that there is far too much of that battle, but we do not, and so continue worshipping the knife that cuts and the wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast sweeper worships Lal-Beg the Glorified Broom that is the incarnation of his craft. But the sweeper has sense enough not to kill himself, and to be proud ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... my fur-lined overcoat, which I commanded a hobbardyhoy of the sweeper class to hold, I again mounted upon the saddle, while the proprietor of the machine sustained it in a position of rectitude, and then, supporting me by the superfluity of my pantaloons, he propelled me from the rear, counselling me to press my feet vigorously upon the paddles. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... purse out of the window to a sweeper in the courtyard, and said to his grandson, 'Then they do not teach you to be a ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... from office rudely swept By Legislative BILL, The crossing-sweeper's broom I ply, My ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... of khidmutgar, bawurchie, bhistie, dhobie, and mihtar; or, in plain English, butler, cook, water-carrier, washerman, and sweeper. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... that blows nobody good," quoted the "Kid," who happened to be sweeper that week. "I won't have to polish the ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... great, deep ruby, doesn't it?" she said proudly. "You should see Annie circle around it with the carpet-sweeper. She knows one bump would be followed by ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... pillow, is a little clock, its face flush with the wall. The room has no corners to gather dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve, and the apartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes of a mechanical sweeper. The door frames and window frames are of metal, rounded and impervious to draught. You are politely requested to turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and forthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bedclothes hang airing. You stand ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... to the throne, you will pay me," the Baron de Grost said. "If you do not succeed, remember that I am a rich man, and that I shall miss this money no more than the sixpence which you might throw to a crossing-sweeper." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reptile should wish to be thought an angel; or that he should not be content to writhe and grovel in his native earth, without aspiring to the skies! It is from the love of dress and finery. He is the Chimney-sweeper on May-day all the year round: the soot peeps through the rags and tinsel, and all the flowers of sentiment!" Aphorisms on ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 'I'd rather be a street-sweeper!' bitterly began Leonard.—'Oh, Dr. May, do let me have that!' he cried, suddenly changing his tone, and holding out his hand, as he perceived in the Doctor's button-hole a dove-pink, presented at a cottage door ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you will not take offense so easily," Janice rejoined. "Here is clean linen for your bed. We send the flat work to the laundry. There is a broom and carpet sweeper in the storeroom, and plenty of dust cloths. You would better put your own room in order first. Then you can come down and I will show you ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... of our tale had been originally—before his promotion—a chimney-sweeper, it may be only appropriate to offer a passing word on the genial subject of soot. Without speculating on its origin and parentage, whether derived from the cooking of a Christmas-dinner, or the production of the beautiful ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... rule of the Whatcheer House that a vacated room was subjected to a "thorough cleaning." Translated this meant a run over the floor with a carpet sweeper and a change of sheets. The door of No. 19 had been left unlocked, and while Mayer sat in the office conning the paper, Jim with the necessary rags and brooms was putting No. 19 in shape for the next tenant. An inside ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... kai asebeia]), says an inscription found in this very theatre [300:1], though not yet set up at the time when the 'town-clerk' spoke. So again, where the same speaker describes the city of Ephesus as the 'neocoros,' the 'temple sweeper,' or 'sacristan of the great goddess Artemis,' we find in these inscriptions for the first time a direct example of this term so applied. Though the term 'neocoros' in itself is capable of general application, yet as a matter of fact, when used of Ephesus on coins and ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... I have always thought some day I'd kape a pig and live pritty in me own house," said Mrs. Kilpatrick. "But I'm the old sweeper yet in Number Two. 'Tis a worrld where some has and more wants," she added with a sigh. "I got the manes for a good buryin', the Lord be praised, and a bitteen more beside. I wouldn't have that if Father Daley ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... that I was looking. Suddenly a little head emerged from one of them, and then half a body, the arms resting on the rim of the chimney-pot. 'Ya-hip! ya-hip!' cried a voice. It was the little chimney-sweeper, who had for the first time in his life crept through a chimney, and stuck out his head at the top. 