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More "Tabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his impressions of life, and had obediently lived in a world of blacks and whites, of heroes and heroines, of villains and adventuresses, until the grateful discovery of the realistic school of fiction permitted him to believe that men and women were for the most part neither good nor bad, but tabby. Moreover, the leisurely reading of many sentences had given him some understanding of the elements of style. He perceived that some combinations of words were illogical, and that others were unlovely to the ear; and ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... at equable temperature, should wear light colours. Light colours are far the best for sporting purposes, as they are usually much less conspicuous than black or rifle-green. Almost all wild beasts are tawny or fawn-coloured, or tabby, or of some nondescript hue and pattern: if an animal were born with a more decided colour, he would soon perish for want of ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... memory I look through, I see most clearly poor Miss Loo, Her tabby cat, her cage of birds, Her nose, her hair—her muffled words, And how she'd open her green eyes, As if in some immense surprise, Whenever as we sat at tea, She made ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... doubt, and with the Governor's ear. He's a scholar and fine gentleman. Deborah, clear away this trash. Lay out my books, fetch a bottle of Canary, and give me my Sunday coat. Put flowers on the table, and a dish of bonchretiens, and get on your tabby gown. Make your curtsy at the door; then leave ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... Then the first inhabitant appeared; it was the Burnells' cat Florrie, sitting on the gatepost, far too early as usual, looking for their milk-girl. When she saw the old sheep-dog she sprang up quickly, arched her back, drew in her tabby head, and seemed to give a little fastidious shiver. "Ugh! What a coarse, revolting creature!" said Florrie. But the old sheep-dog, not looking up, waggled past, flinging out his legs from side to side. Only one of his ears twitched to prove that ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... a dangerous man. He was thin and pale, with light blue eyes and sleek fair hair; and as weak physically as he was strong mentally. In his neat clerical garb, with a slight stoop and meek smile, he looked a harmless, commonplace young curate of the tabby cat kind. No one could be more tactful and ingratiating than Mr Cargrim, and he was greatly admired by the old ladies and young girls of Beorminster; but the men, one and all—even his clerical brethren—disliked and distrusted him, although there was no apparent reason for their doing so. ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... know I'm a peevish old Tabby, and of course I scratch now and then, and see in the dark. I dare say Silas is sorry, but I don't think he is in sackcloth and ashes. He has reason to be sorry and anxious, and I say I think he is both; and you ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... stated day dawned, the shower of kittens began. Some were white and some were tabby, and all were about the same loathsome age. Three were on his hearthrug, three in his bathroom, and the other six turned up at intervals among the visitors who came to see the prophecy break down. Never was a more satisfactory Sending. On the next day there ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... there is no railed-in run attached he must needs be chained up. The dog that is kept on the chain becomes dirty in his habits, unhappy, and savage. His chain is often too short and is not provided with swivels to avert kinks. On a sudden alarm, or on the appearance of a trespassing tabby, he will often bound forward at the risk of dislocating his neck. The yard-dog's chain ought always to be fitted with a stop link spring to counteract the effect of the sudden jerk. The method may be employed with advantage in the garden for several dogs, a separate rope being ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... rained, then snowed again, seeming as if the weather was determined on some kind of storm, but had not yet made up its mind for snow, rain, or hail. Now the wind roared in the chimney, and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her. Tabby opened her yellow eyes suddenly, and erected her smellers, but finding it was only the wind and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and yawned, and then cuddled her head down so as to show her white throat, ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... but being aware that a pert answer turneth away pleasant invitations, said nothing. She nodded and went off to her game, and informing Mr. Petherbridge that Lady Bruce was a platitudinous old tabby, flirted with him up to the nice limits of his parsonical dignity. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... drowsing dogs lie, he'll stir up the tabby sleeping Tom— In fact, he is the model of a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... pretty Poll— A monkey too, what work he made! The sister introduced a Beau— My Susan brought a favorite maid. She had a tabby of her own, A snappish mongrel christen'd Gog— What d'ye think of that, my Cat? What d'ye think of that, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... stood quite still while she milked them, and did not play any of the tricks on her that they had played on other dairymaids who were rough and rude. And when she had done, and was going to get up from her stool, she found sitting round her a whole circle of cats, black and white, tabby and tortoise- shell, who ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... old woman's assurance that we would find him by pounding hard on the gateway leading to the Avenue de la Gare, we hastened away, leaving her to babble her imprecations to a lazy tabby cat who lay sunning itself in ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... it!" Miss Milray triumphed. "I always knew that she was a dreadful old tabby. I wish you were safely out of her clutches. Come and live with me, my dear, when Mrs. Lander gets tired of you. But she'll never get tired of you. You're just the kind of helpless mouse that such an old tabby would make her natural prey. But she sha'n't, even ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... night. 'Tis but a just and rational desire To light a taper at a neighbour's fire. There's danger too, you think, in rich array, 140 And none can long be modest that are gay. The cat, if you but singe her tabby skin, The chimney keeps, and sits content within: But once grown sleek, will from her corner run, Sport with her tail, and wanton in the sun: She licks her fair round face, and frisks abroad To show her fur, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... want you or your visitors, Mrs. Sharpe, if that be your name," said the irascible patient. "You're all a set of old tabby cats together, and if you don't clear out, I'll fling something at ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... corner under the side of the wood. Upon our first entering Sir ROGER winked to me, and pointed at something that stood behind the door, which, upon looking that way I found to be an old broomstaff. At the same time he whispered me in the ear to take notice of a tabby cat that sat in the chimney-corner, which, as the old Knight told me, lay under as bad a report as Moll White herself; for, besides that Moll is said often to accompany her in the same shape, the cat ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... were seated behind the counter: the young woman with the grave profile, and an old lady who sat dozing with a smile on her countenance. The latter was about sixty; and her fat, placid face looked white in the brightness of the lamp. A great tabby cat, crouching at a corner of the counter, watched her ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... play a scarcely noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part in the education and life of children. Which of us does not remember powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkeys, mild old tabby cats, who forgave us when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonising pain? I even fancy, sometimes, that the patience, the fidelity, the readiness to forgive, and the sincerity which ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... that ever was! Pray Heaven I don't dirt it for it is to serve for the whole winter! Peggy has three new frocks, and Margaret Shippen four, but mine is the prettiest, and by tight lacing (though no tighter than theirs) I make my waist an ell smaller than either. In addition, I have a nabob of gray tabby silk trimmed with the same fur, which has such a sweet and modish air that I could cry at having to remove it but for what it would conceal. I intend to ask Peggy if 't would be citified and a la mode to keep it on for a little while after entering the box by the plea that ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... you not observed it?) I am altered of late!—I, that was ever light of heart, the very soul of gayety, brimfull of glee, am now demure as our old tabby—and not half as wise. Tabby had wit enough to keep her paws out of the coals, whereas poor I have—but no matter what. It will never come to pass, I see that. So many reasons for every thing! Such looking forward! Arthur, are not men sometimes too wise to ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... of yellow ribbons puckered up in the shape of a cabbage. In her left hand she has a little heavy Dutch watch; in her right she wields a ladle for the sauerkraut and pork. By her side there stands a fat tabby cat, with a gilt toy-repeater tied to its tail, which "the boys" have there fastened by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 'Eaven knows what we'll live on all the same, pore wurkhus ijets as me an' Bart are, not bein' able to make you an' Miss Sylvia 'appy. Miss Sylvia Krill an' Norman both," ended Deborah with emphasis, "whatever that smooth cat with the grin and the clawses may say, drat her fur a slimy tabby—yah!" ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... coleopterae by artful devices of glass traps and scarlet wafers. Such persons will probably form their ideas of Typee's cockroaches from their own domestic opportunities of observation. That were unjust to the crew of the Julia, and would give no adequate idea of their sufferings. As a purring tabby to a roaring jaguar, so is a British black-beetle to a cock-roach of the Southern Seas. We back our assertion by a quotation from our lamented friend Captain Cringle, who in his especially graphic and attractive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... a pretty little kitten, My name is Tabby Gray, I live out in the country, Some twenty miles away. My eyes are black and hazel, My skin is soft as silk; I'm fed each night and morning With a ...
— The Nursery, May 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... half-crown was coaxed well into sight and forced flat against the knife-blade. The boy then began to manipulate the knife with extreme caution as he kept on making a soft purring noise, ah-h-h-h-ha! full of triumphant satisfaction, while a big curled-up tabby tom-cat, which had taken possession of the fellow chair to that occupied by Aleck, twitched one ear, opened one eye, and then seeing that the purring sound was only a feeble imitation, ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... may lay a deal of it on myself," Mrs. Tugwell began to moan, as soon as he was gone; "for I have cockered Dan up, and there's no denying it, afore Tim, or Tryphena, or Tabby, or Debby, or even little Solomon. Because he were the first, and so like his dear father, afore he got on in the world so. Oh, it all comes of that, all the troubles comes of that, and of laying up of money, apart from your wife, and forgetting almost of her Christian ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... herself on the sofa, curled up among the pillows like a plump little tabby cat. She lit ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, "the domestic angel," the "gentle and refining influence" sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... with papa. Good Rollo!" as the dignified animal rose from the hearthrug to greet her, waving his handsome tail, and calmly expelled a large tabby cat from the easy- chair, to make room for his friends. "Well done, old Roll! Fancy ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and masculinity are expressions of the interplay of all the internal secretions. It used to be said by smart cats and accepted by the tabby cats, that a woman was a woman because of her ovaries alone. It is being said by some great discoverers of the day that man is a man because of his testes alone. Neither of these dogmas is true. There are individuals ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... said Diana, emerging at last, hugging her parcel, and dragging Spot away from the pursuit of an impudent and provocative tabby cat, with a torn ear, that was spitting ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... too well." And they all poured out happily into the corridor—that is, all of them except Caput and the two ladies, who remained seated upon their bench gazing fiercely and disdainfully at each other like two tabby cats on a fence. ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... that he wrote English "surprisingly well." In the next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languages encouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic, "Tabby in Elysium." The erratic character of the punctuation may be said, with perfect impartiality, to be the only distinguishing feature of the style of the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... bridegroom were both clothed in white tabby, his suit laced with a very broad gold and silver lace. The bride had on her head a coronet set full of diamonds, with a diamond collar about her neck and shoulders, a diamond girdle of the same fashion, and a rich diamond jewel at her breast, which were all of them of great value, and by ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... admiration. Every knee was bent, every hand strewed flowers or poured incense, and grimalkin was treated in all respects as the god of the day. But on the festival of St. John, poor tom's fate was reversed. A number of the tabby tribe were put into a wicker basket, and thrown alive into the midst of an immense fire kindled in the public square by the bishop and his clergy. Hymns and anthems were sung, and processions were made by the priests and people in honour of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... into the farm-yard crying— oh, she did cry so! "I've lost my pocket-handkin! Three handkins and a pinny! Have you seen them, Tabby Kitten?" ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle • Beatrix Potter
... Have you weaned her yet? Don't she ever feel sorry, now I am away, that she used to nurse so much more than her share? She needs to have you cuff her ears now and then, that Tabby. She never had any sisterly affection for me, although one of my eyes was a week longer getting open than hers. I shan't forget it in a hurry. I often think it over, as I lie here on the hearth-rug, listening to the everlasting click, ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... be nice folks," said Fido to himself, "for their feather-beds look big and comfortable, and their baskets are all ample and generous,—and see, there goes a bright gilt cage, and there is a plump yellow canary bird in it! Oh, how glad Mrs. Tabby will be to see it,—she so dotes on ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... let them see I am not a deserted tabby-cat," she said to herself, "waiting around in the cold until some one opens a door for me." And then this proud little country girl enclosed both notes to her brother and told him he had best inform ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... flinging it out, and that with such enjoyment that you felt as if you'd like to bear a hand, too, in the work of demolition! But I never shall forget Liszt's look as he so lazily proposed to "pitch everything out of the window." It reminded me of the expression of a big tabby-cat as it sits by the fire and purrs away, blinking its eyes and seemingly half-asleep, when suddenly—!—! out it strikes with both its claws, and woe to whatever is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... what everybody wore and said. I was told that Lady Caroline Lamb was there, enveloped in the folds of an ermine cloak, which she called a 'cat-skin,' and that she talked a great deal about a periodical she wished to get up, to be called 'Tabby's Magazine'; and with her was an exceedingly haughty, brilliant, and beautiful girl, Rosina Wheeler,—since well known as Lady Bulwer Lytton,—and who sat rather impatiently at the feet of her eccentric 'Gamaliel.' Miss Emma Roberts was one of the favored ladies, and Miss Spence (who, like all 'Leo-hunters,' ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... stranger, had he been passing, would have watched her with the same uncritical delight that he might have bestowed on any wood creature had it suddenly appeared darting along the pavement. She reached the corner just in time to bump into the flower-seller, who was turning about like some old tabby to settle ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... went on. "How is this, Sally, dear?— 'A handsome orange male Persian cat, also a tabby, immense coat, brushes and frills, is offered in exchange for an electro-plated revolving covered dish or ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sleeves tight to the elbows, met by black mittens of faded silk, and a very small close bonnet of the same colour. She had small brass buckles in her shoes; a cane, like those borne by running footmen, in one hand, and upon the other arm a small basket, rolled up within which lay a tabby cat, with which she held a conversation in what sounded to me ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... for anecdote. Who has not some faithful black Topsy, Tortoise-shell, or Tabby, or rather succession of them, whose biographies would afford many a curious story? Professor Bell[122] has well defended the general character of poor pussy from the oft-repeated calumnies spread about it. Cats certainly get much attached to individuals, as well as ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... if it has come to that, I myself will gnaw the beard from the old curmudgeon who thinks he sleeps here safely. Is the degradation of effeminate land rats, cheese-eaters, wharf robbers, stable vermin, to come upon us? Fates forbid it! Soon, perhaps, some fierce tabby may come to make our once brave hearts tremble. Then, then,"—but I imagined the eloquence broken off there and giving place to a furious scamper, as perhaps old Captain Mugford, arrayed in a long nightshirt and red bandanna nightcap, would fling open ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... to receive us I was almost disappointed to find that he held no wand, wore no robe, and had no volume of mystic lore by his side. The very cat that emerged from underneath his table, and rubbed itself against my legs was not of the orthodox sable hue, but simple tabby ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... string of birds, and displaying, with much pride and satisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that it would also be a fine thing for her to go forth and kill the canary. But to tabby's surprise, her ability was rewarded with chastisement; whereupon she pondered the question over and over: "How can it be, that what is virtue in man ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... cloak almost new, with a double cape, a womans gown, of printed cotton of the sort called brocade print, very remarkable, the ground dark, with large red roses, and other large and yellow flowers, with blue in some of the flowers, with many green leaves; a pair of womens stays covered with white tabby before, and dove colour'd tabby behind, with two large steel hooks and ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... domestic cats in India. Mr. Blyth states that domestic cats coloured nearly like F. chaus, but not resembling that species in shape, abound in {45} Bengal; he adds, "such a colouration is utterly unknown in European cats, and the proper tabby markings (pale streaks on a black ground, peculiarly and symmetrically disposed), so common in English cats, are never seen in those of India." Dr. D. Short has assured Mr. Blyth[92] that at Hansi hybrids between the common cat and F. ornata (or torquata) occur, "and that ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... as he at dinner sat, Did beckon to his hussar, And bid him bring his tabby cat For charming Nell to ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... you?" "Under the tree, by the meadow-brook Reading, and oh, it was too lovely; I never saw such a charming book." The charming book must have pleased her, truly, There's a happy light in her bright young eyes And she hugs the cat with unusual fervor, To staid old Tabby's intense surprise. ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... side, Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow, Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima, reclined, Gazed on ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of the North American flowers into her stories. The Tabby-striped Arum, or Jack-in-the-Pulpit (as it is called in Mr. Whittier's delightful collection of child-poems[30]), appears in "We and the World," where Dennis, the rollicking Irish hero, unintentionally raises himself in the estimation of his sober-minded Scotch companion ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... there was no more need of them to think of parting, she said, in a more contented tone than he had heard her speak in since it had been settled that he was to be married, "Eh, my lad, I'll be as still as th' ould tabby, an' ne'er want to do aught but th' offal work, as she wonna like t' do. An' then we needna part the platters an' things, as ha' stood on the shelf together sin' ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... old tabby that I set such store by? She died along in March, and I buried her under the sugar-maple side of the barn. The maples didn't do ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... [TABBY, tambourine in one hand and apple in the other, smiles stolidly. He sets her down on the ladder, and stands, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... family as a favourite. The animal was a female, quite white, and perfectly deaf. She produced, at various times, many litters of kittens, of which, generally, some were quite white, others more or less mottled, tabby, &c. But the extraordinary circumstance is, that of the offspring produced at one and the same birth, such as, like the mother, were entirely white, were, like her, invariably deaf; while those that had the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... was about to shut my window, when suddenly I perceived, in a spot of sunshine on my right, the shadow of two pricked-up ears; then a paw advanced, then the head of a tabby-cat showed itself at the corner of the gutter. The cunning fellow was lying there in wait, hoping the crumbs would ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... word tabby chiefly as the name of a kind of striped cat, but this use of the word came from the Old French word tabis, and described a material with marks which the markings on a "tabby" cat resemble. The French word came from the Arab word utabi, which perhaps came from the name of a suburb of the famous city ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... Beatrice's quilt now, her chair drawn up as usual to face the sunny garden, and on the footstool at her feet her favorite tabby cat was curled. ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... leaves which have gathered in the fork of a tree, and will construct a web which spans the coconut avenue with its stays. From one aspect its rotund body invites a good-humoured smile, for the marking exactly simulates the features of a tabby cat, well fed, sleepy, and in placid mood. Venom of virulence to kill a bat almost instantly would be severe enough to a human being. This dirty, obese spider deserves little consideration ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... recluse among books as he is among flowers. No poet of today seems more self-sufficient. Although a lover of humanity, he seems to require no companionship. He is no more lonely than a cat, and has as many resources as Tabby herself. Now when he talks about books, his poetry becomes intimate, and forsakes all objectivity. His humour, a purely intellectual ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... "sissies" who were foolish enough to cross them. Dress, Mrs. McArdle declared, was now a real trial. The girls had to be "in trim all the time," and the boys were as violently in contrast to their fellows as a litter of brindle barn-kits beside a well-groomed tabby-cat's family. "I'm clean worn out with it, Mart," she confessed. "We've been here two weeks the day, and the children howlin' the whole time to go back and McArdle workin' himself to the figger of a spoon with a mind to polish the lawn and ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the stone basin was full of water, in which the sparrows were busy washing, sending up tiny iridescent jets and fountains from their swiftly fluttering wings. It was delicious to Dominic. He felt very safe, very gay. Only a heavy ill- favoured tabby cat came from nowhere. It had designs upon the sparrows. Twice it climbed stealthily up the broken bricks and gas clinkers. Twice the little boy drove it away. It was not a nice cat. It had a broad white face, deceitful little eyes, and grey whiskers. It declared it only caught sparrows for their ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... made sure that his dreaded stepfather was away, he entered the living-room. To his great surprise it was dark and cheerless, and his blind mother sat alone in the midst of it shivering with cold. By way of warming herself, she had taken the sleek tabby cat into her lap and folded her chilled hands over pussy's warm fur. The whole scene sent a pang through the boy's ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... vine, The sunbeams came a flittin'; An' sort of danced upon the floor, Chas'd by the tabby kitten; Losh! to see the critter's big surprise, When them beams ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... was thin and pale, with light blue eyes and sleek fair hair; and as weak physically as he was strong mentally. In his neat clerical garb, with a slight stoop and meek smile, he looked a harmless, commonplace young curate of the tabby cat kind. No one could be more tactful and ingratiating than Mr Cargrim, and he was greatly admired by the old ladies and young girls of Beorminster; but the men, one and all—even his clerical brethren—disliked ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... him, I can tell you! and she handled the matter shrewdly too. So was Esdras and Silas, and a sort more lads, a-crying, 'Scratch him, Tabby!' and she scraught ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... daily and household companions, are clear in their testimony, that never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant. It had become necessary to give Tabby—now nearly eighty years of age—the assistance of a girl. Tabby relinquished any of her work with jealous reluctance, and could not bear to be reminded, though ever so delicately, that the acuteness of her senses was ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... shoes—of pink leather—are fastened each with a bunch of yellow ribbons puckered up in the shape of a cabbage. In her left hand she has a little heavy Dutch watch; in her right she wields a ladle for the sauerkraut and pork. By her side there stands a fat tabby cat, with a gilt toy-repeater tied to its tail, which "the boys" have there fastened ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... My poor little Henry had them given to him when he was six years old—the old ones I mean—and I've never parted with them. 