'Ya-hip! ya-hip!' Yes, certainly that was a very different thing to creeping about in the dark narrow chimneys! the air blew so ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... on board ships of war, whose employment was to see that the decks were kept clean. Also, a man formerly appointed to use the swabs in drying up the decks. He was sometimes called ship's sweeper; ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the best-known example of these leaf-clad mummers is the Jack-in-the-Green, a chimney-sweeper who walks encased in a pyramidal framework of wickerwork, which is covered with holly and ivy, and surmounted by a crown of flowers and ribbons. Thus arrayed he dances on May Day at the head of a troop of chimney-sweeps, who collect pence. In Fricktal a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... broom's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty; The endless soot[532] bestows a tint far deeper Than can be hid by altering his shirt; he Retains the sable stains of the dark creeper, At least some twenty-nine do out of thirty, In all their habits;—not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... a bird. Hurrah! the old sweeper has lit. Now the cobwebs will fly. Don't hurry back," shouted the man; and a faint, far-off voice answered, "I shall be ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... SWEEP, SWEEPER. The name given at Yale and other colleges to the person whose occupation it is to sweep the students' rooms, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... spend his money for a useless art, which perhaps could be used only for dirges. A music-teacher was the most unnecessary and useless of mortals, and the music-teacher felt this, and was ready to become wood-cutter, laborer, street-sweeper, anything to procure food for his sick wife, his only child, to brighten their impoverished, sorrowful lives with a ray of comfort. But it was all in vain; the poor music-teacher found employment nowhere; he might have starved in the midst of the ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... truth, indeed, I'm loath— Life's deemed a mawkish dish of broth, Without thy aid, old sweeper; So mawkish, few will put it down, Even from the cottage to the crown, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... doing something for the community to earn my right to live, I was forced to pay for the opportunity and also to aid in keeping alive one of the many systems of graft, which unnaturally swallows up the results of honest men's labor. So I began work as a street-sweeper—a position looked upon generally as one of the lowest in the scale of human employment. Why the man who sweeps the streets, making clean and wholesome the thoroughfares, which have to be traveled constantly by the people, and saving the public from filth ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... sweeper" goes over the ground around the altar with a broom; then the regular priest, a dignified gray-headed man with a long ungirt purple chiton, and a heavy olive garland, comes forward bearing a basin of holy water. This basin is duly passed to the whole ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... time since Diamond had seen North Wind or even thought much about her. Now, as his father drove along, he was thinking not about her but about the crossing sweeper. He was wondering what made him feel as if he knew her quite well when he could not remember anything of her. But a picture arose in his mind of a little girl running before the wind, and dragging her broom after her. From that, he recalled the whole adventure ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • Elizabeth Lewis and George MacDonald
... the pictures; cleaning, dusting, and sometimes polishing the furniture. Open the windows top and bottom, dust and brush them inside and out; use a soft brush or a dust mop to take the dust from the floor. Use a carpet sweeper for the rugs unless you have electricity and can use a vacuum cleaner; collect the sweepings ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... Cossitollah all castes and vocations are met, whether their talk be of gold mohurs or cowries; here the Sahib gives the horrid leper a wide berth, and the Baboo walks carefully round the shadow of Mehtur, the sweeper. Therefore, reader, Cossitollah is by all means the street for you to draw profound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Strand, mingling with all the noise and bustle of a crowded street, where by turns were to be discovered, justling each other, parsons, lawyers, apothecaries, projectors, excisemen, organists, picture-sellers, bear and monkey-leaders, fiddlers and bailiffs. The barber and the chimney-sweeper were however always observed to be careful in avoiding the touch of each other, as if contamination must be the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... I were, I lose nothing, I can make any country mine. I have a private coat for Italian Stilettos, I can be treacherous with the Walloon, drunk with the Dutch, a chimney-sweeper with the Irish, a gentleman with the Welsh and true arrant thief with the English. What then is ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... house, a small crowd of street-arabs and nursemaids collect to stare at it,—and when tired of staring, pass and repass under it with peculiar satisfaction; the beggar, starving for a crust, lingers doubtfully near it, and ventures to inquire of the influenza-smitten crossing-sweeper whether it is a wedding or a party? And if Awning Avenue means matrimony, the beggar waits to see the guests come out; if, on the contrary, it stands for some evening festivity, he goes, resolving to return at the appointed hour, and try if he cannot persuade one "swell" ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... weighty concerns on his mind. And, besides, my whole life almost has passed away in the delusion that, next to my eldest brother, none but Dietrich was capable of giving me advice where to leave my few relics, consisting of a few books and my sweeper [that is, the seven-foot telescope with which she was accustomed to sweep the heavens for comets]. And for the last twenty years I kept to the resolution of never opening my lips to my dear brother William about worldly concerns, let me be ever so much ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... recognition of their claims being, as remarked by Sir Bampfylde Fuller, a great deal cheaper than being weighed against gold. On the other hand, a common occupation may sometimes amalgamate castes originally distinct into one. The sweeper's calling is well-defined and under the generific term of Mehtar are included members of two or three distinct castes, as Dom, Bhangi and Chuhra; the word Mehtar means a prince or headman, and it ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Mr. Robert, decided. "Great marlinspikes! I'm not the war department, am I? I'm only a first-grade lieutenant in command of a blessed, smelly old menhaden trawler that's posing as a mine-sweeper. I am supposed to be enjoying a twenty-four hour shore leave in the peace and quiet of ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the swells would lift us almost level with the rail of the low-built patrol boat and mine sweeper, but the next receding wave would swirl us down into a darksome gulf over which the ship's side glowered like a slimy, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... accompanied by several gentlemen from Bradford. They put up their horses at the Black Bull—the little inn close upon the churchyard, for the convenience of arvills as well as for other purposes—and went into church. On this the people followed, with a chimney-sweeper, whom they had employed to clean the chimneys of some out-buildings belonging to the church that very morning, and afterward plied with drink till he was in a state of solemn intoxication. They placed him right before the reading- desk, where his blackened face nodded a drunken, stupid assent ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... accounts of similar applications. The veil was removed, all mystery was at an end, and chimney-sweeping had become a favourite and chosen pursuit. There is no longer any occasion to steal boys; for boys flock in crowds to bind themselves. The romance of the trade has fled, and the chimney-sweeper of the present day, is no more like unto him of thirty years ago, than is a Fleet-street pickpocket to a Spanish brigand, or ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... crockery at her pension in return for her board and lodging, and he told her one morning that he had forty pounds saved up which she should have, and welcome, if she was in need." The case of the bath-chair woman was not less touching and generous, for she and her husband, a crossing-sweeper, also put their savings at the disposal of an invalid lady his wife used to wheel out every day, telling her that, though their cottage was only small, they did possess a tiny spare room, and they would be ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... "you must learn to be sweeper to all the beasts of the jungle, and you must serve them for twelve years." So for twelve years King Burtal cleared the grass and kept the jungle clean for all the creatures in it—cows, sheep, goats, tigers, cats, bears. Sometimes he stayed in one part of ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... would consider the house to be defiled. According to the old rule, if a Brahman touches a man of an impure caste, as a Chamar (tanner) or Basor (basket-maker), he should bathe and change his loin-cloth, and if he touches a sweeper he should change his sacred thread. Now, however, educated Brahmans usually wear white cotton trousers and black or brown coats of cloth, alpaca or silk with the normal allowance of buttons, and European shoes ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... pledged to anti-rum, anti-dirt, anti-nuisances, anti-monopolies, anti-abominations, and will give to those of you who have been so long feeding on public spoils, careless of public morals, not so much as the wages of a street sweeper. ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... an' Boolgarian club swingers an' foreign men goin' around with their legs in mattesses. All I know is this, that I was carried to a ca-ar in a seedin' chair by two men with room enough in the seat of their pants to dhrive a street sweeper. Did y'r never ride in a seedin' chair, George? Then, faith, ye're not in my class. Fol-der-rol, de-rol ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... guided by fragrant atoms suspended in the air, they should have arrived in the opposite direction. Coming from the south, we might believe them to be warned by effluvia carried on the wind; coming from the north in time of mistral, that resistless sweeper of earth and air, how can we suppose that they had perceived, at a remote distance, what we will call an odour? The idea of a flow of odoriferous atoms in a direction contrary to that of the aerial torrent seems ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... neutral waters; British say she was sunk ten miles off shore; German liner Macedonia, interned at Las Palmas, Canary Islands, slips out of port; British cruiser Amethyst is reported to have made a dash to the further end of the Dardanelles and back; a mine sweeper of the Allies is blown up; Vice Admiral Carden, "incapacitated by illness," in words of British Admiralty, is succeeded in chief command in the Dardanelles by Vice Admiral De Robeck; Germany protests to England against promised harsh treatment of submarine crews; British and French warships ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... origins. Mr. Henderson, speaking of the notion prevalent in the north of England that sickly infants never thrive until they are christened, relates a story communicated to him by a clergyman, within whose personal knowledge it had happened. He says: "The infant child of a chimney-sweeper at Thorne, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was in a very weak state of health, and appeared to be pining away. A neighbour looked in, and inquired if the child had been baptized. On an answer being given in the negative, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... carry a sandwichboard only the girl in the office told me they're full up for the next three weeks, man. God, you've to book ahead, man, you'd think it was for the Carl Rosa. I don't give a shite anyway so long as I get a job, even as a crossing sweeper. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... face!" I heard one old road-sweeper say; and all the children seemed to crowd round her involuntarily, and yet, with the exception of Dot, she had never seemed to ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... which the gentleman-nature of the pompous old baronet, Dedlock, asserts itself under suffering, belong to a high order of writing. There is another most affecting example, taking the lead of the rest, in the poor street-sweeper Jo; which has made perhaps as deep an impression as anything in Dickens. "We have been reading Bleak House aloud," the good Dean Ramsay wrote to me very shortly before his death. "Surely it is one of his most powerful and successful! What a triumph is Jo! Uncultured nature is ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... shines a special star To show us where the puddles are; The crossing-sweeper sweeps the floor— That's what ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... stupendous and almost awful British roar which greeted him as he came out of the Nine Elms station, and took his seat in the carriage that was to convey him to Stafford House, he looked completely disconcerted. From the heir to the throne to the crossing-sweeper, all combined to do him honour; where Garibaldi was not, through the breadth of the land the very poor bought his portrait and pasted it on their whitewashed cottage walls. London made him its citizen. The greatest living English poet invited him to plant a tree in his garden: ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... warrant, which the blessed Solomon had in his little country cellar up there in Lebanon. We'll try if this is not a very fair substitute for it, though. Come, my little man-monkey, drink, and forget your sorrow! You shall be temple-sweeper to Beelzebub yet, I promise you. Look at it there, creaming and curdling, the darling! purring like a cat at the very thought of touching human lips! As sweet as honey, as strong as fire, as clear as amber! Drink, ye children of Gehenna; and make good use of the little time that is left you ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... [1] "The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and Climbing-Boy's Album,"—a book, by James Montgomery, setting forth the wrongs of the little chimney-sweepers, for whose relief a society ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... only charity, was a good deal. The morning I am writing of was the first Sunday of the month, and as she set off for church she held in her thin old fingers inside her well-worn muff two coins—a shilling and a halfpenny, the halfpenny being intended for the first crossing-sweeper she met on her way. This was another of her little customs. She had some way to go to church, and she did not always choose the same streets, so she had no special pet crossing-sweeper, and this morning it was Billy ...
— The Thirteen Little Black Pigs - and Other Stories • Mrs. (Mary Louisa) Molesworth
... Antwerp began about ten o'clock on the evening of Wednesday, October 7. The first shell to fall within the city struck a house in the Berchem district, killing a fourteen-year-old boy and wounding his mother and little sister. The second decapitated a street-sweeper as he was running for shelter. Throughout the night the rain of death continued without cessation, the shells falling at the rate of four or five a minute. The streets of the city were as deserted as those ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... white kitten; not a jumpsome, frisky little beast, but a slug-like crawler with its eyes barely opened and its paws lacking strength or direction—a kitten that ought to have been in a basket with its mamma. Lone Sahib caught it by the scruff of its neck, handed it over to the sweeper to be drowned, and fined the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... pipe goes out. He takes a last puff at it, squints into it to make sure all the tobacco is gone, then lays it down with a sigh.] I reckon I'll try making 'em too. I went to the Vestry again, this morning, to see whether they'd take me as sweeper—but they've thirty names down, ahead of me. I've tried chopping wood, but I can't—I begin to cough the third stroke—there's something wrong with me inside, somewhere. I've tried every Institution on God's earth—and there are others before me, and there ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... the College of Physicians, unless he had Levett with him. He must have been a useful assistant in the chemical processes with which Johnson was fond of amusing himself; and at one of which Murphy, on his first visit, found him in a little room, covered with soot like a chimney-sweeper, making aether. Beauclerk, with his lively exaggeration, used to describe Johnson at breakfast, throwing his crusts to Levett after he had eaten the crumb. The pathetic verses written by Johnson on his death, which happened ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... be avoided. The dust should be removed—not by the old-fashioned feather duster which scatters the dust into the air—but by a damp or oiled cloth. Dust-catching furniture and hangings of plush, lace, etc., are not hygienic. A carpet-sweeper is more hygienic than a broom, and a vacuum cleaner is better than a carpet-sweeper. The removable rug is an improvement hygienically ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... superior that entire reliance might be placed on their fidelity, and that they knew of three or four other men in Leyden "as firm as trees and fierce as lions," whom they would engage—a fustian worker, a tailor, a chimney-sweeper, and one or two other mechanics. The looseness and utter recklessness with which this hideous conspiracy was arranged excites amazement. Van Dyk gave the two brothers 100 pistoles in gold—a coin about equal to a guinea—for their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... freer and more natural than the streets outside. A man goes by gesticulating as though he practiced for a speech. A woman adjusts her stocking on the coping below the fence with the freedom of a country road. A street sweeper, patched to his office, tunes his slow work to fit the quiet surroundings. Boys skate by or cut swirls upon the pavement in ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... scarcely have heard, he preserves—little flies in the priceless amber of his Attic wit—and has his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as William Blake has written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's Song) valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white sheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story, anticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last generation. His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident, or ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... are Kureshis, Sadikis, and Ansaris of foreign origin and high social standing. The rest are new converts to Islam, often of the sweeper caste originally. ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... that can be expected of them. There are various things to avoid, washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out, and the man showed him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems"* lived. There were three tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Lindsay's trivial coin, and one sahib, but this was ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... am sure you for one would not be a snob if you had turned chimney-sweeper, and let Tom Underwood nail me to his office; he'll ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scavenger; and why not? Is the mud never to be collected into a heap? I look down upon the other scavengers, of whom there have been a few—mere historical drudges; Montucla, Hutton, etc.—as not fit to compete with me. I say of them what one crossing-sweeper said of the rest: "They are well enough for the common thing; but put them to a bit of fancy-work, such as sweeping round a post, and see what a mess they make of it!" Who can touch me at sweeping round a paradoxer? If I complete my design of publishing a separate work, an old ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... he fancied himself mounted upon old Battle, reviewing the Barnstable Invincibles, whom he was berating right soundly for a set of stupid knaves. An invitation from the general to join him and the aid in drinking a morning sweeper, suddenly brought him to his understanding, and, after offering numerous apologies for the distressed state of his person, said he was not aware that the earliness of the hour prevented military men and politicians from drinking one another's health, provided ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... good many persons, first and last, or I stand around until they talk to me. So many persons wear blinders in the city. They don't know how wonderful it is. Once, on Christmas Eve, I pretended to shop on Fourteenth Street, just to listen to the crowd on its final round—mother's carpet sweeper, you understand, or a drum for the heir. A crowd on Christmas is different—it's gayer—reckless—it's an exalted Saturday night. Afterwards I heard Midnight Mass at the Russian Cathedral. Then there are always ferryboats—the ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... King's or Queen's men in Sidney? Or have thieves no politics? Man, don't let this lie about your room for your bed sweeper or Major Domo to see, he mayn't like ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... complacently and piously, how lovely they look! So they do: and you love them heartily and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right: that is charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also,—it, in its Sunday dress,—the dirtiest rags it has,—that it may beg the better: we shall give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad. But what does Justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper, or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ran ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dependence upon Aunt Eliza too unspeakably galling. What a monstrous injustice it seems that I—who if I had been born a boy, must have been Earl of Gaverick, should be at the mercy of an ill-tempered, miserly, old woman who may leave the home of my forefathers to a crossing-sweeper if she pleases. I suppose it ought to go to Chris, but one doesn't feel called upon to arraign Fate on behalf of a distant cousin who by rights has no business to be ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Leave the swamps to those that wander, Leave the cornfields to the plowman, Leave the forests to the weary, Leave the heather to the rover, Leave the copses to the stranger, Leave the alleys to the beggar, Leave the courtyards to the rambler, Leave the portals to the servant, Leave the matting to the sweeper, Leave the highways to the roebuck, Leave the woodland-glens to lynxes, Leave the lowlands to the wild-geese, And the birch-tree to the cuckoo. Now I leave these friends of childhood, Journey southward ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... thyself?" jeered an old watchman who stood a spectator of the scene. "All that thou cookest will be given to the sweeper's family. Who will eat of thy cooking tonight when the child is ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... a 'sweeper,' children, His deeds all unnoticed, unknown; Yet I think he is one of the heroes God sees and will mark ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... white-garbed street sweeper, who had been leaning on his broom at the curb ever since the onlookers had reached the sidewalk, decided to move on at last. With infinite slowness his foot came up. He poised, swung forward, then, the universal paralysis ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... expense account for May that during that month alone Alice and I purchased no fewer than thirty devices of an economical character. We have three different kinds of smoke-consumers, an automatic carpet-sweeper, a bottle of lightning polish for plate-glass, a dish-washing machine, a knife-scourer, a potato-parer, two automatic lawn-hose reels, a sewer-gas consumer, a patent ashes-sifter, etc., etc. It has required a considerable outlay of money ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... black ingratitude that the son of Costantin should be set apart for their priesthood, be made an Englishman, a grand khawajah, whilst Iskender was offered employment—mark the kindness!—as a scullion and a sweeper in their house—Iskender, who had been their favourite till ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
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