'Take them all,' he said—so good; but, oh dear. Tit! Tit! Tittie! He was playing with her just now. Has anyone seen a tabby cat? Bless me, there it goes! So dreadful! It takes one's breath away, and all my things. ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... any woman inferior to the type I have created with my pencil—what the public calls the 'Carden Girl.' And now you see that your discovery of this living type comes rather late. In two days I must be legally married if I want my Aunt Tabby's legacy; and to-day for the first time I hear of a girl who, you assure me, compares favorably to my copyrighted type, but who has a mission and an aversion to men. So you see, Mr. Keen, that the matter ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... tiny bits out of our cheek, and left the blood trickling down, so cleverly, that one did not feel it—till afterwards. We did feel the mosquitoes, and fought with them as well as we could, whilst Dennis O'Moore, defending his own face with a big bunch of jack-in-pulpits striped like tabby cats, ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... you or your visitors, Mrs. Sharpe, if that be your name," said the irascible patient. "You're all a set of old tabby cats together, and if you don't clear out, I'll fling ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... with rose-trees on each side of a narrow, flagged path, and honeysuckle all over the house right up to the thatch, which is quite a yard thick. I have a water-colour of her, sitting outside her door, with the Royal Arms and Georgius Rex just showing over her cap, and a fat tabby cat asleep on the threshold. It was late summer when I did it, and the air was warm gold with purple shadows. I know it is a detestable trick to talk painter's shop, but I can't help it sometimes. I am reminded of this by the experiences I've ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... him when I went out a-walking. For this reason I hated him, and when we were out of my aunts' hearing I used to pull his tail and his ears and make the poor little thing howl sadly. My Aunt Penelope had a large tabby cat, which I also hated and used ill. I remember once being sent out of the dining-room to carry Shock his dinner, Shock being ill, and laid on a cushion in my aunts' bedroom. As I was going upstairs I was so unfortunate as to break the plate, which was fine blue ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... "It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol, while she soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Prime Ministers and such as they Grew like asparagus in May, And Dukes were three a penny: Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats, And Bishops in their shovel hats Were plentiful as tabby cats - If possible, too many. On every side Field-Marshals gleamed, Small beer were Lords-Lieutenants deemed, With Admirals the ocean teemed, All round his wide dominions; And Party Leaders you might meet In twos and threes in every street Maintaining, with ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... the farmer, gently, as he rose and went to carry the milk-pails into the pantry, calling coaxingly, as he did so, "Kitty! kitty! You had your milk? Don't you joggle, now!" For one eager tabby rose on her hind legs, in purring haste, and hit her ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... five might face a peril greater than that which now confronts him. Conceivably he might flop into a swollen river to save a drowning puppy; might dive into a burning building after some stranger's pet tabby cat. But this prospect which lies before him of ambling across a field with death singing about his ears, is a thing which tears with clawing fingers at the tuggs and toggles of his imagination until ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... have to hurry!" said Diana, emerging at last, hugging her parcel, and dragging Spot away from the pursuit of an impudent and provocative tabby cat, with a torn ear, that was spitting at him ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... she seemed to fairly overreach all the innocent young flowery beauties of the spring with one rich trill of colour, like a high note of a bird above a wide chorus of others. Mistress Mary that morning wore a tabby petticoat of a crimson colour, and a crimson satin bodice shining over her arms and shoulders like the plumage of a bird, and down her back streamed her curls, shining like gold under her gauze love-hood. I knew well how she had sat up late the night before ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... subject for anecdote. Who has not some faithful black Topsy, Tortoise-shell, or Tabby, or rather succession of them, whose biographies would afford many a curious story? Professor Bell[122] has well defended the general character of poor pussy from the oft-repeated calumnies spread ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... loved to stroke her soft, confiding face, Who gave her food and shelter from her birth, Who joined in all her harmless youthful mirth; But, when they went for holidays to roam, Shut-to the door of what had been her home, And thoughtless left to die upon the mat, Their faithful but forgotten Tabby-cat." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... his face turned toward the spot where the last savage snarl had been heard. He had a vague suspicion that perhaps the beast might try to stalk them, just as he had seen a domestic tabby do ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... wanted her to do. However, as she was a good, kindhearted girl, she set to work to pick up the little kittens which tumbled about on the floor, she patched up quarrels, and nursed on her lap a big tabby—the oldest of the community—which had a lame paw. All these kindnesses could hardly fail to make a favourable impression on the cats, and it was even better after a while, when she had had time to ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... present occupant of the throne is a large, young, grey Tabby—Oliver by name. Not that he is in any sense a protector, for I doubt whether he has the heart to kill a mouse. However, I saw him catch and eat the first butterfly of the season, and trust that ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... thy lord which, when he neigheth in Assyria and Nineveh, his voice is heard by our mares in this place so that they miscarry?"[FN74] Hereat Haykar left the King and faring to his place took a tabby-cat and tying her up fell to flogging her with a sore flogging until all the Egyptians heard her outcries and reported the matter to the Sovran. So Pharaoh sent to fetch him and asked, "O Haykar, for ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... little savage severely repent the delight she took in seeing her tabby favourite make cruel sport with a pretty sleek bead- eyed mouse, before she devoured it. Egad, my love, said I to myself, as I sat meditating the scene, I am determined to lie in wait for a fit opportunity to try how thou wilt like to be tost over my head, and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... A sister tabby saw the cord, And interposed a happy word: "In every age and clime we see Two of a trade cannot agree; Each deems the other an encroacher, As sportsman thinks another poacher. Beauty with beauty vies in charms, And king with king in warfare's arms: But ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... other round the grassplot and up and down the stems of the cherry-trees, ceased their gambols and lay still, crouching in the grass, and watching her graceful motions, as if taking heed for future imitation. If Kit and Tabby really did regard Laura with admiration and complacency, it was more than I can say for Mrs. Jaynes, in whose heart a secret rage was burning, though her aspect and demeanor were as placid and demure as if the butter she held in her hand would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... drained a champagne-glass, bottle in hand, and was priming the successor to it. He cocked his eye at Mr. Redworth's quick stare. 'Malkin!' And now we'll see whether the interior of him is grey, or black, or tabby, or tortoise-shell, or any other colour of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... groaning, dismal old house. I shall feel like a younger man when we get into my splendid brick mansion, as, please Heaven, we shall by this time next autumn. You shall have a room on the sunny side, old Tabby, finished and furnished as best may ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Bold Strafford, Cambridge, Capel, Lucas, Lisle, Who crown'd in death his father's fun'ral pile. The loss of whom, in order to supply With true-born English nobility, Six bastard dukes survive his luscious reign, The labours of Italian Castlemain, French Portsmouth, Tabby Scott, and Cambrian; Besides the num'rous bright and virgin throng, Whose female glories shade them from my song. This offspring if our age they multiply, May half the house with English peers supply: There with true English pride they may contemn ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... straw, and if there is no railed-in run attached he must needs be chained up. The dog that is kept on the chain becomes dirty in his habits, unhappy, and savage. His chain is often too short and is not provided with swivels to avert kinks. On a sudden alarm, or on the appearance of a trespassing tabby, he will often bound forward at the risk of dislocating his neck. The yard-dog's chain ought always to be fitted with a stop link spring to counteract the effect of the sudden jerk. The method may be employed with advantage in the garden for several dogs, a separate rope being ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... a tender strain that melted in our ears, Thet brought up blessed memories and drenched 'em down 'ith tears; An' we dreamed uv ol' time kitchens, 'ith Tabby on the mat, Uv home an' luv an' baby days, an' Mother, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... peevish old Tabby, and of course I scratch now and then, and see in the dark. I dare say Silas is sorry, but I don't think he is in sackcloth and ashes. He has reason to be sorry and anxious, and I say I think he is both; and you know he pities you very much, and also ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... some anecdotes of the sagacity shown by animals with which you are all well acquainted—Cats and Dogs; and if you have been accustomed to watch the proceedings of your dumb companions you will be able to say, "Why, that is just like what Tabby once did;" or, "Our Ponto acted nearly as cleverly as ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... dimity and other cloths and silks and brocades of Damietta, Alexandria, Tinnis, and Cairo, cotton from Ba'lbekk, silk from Baghd[a]d, atlas satin from Ma'din in Armenia; and she introduced to Europe not only the products of the East, but their very names. Sarcenet is Saracen stuff; tabby is named after a street in Baghd[a]d where watered silk was made; Baldacchini are simply "Baldac," i.e., Baghd[a]d, canopies; samite is Sh[a]m[i], "Syrian," fabric; the very coat of the Egyptian, the jubba, is preserved in giuppa, jupe.[19] With the loss of her Oriental commerce, which ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... everybody wore and said. I was told that Lady Caroline Lamb was there, enveloped in the folds of an ermine cloak, which she called a 'cat-skin,' and that she talked a great deal about a periodical she wished to get up, to be called 'Tabby's Magazine'; and with her was an exceedingly haughty, brilliant, and beautiful girl, Rosina Wheeler,—since well known as Lady Bulwer Lytton,—and who sat rather impatiently at the feet of her eccentric 'Gamaliel.' ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... vase's side, Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow, Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima, reclined, Gazed on the ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... must be nice folks," said Fido to himself, "for their feather-beds look big and comfortable, and their baskets are all ample and generous,—and see, there goes a bright gilt cage, and there is a plump yellow canary bird in it! Oh, how glad Mrs. Tabby will be to see it,—she so dotes on ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... flushed, but being aware that a pert answer turneth away pleasant invitations, said nothing. She nodded and went off to her game, and informing Mr. Petherbridge that Lady Bruce was a platitudinous old tabby, flirted with him up to the nice limits of his parsonical dignity. But Marmaduke did ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the solid pieces of real estate that his frugality had enabled him to accumulate. The passing of the flood left him low and dry. One month after his dishabilitation a saloon-keeper plucked him by the neck from his free-lunch counter as a tabby plucks a strange kitten from her nest, and cast him asphaltward. This seems low enough. But after that he acquired a pair of cloth top, button Congress gaiters and wrote complaining letters to the newspapers. And then he fought the attendant at the Municipal Lodging House who tried to give ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... inoffensive giant. He adored the house-cat, and used to help her, in a ponderous way, with the care of her numerous family. Many a time have I seen him placidly extended before a fire, while puss used his shaggy body as a sleeping box, and once he was observed to help that anxious tabby-mother with the toilet of her kittens by licking them carefully all over. At every lick of Rufus's huge prehensile tongue a kitten was lifted bodily into the air, only, however, to descend washed and unharmed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... boys into all sorts of scrapes and trouble. One day they would hide poor Jenny's spectacles, and then when search was made the lost treasure would be found in some one else's desk. Or they would tie cotton reels on the four feet and tail of the old tabby cat, and launch her, with a horrid clatter, right into the middle of the room, just as I or one of the others happened to be scampering out. Or they would turn the little boys' forms upside down, and compel them with terrible threats to sit on the iron ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... three new frocks, and Margaret Shippen four, but mine is the prettiest, and by tight lacing (though no tighter than theirs) I make my waist an ell smaller than either. In addition, I have a nabob of gray tabby silk trimmed with the same fur, which has such a sweet and modish air that I could cry at having to remove it but for what it would conceal. I intend to ask Peggy if 't would be citified and a la mode to keep it on for a little while after entering the box by the plea that ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... "And so you shall, Tabby!" her husband graciously replied, as he removed the blotting-paper, and showed the two parchments lying side by side. "This is the one he read but didn't sign: and this is the one he signed but didn't read! You see it was all covered up, except the ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... found some chestnuts, which he put on the hot coals of a fire to roast. He was puzzled, however, as to how he should get them again without burning himself. Seeing a nice tabby cat in a corner, he thus accosted her: "Please come and sit with me awhile, for I am lonely." Puss took a seat at the monkey's side, without thinking of harm, when he jumped on her back. Seizing both her paws, he made her pull the nuts from the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... us to hear it," replied he. "What is it? and whom threatens it? The red cow or the tabby cat? Poor puss!" and he stooped down and stroked her as she lay on ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... is to think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote," a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with "Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... I'm a pretty little kitten, My name is Tabby Gray, I live out in the country, Some twenty miles away. My eyes are black and hazel, My skin is soft as silk; I'm fed each night and morning With a saucer ...
— The Nursery, May 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... of the wood. Upon our first entering Sir Roger winked to me, and pointed at something that stood behind the door, which, upon looking that way, I found to be an old broomstaff. At the same time he whispered me in the ear to take notice of a tabby cat that sat in the chimney-corner, which, as the old Knight told me, lay under as bad a report as Moll White herself; for, besides that Moll is said often to accompany her in the same shape, the cat is reported to have spoken twice or thrice in her life, ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... devised by Humane wit. To this end, he hath made a very curious Survey of all kinds of bodies, beginning with the Point of a Needle, and proceeding to the Microscopical view of the Edges of Rasors, Fine Lawn, Tabby, Watered Silks, Glass-canes, Glass-drops, Fiery Sparks, Fantastical Colours, Metalline Colours, the Figures of Sand, Gravel in Urine, Diamonds in Flints, Frozen Figures, the Kettering Stone, Charcoal, Wood and ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... the Parthenon, winking at the light, and testifying great disapproval of Arthur, though when her master took her on his finger, she drew herself up and elevated her pretty little feathery horns with satisfaction, and did not even object to his holding her to a great tabby cat belonging to the landlady, but which was most at home on the hearth-rug of the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Linnen Linings, suitable for Beaver, Beaverett, Castor and Felt Hatts, Tabby ditto, Mohair Lupings, Silk Braid ditto, flatt and round Silk Lace and Frogs for Button Lupes, plain and sash Bands, workt & plain Buttons, black Thread, Gold and Silver Chain, yellow and white Buttons, hard and light Brushes, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... mastodon—compared to which old Jumbo was but a baby. And imbedded in the asphalt of Southern California is found the remains of the sabre toothed, tiger, by the side of which the royal Bengal is but a tabby cat. But I am getting into deep water, and will leave this question for the naturalist, the geologist and the theorist. And the passing of the "noble red man" to the gentleman in silk gown and slippers—and to the ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... Griffin nodded. "Tabby March, you know. The young woman who paints pussies. Used to go here three years ago, before she'd arrived. She was a wild one, ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... to have been no lack of fashionable clothing. The old diaries and account books tell the tale. Thus, Washington has left us an account of articles ordered from London for his wife. Among these were "a salmon-colored tabby velvet of the enclosed pattern, with satin flowers, to be made in a sack and coat, ruffles to be made of Brussels lace or Point, proper to be worn with the above negligee, to cost L20; 2 pairs of white silk hose; 1 pair of white satin shoes of the smallest fives; 1 ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... looked out on the stable-yard; but in the evening, when the fire burned clear and the blinds were drawn, it was a pleasant place. Deborah and Martha used to sit in the brown Windsor chairs knitting, with Puff, the great tabby cat, beside them, and the firelight would play on the red brick floor ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... up the act music. The curtains parted, and revealed the brightly polished miniature gymnasium I had seen at Anastasius's cattery; the row of pussies at the back, each on a velvet stand, some white, some tabby, some long-furred, some short-furred, all sitting with their forepaws doubled demurely under their chests, wagging their tails comically, and blinking with feline indifference at the footlights; a cage in a corner ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... horn, and shot, And proudly forth they went On sport intent. "Oh, Tom! if we should shoot a hare," Cried one, The elder son, "How father, sure, would stare!" Look there! what's that?" "Why, as I live, a cat," Cried Bill, "'tis mother Tibbs' tabby; Oh! what a lark She loves it like a babby! And ain't a cat's eye, Tom, as good a mark As any bull's eyes?" And straight "Puss! puss!" he cries, When, lo! as Puss approaches, They hear a squall, And see a ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... misfortune! direful calamity! Why? Read, and you will be as wise as myself. In the middle watch of this night, our two cats—have I told you that we brought two cats from England with us?—as was their wont, were skylarking and cutting capers on the hammock nettings and davits, when tabby the lesser, instead of jumping on something palpable, made a leap on space with the natural result, for he lighted on water and was rapidly whirled astern by the inky waters of the Tartar gulf. Poor pussy, little did we dream, or you either, that Siberian waters were ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Poll— A monkey too, what work he made! The sister introduced a Beau— My Susan brought a favorite maid. She had a tabby of her own, A snappish mongrel christen'd Gog— What d'ye think of that, my Cat? What d'ye think ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... nicest kitten. Jane was half-Persian, white with untidy tabby patterns on her. Jerry was black all over. Whatever attitude he took, his tight, short fur kept the outlines of his figure firm and clear, whether he arched his back and jumped sideways, or rolled himself into a cushion, or squatted with haunches spread and paws doubled in ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... if the weather was determined on some kind of storm, but had not yet made up its mind for snow, rain, or hail. Now the wind roared in the chimney, and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her. Tabby opened her yellow eyes suddenly, and erected her smellers, but finding it was only the wind and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and yawned, and then cuddled her head down so as to show her white throat, and ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... three or four, Like an Indian Conjuror; 30 Quick as he in feats of art, Far beyond in joy of heart. Were her antics play'd in the eye Of a thousand Standers-by, Clapping hands with shout and stare, What would little Tabby care For the plaudits of the Crowd? Over happy to be proud, Over wealthy in the treasure Of her own exceeding ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... If I did, Mrs. Goodwin might box my ears for the impertinence; she has boxed them before. I grew up around here, remember. The first acquaintance I made with this house was when I shied an apple at the family tabby as it sat sunning itself on the well-curb, and bowled it in. Naturally, I hadn't meant to hit it; the beast stepped forward just as I fired. I nearly fell in, myself, trying to get it out, but the well was deep and I couldn't raise a meow or a whisker. It was a fine November ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... beard the lion in his den, to liberate Pharaoh's slaves right under his very nose, and to lead them across that great and terrible wilderness. A WILD-CAT AFFAIR, if ever there was one! When were God's schemes otherwise? Look at Jordan, Jericho, Gideon, Goliath, and scores of others. Tame tabby-cat schemes are stamped with another hall mark—that of the Chocolate Brigade! How dearly they love their tabbies yet think themselves wise men! REAL CHRISTIANS REVEL IN DESPERATE VENTURES FOR CHRIST, expecting from God great things and attempting the same with exhilaration. History ...
— The Chocolate Soldier - Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity • C. T. Studd
... self-possession. The estate, the household, the parish, the county: there was no mistaking his interest in these matters. He was interested in the smallest particulars: her broods of young chicks, her pigeons, the tabby cat's kittens, the Rector's baby. He asked searching questions. How many cows were in milk just now; when would Menzies have asparagus fit to eat? The servants—was all well there? Their young men? Nothing escaped him. She was quite ready for him, took ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... length—lent herself to the cheapest kind of jugglery, playing with horrible adroitness upon the emotions of a lot of bereaved men and women. It was revolting, Kate. It shakes one's faith in humanity to see such a girl in such a position—and that nice-appearing old mother sat there serene as a tabby-cat while her daughter bamboozled a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... and encouragements of the General, the works at St. Simons were carried on with such expedition, that, by the middle of April, the fort, which was a regular work of tabby, a composition of oyster shells and lime, was finished; and thirty-seven palmetto houses were put up, in which all the people might be sheltered till they could ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... brown velvet, laced with gold, and a large wig. The parson in his silk cassock, and his helpmate in brown damask. Old General Atkinson in scarlet velvet, and his wife and daughters in white damask. The Governor in black velvet, and his lady in crimson tabby trimmed with silver. The ladies wore bell-hoops, high-heeled shoes, paste buckles, silk stockings, and enormously high head-dresses, with lappets of Brussels lace hanging thence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Tabby how immensely pleased everyone is with her slippers. The men who have stood long in the trenches are in agonies of frost-bite and rheumatism, and now that I can give them these slippers when they arrive at the station, they are able to take off their ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... the centre table, the hearth had just been swept up, there was a smell of hot bread, and a row of freshly-baked loaves were cooling on the dresser; the firelight shone on the gleaming pewter and brass utensils, and a great tabby cat sat purring on the elbow of Nathaniel's chair. I thought he seemed a little confused at my entrance, for he got up rather awkwardly and shuffled his papers together, so I took pity on his embarrassment, and only spoke to ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... trooped the men, and I noticed that two of them walked slowly and cautiously. The boat safely out of harbour, one of them produced from his chest a large tabby cat, whilst the other placed a fine cock on the deck. It was a cock with the true Gallic spirit, before the cat had time to consider the situation it had sprung on its back. The cat beat a hasty retreat into ...
— The White Road to Verdun • Kathleen Burke
... "An' who'd I hev to write to me, with you goin' 'long? It'll seem terrible nice to hear from somebody. I always did love letters. Sence Cousin Tabby ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... up to see, went off to Brighton the night after I arrived, and has not re- appeared: but I must wait some time longer for him. Thank Miss Barton much for the kit; if it is but a kit: my old woman is a great lover of cats, and hers has just kitted, and a wretched little blind puling tabby lizard of a thing was to be saved from the pail for me: but if Miss Barton's is a kit, I will gladly have it: and my old lady's shall be disposed of—not to the pail. Oh rus, quando te aspiciam? Construe that, Mr. Barton.—I am going to send down my pictures to Boulge, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... did it seem thy tabby grace, The woes of London streets to face, Cold glances, or a kick for thy fur, And none to list to ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of some big puma cub warming itself at a hearth like a common tabby cat, a tame puma thrusting out its claws and turning its yellow eyes up to its owner—tame, but with infinite possibilities of danger. For the information which Nash had given seemed to remove all his distrust of the moment before and he became instantly genial, ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... of cats, although I admit they are well enough in their place, and I can worry along comfortably with a nice, matronly old tabby who can take care of herself and be of some use in the world. As for Ismay, she hates cats ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... little rabbit strayed from home away; Far from woodland haunts she wandered, little rabbit gray. Our old Tabby cat, whilst sitting at the kitchen door, Thought she saw her long-lost kitten home ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ears, it would have brought the tears to his eyes. He thought of everything connected with his hallowed home: of the good-natured spinster who was his housekeeper, and of the ten-acre lots upon his farm; of the red steers and the gray mare; of the shaggy watch-dog and the tabby-cat; of home in all its minutiae. Its familiar scenes visited him with a vividness which added ten-fold to their influence. He was as far abstracted as the mosquitos, which gathered in swarms upon every tenable spot of his flesh, would permit, when his meditations were disturbed by the gentleman ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... ladies rode in on pillions, and the planters themselves, in gold-embroidered waistcoats and plush breeches and new-powdered wigs, leaned on the tombstones, and exchanged snuffmulls and gossip. In the old ramshackle graveyard you would see such a parade of satin bodices and tabby petticoats and lace headgear as made it blossom like the rose. I went to church one Sunday in my second summer, and, being late, went up the aisle looking for a place. The men at the seat-ends would ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... cats," I went on. "How is this, Sally, dear?— 'A handsome orange male Persian cat, also a tabby, immense coat, brushes and frills, is offered in exchange for an electro-plated revolving covered dish or an Allen's ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... dead, it is usually the latter that is the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the survivor; Oh no! I would rather seem to mistake, and to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you will excuse me if I do not begin ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... home from China I was the desirable Mr. Potiphar, and every evening was a field-day for me, in which I reviewed all the matrimonial forces. It is astonishing, now I come to think of it, how skilfully Brigadier-General Mrs. Pettitoes deployed those daughters of hers; how vigorously Mrs. Tabby led on her forlorn hope; and how unweariedly, Murat-like, Mrs. De Famille charged at the head of her cavalry. They deserve to be made Marshals of France, all of them. And I am sure, that if ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... Amanda Welsh Sampson here," murmured Arthur in his wife's ear, as the Fentons made their way toward their hostess. "It would be too delicious to see how she'd stir things up, and how shocked the old tabby dowagers would be." ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... well." In the next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languages encouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic, "Tabby in Elysium." The erratic character of the punctuation may be said, with perfect impartiality, to be the only distinguishing feature of the style of the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... called tragiques histoires plebeiennes. But the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Abner singing, as she knelt in front of the basket where the mother cat lay with her four blind kittens. "You see, Tabby," she said, "people still sing. A lot of them learned to sing in the war, and now they're home, they may as well sing as cry. Oh, Tabby, I wanted to sing, too . . . ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... to hurry!" said Diana, emerging at last, hugging her parcel, and dragging Spot away from the pursuit of an impudent and provocative tabby cat, with a torn ear, that was spitting at ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... thy wanton play, Applauses too thy pains repay: For then, beneath some urchin's hand With modest pride thou takest thy stand, While many a stroke of kindness glides Along thy back and tabby sides. Dilated swells thy glossy fur, And loudly croons thy busy purr, As, timing well the equal sound, Thy clutching feet bepat the ground, And all their harmless claws disclose Like prickles of an early rose, While ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... managed by Wheels, and Engines, and Springs, that were devised by Humane wit. To this end, he hath made a very curious Survey of all kinds of bodies, beginning with the Point of a Needle, and proceeding to the Microscopical view of the Edges of Rasors, Fine Lawn, Tabby, Watered Silks, Glass-canes, Glass-drops, Fiery Sparks, Fantastical Colours, Metalline Colours, the Figures of Sand, Gravel in Urine, Diamonds in Flints, Frozen Figures, the Kettering Stone, Charcoal, Wood and other Bodies petrified, the Pores of Cork, and of other substances, Vegetables ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... testifying great disapproval of Arthur, though when her master took her on his finger, she drew herself up and elevated her pretty little feathery horns with satisfaction, and did not even object to his holding her to a great tabby cat belonging to the landlady, but which was most at home on the hearth-rug of the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thus. Supported by the two brindled tabby house cats, Geraldine and Mustapha—descendants of the numerous tribe honoured, during the last half-century of his long life, by Thomas Clarkson Verity's politely affectionate patronage—Damaris spent the greater part of the morning in the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... inhabitant appeared; it was the Burnells' cat Florrie, sitting on the gatepost, far too early as usual, looking for their milk-girl. When she saw the old sheep-dog she sprang up quickly, arched her back, drew in her tabby head, and seemed to give a little fastidious shiver. "Ugh! What a coarse, revolting creature!" said Florrie. But the old sheep-dog, not looking up, waggled past, flinging out his legs from side to side. Only one of his ears twitched to prove that ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... the morning, Sandoz, who seemed ubiquitous, kept on pouring fresh supplies of hot water into the teapot. From the neighbourhood, now asleep, one now only heard the miawing of an amorous tabby. They all talked at random, intoxicated by their own words, hoarse with shouting, their eyes scorched, and when at last they made up their minds to go, Sandoz took the lamp to show them a light over the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... chagrin, he guzzled at its contents, but found that the liquor still foamed near to the brim. He gave back the horn in disgust. Then Utgard-Loki proposed to him the childish exercise of lifting his cat. Thor put his hands under Tabby's belly, and, lifting with all his might, could only raise one foot from the floor. He was a very Gulliver in Brobdignag. As a last resort, he proposed to retrieve his tarnished reputation by wrestling with some Utgardian; whereupon the king turned into the ring his old ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... all deaths in the family above the degree of second cousin; to post letters, and refuse them when they have been insufficiently stamped; and last, and most intolerable, to show a tender solicitude when tabby is out of sorts." The dog, indeed, for the most part, has become as sentimental and conventional a figure in current fiction as the ghost who haunts the ouija board or the idealistic soldier returned from the wars to ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... good and fortune served him well, for the tabby flying caterwauling through the air alighted almost exactly in front of Deede Dawson on top of a small bush. For a moment it hung there, quite unhurt, but very frightened, and emitted a ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... should you think so, my lord?" answered Mowbray, whose losses had rendered him testy and contradictory upon every subject that was started. "Why should not I pay my respects to Lady Penelope, or any other tabby of quality? I have no title, indeed; but I suppose that ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... up like hay, Prime Ministers and such as they Grew like asparagus in May, And Dukes were three a penny: Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats, And Bishops in their shovel hats Were plentiful as tabby cats - If possible, too many. On every side Field-Marshals gleamed, Small beer were Lords-Lieutenants deemed, With Admirals the ocean teemed, All round his wide dominions; And Party Leaders you might meet ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... moral Almanack of years— The prim old maid, and, by her side, her Niece, Full of bewitching beauty, health, and love. See, how the tabby watches Laura's eyes, Lest they should smile upon some pleasing spark, And violate grim prudery's tyrant ties. With icy finger, she her charge directs, To view the faithful dial of the sun, Whose moral tells how tide and time pass on. See, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... Who loved to stroke her soft, confiding face, Who gave her food and shelter from her birth, Who joined in all her harmless youthful mirth; But, when they went for holidays to roam, Shut-to the door of what had been her home, And thoughtless left to die upon the mat, Their faithful but forgotten Tabby-cat." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... some kind of storm, but had not yet made up its mind for snow, rain, or hail. Now the wind roared in the chimney, and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her. Tabby opened her yellow eyes suddenly, and erected her smellers, but finding it was only the wind and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and yawned, and then cuddled her head down so as to show her white throat, and ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... actual life itself. Yet notwithstanding this "possession" (as it were), those who survive, of her daily and household companions, are clear in their testimony, that never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant. It had become necessary to give Tabby—now nearly eighty years of age—the assistance of a girl. Tabby relinquished any of her work with jealous reluctance, and could not bear to be reminded, though ever so delicately, that the acuteness of ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... is to serve for the whole winter! Peggy has three new frocks, and Margaret Shippen four, but mine is the prettiest, and by tight lacing (though no tighter than theirs) I make my waist an ell smaller than either. In addition, I have a nabob of gray tabby silk trimmed with the same fur, which has such a sweet and modish air that I could cry at having to remove it but for what it would conceal. I intend to ask Peggy if 't would be citified and a la mode to keep it on for a little while after entering the box by the plea that ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... Roger winked to me, and pointed at something that stood behind the door, which, upon looking that way, I found to be an old broomstaff. At the same time he whispered me in the ear to take notice of a tabby cat that sat in the chimney-corner, which, as the old Knight told me, lay under as bad a report as Moll White herself; for, besides that Moll is said often to accompany her in the same shape, the cat is reported to have spoken twice or thrice in her life, and to have played several pranks above ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... long enough to give him a good appetite, which made him draw near the table, where the very smell of such viands was agreeable and refreshing. The princess had a curious tabby-cat, for which she had a great kindness. This cat one of the maids of honor held in her arms, saying, "Madam, Bluet is hungry!" With that a chair was presently brought for the cat; for he was a cat of quality, ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... they lay on their backs on the grass and grumbled. It was clear that the world was against them, and what is the good of fighting in the face of such opposition? Bertram began the grumbling. 'Old Tabby,' he said,—that being the way in which he spoke of Miss Tabitha, his governess,—'is a beast. She makes me learn heaps of things which nobody can ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... the children were wont to climb up to inspect their kittens. Here Rose was for a moment startled by a glare close to her of what looked like two fiery lamps in the darkness, but the next instant a long, low, growling sound explained it, and the tabby stripes of the cat quickly darted across her lantern's range of light. She heard a slight rustling above, and ventured to call, in a ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was a dangerous man. He was thin and pale, with light blue eyes and sleek fair hair; and as weak physically as he was strong mentally. In his neat clerical garb, with a slight stoop and meek smile, he looked a harmless, commonplace young curate of the tabby cat kind. No one could be more tactful and ingratiating than Mr Cargrim, and he was greatly admired by the old ladies and young girls of Beorminster; but the men, one and all—even his clerical ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... domestic cats are tabbies' (but this probably is the ancestral colouring). We may then resort to statistics for greater definiteness, and find that in Hampshire (say) 90 per cent. of the domestic cats are tabby. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... speakin' mod'rate, he quits winner. He travels back to Sni-a-bar as tame as tabby cats in persooance with Enright's commands, an', once thar, old man Parks an' the rest of 'em whistles him through the marital chute a heap successful. When he shows up among us, his blushin' Peggy bride on his arm, he's wearin' all the brands an' y'ear marks of a thor'ughly ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... lofty vase's side Where China's gayest art had dy'd The azure flowers, that blow; Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima reclin'd Gazed on ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... help her, in a ponderous way, with the care of her numerous family. Many a time have I seen him placidly extended before a fire, while puss used his shaggy body as a sleeping box, and once he was observed to help that anxious tabby-mother with the toilet of her kittens by licking them carefully all over. At every lick of Rufus's huge prehensile tongue a kitten was lifted bodily into the air, only, however, to descend washed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... dance was over the ladies came to be presented to Lady Rebecca. They did not know what they ought to talk to the stranger about; but one of them in a dull mouse-colored tabby, with sad-colored ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... spectral figure which had grown up out of common report. The house negroes stood in mortal dread of Blue Dave, and their dismay was not without its effect upon Mrs. Kendrick and her daughter. Jenny, the house-girl, refused to sleep at the quarters; and when Aunt Tabby, the cook, started for her cabin after dark, she was accompanied by a number of little negroes bearing lightwood torches. All the stories and legends that clustered around Blue Dave's career were brought ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... to him when he was six years old—the old ones I mean—and I've never parted with them. 'Take them all,' he said—so good; but, oh dear. Tit! Tit! Tittie! He was playing with her just now. Has anyone seen a tabby cat? Bless me, there it goes! So dreadful! It takes one's breath away, and all my things. ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... them see I am not a deserted tabby-cat," she said to herself, "waiting around in the cold until some one opens a door for me." And then this proud little country girl enclosed both notes to her brother and told him he had best inform the Nasons of her intended visit in a matter-of-fact way. "But ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... think of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote," a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with "Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or ciffer" (New England ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... and Cape Guardafui, was made holy by the birth of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Dr. Brugsch-Bey shows that one of the titles of the he-god was Bass, the cat or the leopard (whence our "Puss"); whilst his wife, Bast (the bissat or tabby-cat of modern Arabic), gave her name to Bubastis (Pi-Bast, the city of Bast). From the Osiric term (Bass) the learned Egyptologist would derive Bacchus and his priests, the Bacchoi and the Bacchantes, whose dress was the leopard's skin. Could Osiris have belonged to the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... people's conversation, most especially when my mother and the friends of her youth got upon old stories; nor did I lose my taste for them when I grew old enough to converse with her on equal terms, and enquire into particulars.] Now I am [an] ancient [tabby] myself, I should be a great treasure of anecdote to anybody who had the same humor,—but I meet with few who have. They read vulgar tales in books, Wraxall, and so forth, what the footmen and maids ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... her much of the detail of ordering her own clothing, and we find him sending for "A Salmon-colored Tabby of the enclosed pattern, with satin flowers, to be made in a sack," "1 Cap, Handkerchief, Tucker and Ruffles, to be made of Brussels lace or point, proper to wear with the above negligee, to cost L20," "1 pair black, and 1 pair white Satin Shoes, of the smallest," ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... "You see, old tabby, I mean Dr. Byram, told me about you before I met you," explained Clifford, "and Elliott and I will be glad to do anything we can." Then looking at his watch again, he muttered, "I have just ten minutes to catch the Versailles ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... little Lucie came into the farm-yard crying— oh, she did cry so! "I've lost my pocket-handkin! Three handkins and a pinny! Have you seen them, Tabby Kitten?" ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle • Beatrix Potter
... ten minutes of eager questioning on the part of Alma had gone by before Mrs. Kelsey realized that thus far their conversation had been of nothing more important than Nathan's rheumatism, her own health, and the welfare of Rover, Tabby, and the mare Topsy. Commensurate with the happiness that had been hers during those ten minutes came now her remorse. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... Nuggets" and took some geological and biological photographs, which on being developed turned out well. They had occasion to enter one of the unoccupied huts down there and found a wild cat a little more than half grown, which they caught and carried home with them. He was of the usual tabby colour and by no means fierce, quickly yielding to the coaxing treatment of his captors. He made himself quite at home in the Shack, and we looked forward to a display of his ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... he at dinner sat, Did beckon to his hussar, And bid him bring his tabby cat For charming Nell to ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... was to slip out of bed at once and investigate. I didn't. I knew a trick worth two of that. I sat up and listened. It might be a wandering tabby that had blundered into a piece of furniture; perhaps the window had creaked; it might be any one of half a hundred things. If there was an intruder in the house I felt certain that presently I would hear something more. No man, ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... from unseen sources. Under other circumstances any one of the five might face a peril greater than that which now confronts him. Conceivably he might flop into a swollen river to save a drowning puppy; might dive into a burning building after some stranger's pet tabby cat. But this prospect which lies before him of ambling across a field with death singing about his ears, is a thing which tears with clawing fingers at the tuggs and toggles of his imagination until his flesh ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... his knees.] I must beg your ladyship e'en to have the honour to trust you but for your gown, for the sake of that last jest, flowered sattin, wrought tabby, silver upon any grounds; I shall run mad if I may not trust ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... of contemplation on the most dissipated tabby of the streets, and you shall discern the celestial quality of life set like an aureole about his tattered ears, and hear in his strident mew an ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... which the sparrows were busy washing, sending up tiny iridescent jets and fountains from their swiftly fluttering wings. It was delicious to Dominic. He felt very safe, very gay. Only a heavy ill- favoured tabby cat came from nowhere. It had designs upon the sparrows. Twice it climbed stealthily up the broken bricks and gas clinkers. Twice the little boy drove it away. It was not a nice cat. It had a broad white face, deceitful little eyes, and grey whiskers. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... deal of it on myself," Mrs. Tugwell began to moan, as soon as he was gone; "for I have cockered Dan up, and there's no denying it, afore Tim, or Tryphena, or Tabby, or Debby, or even little Solomon. Because he were the first, and so like his dear father, afore he got on in the world so. Oh, it all comes of that, all the troubles comes of that, and of laying up of money, apart from your wife, and forgetting almost of her Christian ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... shimmering in cream satin was the animated heart of another group. His love for scandal and his facility for acquiring the latest tidbit made him the delight of many an old tabby cat. Now his eyes shone with the joy of imparting ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... the example of the cat, which (seeing its master come home from the hunt with a string of birds, and displaying, with much pride and satisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that it would also be a fine thing for her to go forth and kill the canary. But to tabby's surprise, her ability was rewarded with chastisement; whereupon she pondered the question over and over: "How can it be, that what is virtue in man is ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... soon seated in a large cushioned chair, a fat tabby cat on her lap, and while Sir Edward was occupied with his keeper she was making fast ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre
... Jud. I've seen our tabby cat do that when crouching to spring on a sparrow. The beast is ready to jump as soon as we come within range. Are you covering ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... tabby velvet, laced with silver, and a huge feathered hat, Nancy set out from Stair about eight in the morning with Dame Dickenson in the Stair coach, driven by Patsy MacColl. By a change of horse at Balregal, she ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... another lump. Miss Leigh, may I ask you to reach me a very pretty book of coloured animals I saw behind you? Now, Emma, there is a tabby cat, just ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... they are well off. It is a complaint which afflicts cats, you may have noticed, and gets them into much trouble that their contemptuous temper might otherwise leave them free from. The silver tabby would have done better if she had remained asleep upon Miss Somebody's arm-chair, instead of squatting, still as marble, out in a damp field on a damp night, watching a rabbits' "stop"—which is vernacular for a bunnies' ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... enough to write by return of post and tell me how you are getting on and how you are. Give my kind regards to Tabby and Martha, and—Believe me, dear papa, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Has it in her power again: Now she works with three or four, Like an Indian conjurer; 30 Quick as he in feats of art, Far beyond in joy of heart. Were her antics played in the eye Of a thousand standers-by, Clapping hands with shout and stare, 35 What would little Tabby care For the plaudits of the crowd? Over happy to be proud, Over wealthy in the treasure Of her own exceeding ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... What was there in the mere mention of a laboratory that could so transform a humdrum little rector into a thing of fire? That it was the laboratory, Olive never stopped to question. She was far too sane, too used to the tame-tabby-cat propensities of youthful rectors, to imagine for a moment that the enthusiasm had come out of the chance to escape from her society. Therefore she decided that, for the present, she would keep this particular rector to herself, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... violent tongue, too, as the several men who accosted us on our dark way discovered at their first approach to familiarity; and on one occasion, when a drunken sailor leered up to my side, Mrs. Bridget spat at him like an angry tabby-cat. Somehow, I no longer felt afraid under her protection ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence' sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and delicacy of ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... souls of the departed who are supposed to be hovering unseen on the day "when autumn to winter resigns the pale year." Witches then speed on their errands of mischief, some sweeping through the air on besoms, others galloping along the roads on tabby-cats, which for that evening are turned into coal-black steeds.[575] The fairies, too, are all let loose, and hobgoblins of every sort roam freely about In South Uist and Eriskay there is ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Mrs. Goodwin might box my ears for the impertinence; she has boxed them before. I grew up around here, remember. The first acquaintance I made with this house was when I shied an apple at the family tabby as it sat sunning itself on the well-curb, and bowled it in. Naturally, I hadn't meant to hit it; the beast stepped forward just as I fired. I nearly fell in, myself, trying to get it out, but the ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... you are cherished here chiefly because it was Lily's wish. Peggy can easily find another kitten; and you know she has often said that white cats were not to her taste, and she should much prefer a tabby." ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... be alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the survivor; Oh no! I would rather seem to mistake, and to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you will excuse me if I do ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... "suppose this Mrs. Billings wasn't happy at home? We'll say she and her husband didn't gee worth a cent. They've got incompatibility to burn. The things she likes, Billings wouldn't have as a gift with trading-stamps. It's Tabby and Rover with them all the time. She's an educated woman in science and culture, and she reads things out loud at meetings. Billings is not on. He don't appreciate progress and obelisks and ethics, and things of that sort. Old Billings is simply a blink when ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... his "Tale of a Tub," has a ludicrous passage in this style: "Look on this globe of earth, you will find it to be a very complete and fashionable dress. What is that which some call land, but a fine coat faced with green? or the sea, but a waistcoat of water-tabby? Proceed to the particular works of creation, you will find how curious journeyman Nature has been to trim up the vegetable beaux; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the birch." The fault is not in ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... gently, as he rose and went to carry the milk-pails into the pantry, calling coaxingly, as he did so, "Kitty! kitty! You had your milk? Don't you joggle, now!" For one eager tabby rose on her hind legs, in purring haste, and hit her nose against ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... jugglery, playing with horrible adroitness upon the emotions of a lot of bereaved men and women. It was revolting, Kate. It shakes one's faith in humanity to see such a girl in such a position—and that nice-appearing old mother sat there serene as a tabby-cat while her daughter bamboozled a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... knife, well hacked along the edge, cleans the fish, or cuts the necks of hens, ducks, or geese which struggle and gurgle in their own blood; when pretty Fridoline, with her rosy little mouth and her long fair hair, leans out of her window to tend the honeysuckle, and over her head the neighbour's tabby cat is gently swaying her tail and watching, with her cunning green eyes, the swallow circling in the deepening purple—I do assure you that a man must be utterly devoid of taste for the picturesque not to stop and contemplate ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... here one at school; 'see, if y' all can guess it: 'Tabby had four kittens but Stillshee didn't ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... still sitting on a chair watching the tortoise-shell cat outside the window, and on the hearth-rug lay a tabby one, with its head on ...
— The Little Clown • Thomas Cobb
... eyes, at the cat, as if he thought that she might tell him; then lifted his mug, on which was elegantly painted, with about twenty-seven flourishes, the words, "For Willie," to his lips, and took a long drink of milk, staring over the top of it at the cat the whole time, but the blinking old tabby only dozed away with one eye opened, and slapped her tail on the carpet as if to say, "you'll find no spell in me," so Willie put his mug down, and drawing a long breath, ...
— Baby Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... angrily: "Do you suppose I can live my woman's life on the real and practical? What kind of woman do you take me for? An Amelia, a Patient Griselda, a tabby cat?" ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Miss Milray triumphed. "I always knew that she was a dreadful old tabby. I wish you were safely out of her clutches. Come and live with me, my dear, when Mrs. Lander gets tired of you. But she'll never get tired of you. You're just the kind of helpless mouse that such ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... or your visitors, Mrs. Sharpe, if that be your name," said the irascible patient. "You're all a set of old tabby cats together, and if you don't clear out, I'll fling ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... were both clothed in white tabby, his suit laced with a very broad gold and silver lace. The bride had on her head a coronet set full of diamonds, with a diamond collar about her neck and shoulders, a diamond girdle of the same fashion, and a rich diamond ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... papa. Good Rollo!" as the dignified animal rose from the hearthrug to greet her, waving his handsome tail, and calmly expelled a large tabby cat from the easy- chair, to make room for his friends. "Well done, old Roll! Fancy a cat ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the woman hastily cleared the table and set out a teacup and saucer, a huge loaf, butter, and a pot of tea. The dog had made friends, and crept up to Honor, snuggling his nose into her hand; and a tabby cat, interested in the preparations, came purring eagerly to join the feast. Honor did not know whether to call it late breakfast, dinner, or tea, but she told Janie afterwards she thought she must have eaten ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... the dress in which I shall dance with you at the party at Green Spring which the governor is to give in your honor—if you ask me, sir. Oh, I take it for granted that you will, so spare us your protestations. 'Tis to have a petticoat of blue tabby and an overdress of white satin trimmed with yards and yards of Venice point. The stockings are blue silk, and come from the French house in Covent Garden, as doth the scarf of striped gauze and the shoes, gallooned ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... and all were glad to see again the sojourner in foreign lands, even down to the ladylike tabby, who was all purr and warmth towards him except when she was all claws and nippers. But had the prime sentiment of the meeting shown itself it would have been the unqualified surprise of Christopher at seeing how much Picotee's face had grown to resemble her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... of the throne is a large, young, grey Tabby—Oliver by name. Not that he is in any sense a protector, for I doubt whether he has the heart to kill a mouse. However, I saw him catch and eat the first butterfly of the season, and trust that this germ of courage, thus ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... you'd have thought, as I graivly laid the volloms down before him, and as he berried his head in his nicely brushed hat, before service began, that such a pious, proper morl, young nobleman was not to be found in the whole of the peeridge. It was a comfort to look at him. Efry old tabby and dowyger at my Lord Bobtail's turned up the wights of their i's when they spoke of him, and vowed they had never seen such a dear, daliteful, exlent young man. What a good son he must be, they said; ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... disappeared so rapidly that the Dey wished to buy the cat, but the captain would not sell until a very high price was offered. With the purchase-money was sent a present of valuable pearls for the owner of Tabby. When the ship returned the sailors were greatly astonished to find that the boy owned most of the cargo, for it was part of the bargain that he was to bring back the value of his cat in goods. The London merchant ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... called. Where were you?" "Under the tree, by the meadow-brook Reading, and oh, it was too lovely; I never saw such a charming book." The charming book must have pleased her, truly, There's a happy light in her bright young eyes And she hugs the cat with unusual fervor, To staid old Tabby's ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... watched her with the same uncritical delight that he might have bestowed on any wood creature had it suddenly appeared darting along the pavement. She reached the corner just in time to bump into the flower-seller, who was turning about like some old tabby to settle himself and ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... moonlight the sharper bark of the coyote swells a chorus from the cliffs, and the rich note of the night-storm is accentuated by the long screech of the puma prowling on the heights. In daylight his brother, the wild-cat, reminds one of Tabby at home by the fireside. There is the lynx, too, among the rocks; and on the higher planes the deer, elk, and bear have their homes. In Green River Valley once roamed thousands of bison. The more arid districts have the fewest large animals, and conversely the more ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... bow, and advanced to Mrs Lambert's chair, unhappily treading as he did so on the paw of a tabby cat, who resisted the indignity by a very prolonged yell and an angry ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... a charming little savage severely repent the delight she took in seeing her tabby favourite make cruel sport with a pretty sleek bead- eyed mouse, before she devoured it. Egad, my love, said I to myself, as I sat meditating the scene, I am determined to lie in wait for a fit opportunity ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... victory again, till that thin old half-crown was coaxed well into sight and forced flat against the knife-blade. The boy then began to manipulate the knife with extreme caution as he kept on making a soft purring noise, ah-h-h-h-ha! full of triumphant satisfaction, while a big curled-up tabby tom-cat, which had taken possession of the fellow chair to that occupied by Aleck, twitched one ear, opened one eye, and then seeing that the purring sound was only a feeble imitation, went off to ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... are expressions of the interplay of all the internal secretions. It used to be said by smart cats and accepted by the tabby cats, that a woman was a woman because of her ovaries alone. It is being said by some great discoverers of the day that man is a man because of his testes alone. Neither of these dogmas is true. There are individuals with ovaries who show every deviation from the feminine and there ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... for Tania's entertainment while he talked to Madge. Tania was watching him, breathless with admiration and terror. The captain would take hold of one of the great, crawling things, rub it softly on its horned head as one would rub a tabby cat to make it purr. He would then set the lobster up on its hind claws and the funny crustacean would fall quietly asleep, as though it were nodding in ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... of paper on which young Munsey had been making some calculations, and flung it into the fire. Augustina sat cowering. The young man himself turned white, bowed, and said nothing. While Father Bowles, of course, like the old tabby that he was, had at once begun ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... observed it?) I am altered of late!—I, that was ever light of heart, the very soul of gayety, brimfull of glee, am now demure as our old tabby—and not half as wise. Tabby had wit enough to keep her paws out of the coals, whereas poor I have—but no matter what. It will never come to pass, I see that. So many reasons for every thing! Such looking forward! Arthur, are not men sometimes too ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... rid of her. The three parted, therefore, not in the best humor all round. Mrs. Hopkins declared she'd see the minister in Jericho before she'd fix herself up as if she was goin' to a weddin' to go and see him again. Why, he did n't make any more of her than if she'd been a tabby-cat. She believed some of these ministers thought women's souls dried up like peas in a pod by the time they was forty year old; anyhow, they did n't seem to care any great about 'em, except while they was green and tender. It was all Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-usan, my dear! ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of time to do it at the studio. I was so particular to have everything done up to the last notch that there isn't a single letter to write, or button to sew on, or—or—anything. I simply can't sit down like a tame tabby this first exciting afternoon, when all sorts of wonderful things may be going to ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... estate that his frugality had enabled him to accumulate. The passing of the flood left him low and dry. One month after his dishabilitation a saloon-keeper plucked him by the neck from his free-lunch counter as a tabby plucks a strange kitten from her nest, and cast him asphaltward. This seems low enough. But after that he acquired a pair of cloth top, button Congress gaiters and wrote complaining letters to the newspapers. And then he fought the attendant ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... encouragements of the General, the works at St. Simons were carried on with such expedition, that, by the middle of April, the fort, which was a regular work of tabby, a composition of oyster shells and lime, was finished; and thirty-seven palmetto houses were put up, in which all the people might be sheltered till they could ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... care for me, and the chapel close to hand. But I miss our own little place, sure, sometimes, Danny dear! I miss the pot of flowers on the window (it's against the rule to grow flowers here), and me own little blue teapot on the stove, and Tabby curled up on the mat before ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... completely spoil us. Look at the wild cat and then look at the tabby cat. The wild cat supports itself and the tabby cat has its million. So the tabby cat has to be doctored ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... seems, not totally and invariably the same, though I doubt not but it is so in their native deserts. Let it once become a fashion for sovereigns and other great men to keep and to caress them, we shall see camels as variegated as cats, which in the woods are all of the uniformly-streaked tabby—the males inclining to the brown shade—the females to blue among them;—but being bred down, become tortoise-shell, and red, and every variety of colour, which ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... see, went off to Brighton the night after I arrived, and has not re- appeared: but I must wait some time longer for him. Thank Miss Barton much for the kit; if it is but a kit: my old woman is a great lover of cats, and hers has just kitted, and a wretched little blind puling tabby lizard of a thing was to be saved from the pail for me: but if Miss Barton's is a kit, I will gladly have it: and my old lady's shall be disposed of—not to the pail. Oh rus, quando te aspiciam? Construe that, Mr. Barton.—I am going to send ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... great disapproval of Arthur, though when her master took her on his finger, she drew herself up and elevated her pretty little feathery horns with satisfaction, and did not even object to his holding her to a great tabby cat belonging to the landlady, but which was most at home on the hearth-rug ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... going to marry any woman inferior to the type I have created with my pencil—what the public calls the 'Carden Girl.' And now you see that your discovery of this living type comes rather late. In two days I must be legally married if I want my Aunt Tabby's legacy; and to-day for the first time I hear of a girl who, you assure me, compares favorably to my copyrighted type, but who has a mission and an aversion to men. So you see, Mr. Keen, that the matter ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... tired to death of living in this cold, dark, windy, smoky, creaking, groaning, dismal old house. I shall feel like a younger man when we get into my splendid brick mansion, as, please Heaven, we shall by this time next autumn. You shall have a room on the sunny side, old Tabby, finished and furnished as best may suit ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... telling when a man's sins may show themselves, for hares pop out of the ditch just when you are not looking for them. A horse that is weak in the legs may not stumble for a mile or two, but it is in him, and the driver had better hold him up well. The tabby cat is not lapping milk just now, but leave the dairy door open, and see if she is not as bad a thief as the kitten. There's fire in the flint, cool as it looks: wait till the steel gets a knock at it, and you will ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... all the day I give and take delight, Doubt not, sufficient will be left at night. 'Tis but a just and rational desire To light a taper at a neighbour's fire. There's danger too, you think, in rich array, 140 And none can long be modest that are gay. The cat, if you but singe her tabby skin, The chimney keeps, and sits content within: But once grown sleek, will from her corner run, Sport with her tail, and wanton in the sun: She licks her fair round face, and frisks abroad To show her fur, and to ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... wife lectures a gay husband, who never returns to his better half when he finds any thing to amuse him abroad. Good-by, old fellow; I have found better company than your rememberings or hopings; to wit, Miss Flora Cooper, alias Little Handsome, alias Aunt Tabby's Canary. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... notice the general untidiness of her surroundings, while the woman hastily cleared the table and set out a teacup and saucer, a huge loaf, butter, and a pot of tea. The dog had made friends, and crept up to Honor, snuggling his nose into her hand; and a tabby cat, interested in the preparations, came purring eagerly to join the feast. Honor did not know whether to call it late breakfast, dinner, or tea, but she told Janie afterwards she thought she must have eaten enough to combine ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... leaving his white surtout and cocked hat in the hall, and entered the chamber where pale little Mrs. Sturk, who had been crying a great deal, sat in a dingy old tabby saque, by the light of a solitary mould-candle at the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... looks like, speakin' mod'rate, he quits winner. He travels back to Sni-a-bar as tame as tabby cats in persooance with Enright's commands, an', once thar, old man Parks an' the rest of 'em whistles him through the marital chute a heap successful. When he shows up among us, his blushin' Peggy bride on his arm, he's wearin' all the brands ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the house-cat, and used to help her, in a ponderous way, with the care of her numerous family. Many a time have I seen him placidly extended before a fire, while puss used his shaggy body as a sleeping box, and once he was observed to help that anxious tabby-mother with the toilet of her kittens by licking them carefully all over. At every lick of Rufus's huge prehensile tongue a kitten was lifted bodily into the air, only, however, to descend washed and unharmed to the ground. But out ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... not accompany her. Dulcie being a practical woman, a needle in innocent sharpness, had peeped about the waggon to inspect their luggage, and had found to her horror that one of her boxes had burst its fastenings—that very box with her respected mother's watered tabby, and her one lace head on the place of honour on the top. So she and Cambridge had an earnest consultation on the accident, which resulted in their proceeding to tuck up their skirts, empty the receptacle with the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Milray triumphed. "I always knew that she was a dreadful old tabby. I wish you were safely out of her clutches. Come and live with me, my dear, when Mrs. Lander gets tired of you. But she'll never get tired of you. You're just the kind of helpless mouse that such an old tabby would make her natural prey. But she sha'n't, even if another sort of cat ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a pretty Poll— A monkey too, what work he made! The sister introduced a Beau— My Susan brought a favorite maid. She had a tabby of her own, A snappish mongrel christen'd Gog— What d'ye think of that, my Cat? What d'ye think ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... thing she said about men once (in the boarding house now) and often repeated. "They're very fond of saying women are cats," she once said. "Fools! It's men that are the cat tribe: tame cats, tabby cats, wild cats, Cheshire cats, tomcats and stray cats! Aren't they just? And look at them—tame cats are miserable creatures, tabby cats the sloppy creatures, wild cats ferocious creatures, Cheshire cats fool creatures, tomcats disgusting creatures, ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... for the whole winter! Peggy has three new frocks, and Margaret Shippen four, but mine is the prettiest, and by tight lacing (though no tighter than theirs) I make my waist an ell smaller than either. In addition, I have a nabob of gray tabby silk trimmed with the same fur, which has such a sweet and modish air that I could cry at having to remove it but for what it would conceal. I intend to ask Peggy if 't would be citified and a la mode to keep ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... puppies, with insolent stare, were lounging at every turn, their delicate paws proving how little they were used to labour. On one side Bruin observed a gracefully-proportioned white cat, veiled, gliding demurely along, whilst a strong tabby, her nurse, purred behind, with three little kittens in her arms, mewing to their hearts' content; and on the other several huge mastiffs, stalking gravely in a row, like policemen in our London streets going to their beats, the animals to which they have been compared being ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... the throat open, they walk round the prostrate carcase of their prey, growling and spitting like 'tabby' cats. They begin their operations in earnest, invariably on the buttock. A leopard generally eats the inner portion of the thigh first. A wolf tears open the belly, and eats the intestines first. A vulture, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... was an ordinary nice creature, tabby, and in she came, and sat watching me while I had soup. To all appearance she was as innocent as a lamb—but no matter for that. What she was saying was something of ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... comes to a new area in London, appears to me to be obliged to fight till he gains undisturbed possession of it; at least so it has been the case with my cats. A very fine, bold, powerful tabby, did this twice with perfect success; but after repeated combats, although victorious, the struggle made him fierce and occasionally sullen. Another who was a very beautiful creature, but much weaker, used to come in with his handsome ears slit, his cheeks swollen, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... Tuesday I'd be begging to-day, Emma," interrupted a young man from across the stream of water which ran down the centre of Main Street. "I'm sitting on your aunt Tabby's trunk." The girl gave a cry, half of pained remembrance, half of pleasure. "Oh, my dear Aunt Tabby!" she cried, and, rushing across the rivulet, she threw herself across the battered leather trunk—sole surviving ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... as he rose and went to carry the milk-pails into the pantry, calling coaxingly, as he did so, "Kitty! kitty! You had your milk? Don't you joggle, now!" For one eager tabby rose on her hind legs, in purring haste, and hit her nose against ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... domestic cats coloured nearly like F. chaus, but not resembling that species in shape, abound in {45} Bengal; he adds, "such a colouration is utterly unknown in European cats, and the proper tabby markings (pale streaks on a black ground, peculiarly and symmetrically disposed), so common in English cats, are never seen in those of India." Dr. D. Short has assured Mr. Blyth[92] that at Hansi hybrids between the common ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... all were glad to see again the sojourner in foreign lands, even down to the ladylike tabby, who was all purr and warmth towards him except when she was all claws and nippers. But had the prime sentiment of the meeting shown itself it would have been the unqualified surprise of Christopher at ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... matter with you?—and what do you want of the old man?" asked Tabby, bounding out through one ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... solitary corner under the side of the wood. Upon our first entering Sir ROGER winked to me, and pointed at something that stood behind the door, which, upon looking that way I found to be an old broomstaff. At the same time he whispered me in the ear to take notice of a tabby cat that sat in the chimney-corner, which, as the old Knight told me, lay under as bad a report as Moll White herself; for, besides that Moll is said often to accompany her in the same shape, the cat is reported to have spoken twice or thrice in her life, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... Almanack of years— The prim old maid, and, by her side, her Niece, Full of bewitching beauty, health, and love. See, how the tabby watches Laura's eyes, Lest they should smile upon some pleasing spark, And violate grim prudery's tyrant ties. With icy finger, she her charge directs, To view the faithful dial of the sun, Whose moral tells how tide and time pass on. See, there—the fated victim of mischance; Read, in that ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... attached he must needs be chained up. The dog that is kept on the chain becomes dirty in his habits, unhappy, and savage. His chain is often too short and is not provided with swivels to avert kinks. On a sudden alarm, or on the appearance of a trespassing tabby, he will often bound forward at the risk of dislocating his neck. The yard-dog's chain ought always to be fitted with a stop link spring to counteract the effect of the sudden jerk. The method may be employed with advantage in the garden for several dogs, a separate rope ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... magnificent harbour of Yokohama with its hundreds of sampans, junks, tugs, ships, steamers, and every other craft. The smaller craft surround us clamorously, and looking down upon them we see that in almost every case there is a cat on board the junks, many of them tabby ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... "Do you suppose I can live my woman's life on the real and practical? What kind of woman do you take me for? An Amelia, a Patient Griselda, a tabby cat?" ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... bunch of yellow ribbons puckered up in the shape of a cabbage. In her left hand she has a little heavy Dutch watch; in her right she wields a ladle for the sauerkraut and pork. By her side there stands a fat tabby cat, with a gilt toy-repeater tied to its tail, which "the boys" have there fastened by way ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... When "tabby" is well on the wires I close the switch and she goes the length of the fence in bounds, often coming back to see what the trouble is, thus receiving another shock. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... right under his very nose, and to lead them across that great and terrible wilderness. A WILD-CAT AFFAIR, if ever there was one! When were God's schemes otherwise? Look at Jordan, Jericho, Gideon, Goliath, and scores of others. Tame tabby-cat schemes are stamped with another hall mark—that of the Chocolate Brigade! How dearly they love their tabbies yet think themselves wise men! REAL CHRISTIANS REVEL IN DESPERATE VENTURES FOR CHRIST, expecting from God great things and attempting the same with exhilaration. History ...
— The Chocolate Soldier - Heroism—The Lost Chord of Christianity • C. T. Studd
... deaths in the family above the degree of second cousin; to post letters, and refuse them when they have been insufficiently stamped; and last, and most intolerable, to show a tender solicitude when tabby is out of sorts." The dog, indeed, for the most part, has become as sentimental and conventional a figure in current fiction as the ghost who haunts the ouija board or the idealistic soldier returned from the wars to reconstruct his ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... sorry, poor stuffe, of eating of sack posset and slabbering themselves, and mirth fit for clownes; the prologue but poor, and the epilogue little in it but the extraordinariness of it, it being sung by Harris and another in the form of a ballet. My wife extraordinary fine to-day in her flower tabby suit, bought a year and more ago, before my mother's death put her into mourning, and so not worn till this day: and every body in love with it; and indeed she is very fine and handsome in it. Home in a coach round by the ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... with three or four, Like an Indian conjurer; 30 Quick as he in feats of art, Far beyond in joy of heart. Were her antics played in the eye Of a thousand standers-by, Clapping hands with shout and stare, 35 What would little Tabby care For the plaudits of the crowd? Over happy to be proud, Over wealthy in the treasure Of her own ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... choice. My poor little Henry had them given to him when he was six years old—the old ones I mean—and I've never parted with them. 'Take them all,' he said—so good; but, oh dear. Tit! Tit! Tittie! He was playing with her just now. Has anyone seen a tabby cat? Bless me, there it goes! So dreadful! It takes one's breath away, and all my things. Oh! where ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was bent, every hand strewed flowers or poured incense, and grimalkin was treated in all respects as the god of the day. But on the festival of St. John, poor tom's fate was reversed. A number of the tabby tribe were put into a wicker basket, and thrown alive into the midst of an immense fire kindled in the public square by the bishop and his clergy. Hymns and anthems were sung, and processions were made by the priests and people in honour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... to see, went off to Brighton the night after I arrived, and has not re- appeared: but I must wait some time longer for him. Thank Miss Barton much for the kit; if it is but a kit: my old woman is a great lover of cats, and hers has just kitted, and a wretched little blind puling tabby lizard of a thing was to be saved from the pail for me: but if Miss Barton's is a kit, I will gladly have it: and my old lady's shall be disposed of—not to the pail. Oh rus, quando te aspiciam? ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... been chasing each other round the grassplot and up and down the stems of the cherry-trees, ceased their gambols and lay still, crouching in the grass, and watching her graceful motions, as if taking heed for future imitation. If Kit and Tabby really did regard Laura with admiration and complacency, it was more than I can say for Mrs. Jaynes, in whose heart a secret rage was burning, though her aspect and demeanor were as placid and demure as if the butter she held in her hand would not have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... what we'll live on all the same, pore wurkhus ijets as me an' Bart are, not bein' able to make you an' Miss Sylvia 'appy. Miss Sylvia Krill an' Norman both," ended Deborah with emphasis, "whatever that smooth cat with the grin and the clawses may say, drat her fur a slimy tabby—yah!" ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... breakfast, but she gave Shock cream; and she often made me carry him when I went out a-walking. For this reason I hated him, and when we were out of my aunts' hearing I used to pull his tail and his ears and make the poor little thing howl sadly. My Aunt Penelope had a large tabby cat, which I also hated and used ill. I remember once being sent out of the dining-room to carry Shock his dinner, Shock being ill, and laid on a cushion in my aunts' bedroom. As I was going upstairs I was so unfortunate as to ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... chaplain, was a dangerous man. He was thin and pale, with light blue eyes and sleek fair hair; and as weak physically as he was strong mentally. In his neat clerical garb, with a slight stoop and meek smile, he looked a harmless, commonplace young curate of the tabby cat kind. No one could be more tactful and ingratiating than Mr Cargrim, and he was greatly admired by the old ladies and young girls of Beorminster; but the men, one and all—even his clerical brethren—disliked ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... washing into the hands of his lawyers the solid pieces of real estate that his frugality had enabled him to accumulate. The passing of the flood left him low and dry. One month after his dishabilitation a saloon-keeper plucked him by the neck from his free-lunch counter as a tabby plucks a strange kitten from her nest, and cast him asphaltward. This seems low enough. But after that he acquired a pair of cloth top, button Congress gaiters and wrote complaining letters to the newspapers. And then he ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... blood; Bold Strafford, Cambridge, Capel, Lucas, Lisle, Who crown'd in death his father's fun'ral pile. The loss of whom, in order to supply With true-born English nobility, Six bastard dukes survive his luscious reign, The labours of Italian Castlemain, French Portsmouth, Tabby Scott, and Cambrian; Besides the num'rous bright and virgin throng, Whose female glories shade them from my song. This offspring if our age they multiply, May half the house with English peers supply: There with true ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... up their minds to try no longer, and instead they lay on their backs on the grass and grumbled. It was clear that the world was against them, and what is the good of fighting in the face of such opposition? Bertram began the grumbling. 'Old Tabby,' he said,—that being the way in which he spoke of Miss Tabitha, his governess,—'is a beast. She makes me learn heaps of things which nobody ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... flirtation with a brilliant society queen full of tyrannical whims and capricious demands. When this was commented on as surprising, he explained that after playing with a squirrel one likes to take a cat in his lap. Really, it is so restful that the building suggests a big yellow tabby purring sleepily in the sunshine. I sat on the veranda, or piazza, taking a sun-bath, in a happy dream or doze, until the condition of nirvana was almost attained. What day of the week was it? And the season? Who could tell? ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... cream satin was the animated heart of another group. His love for scandal and his facility for acquiring the latest tidbit made him the delight of many an old tabby cat. Now his eyes shone with the joy of ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... middle of the night by a scratching and hissing and struggling noise under my bed, as if two animals were fighting. I sprung to my feet, and by the light of the full moon, which streamed in through a hole in the wall, I saw a large tabby cat engaged in a fierce combat with a glittering snake. At first I thought it would prove a hopeless one for poor pussy; but I soon saw by her manoeuvres, that she had at all events an equal chance of victory. Now the venomous ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... bear you no ill-will: you set me free. I'm a wildcat, all bristling fur and claws: At Krindlesyke, I've been a wildcat, caged: And Michael never twigged! Son, don't you mind The day we came—was I a tabby then? The day we came here, with no thought to bide, Once we had got the plunder; and were trapped Between these four white walls by a dead woman? She held me—forced my feet into her shoes— Held me for your sake. Ay: there seemed some link ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... which on being developed turned out well. They had occasion to enter one of the unoccupied huts down there and found a wild cat a little more than half grown, which they caught and carried home with them. He was of the usual tabby colour and by no means fierce, quickly yielding to the coaxing treatment of his captors. He made himself quite at home in the Shack, and we looked forward to a display of his ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... set free the tabby. Hearing the front door open, Mrs Curtiss called from upstairs: 'Is that ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... he tried a tender strain that melted in our ears, Thet brought up blessed memories and drenched 'em down 'ith tears; An' we dreamed uv ol' time kitchens, 'ith Tabby on the mat, Uv home an' luv an' baby days, an' Mother, an' ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... cheerfulness that throbbed in her quavering voice. Hers could be a violent tongue, too, as the several men who accosted us on our dark way discovered at their first approach to familiarity; and on one occasion, when a drunken sailor leered up to my side, Mrs. Bridget spat at him like an angry tabby-cat. Somehow, I no longer felt afraid under ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... in use at present: they sell them by the weight. The tabby doublets wt the silk [called wats][232] furring wtin are also in faschion: wery warm in winter, cost 20 franks. Men and women from the least to the greatest, yea not the wery keel wifes and fruit wifes, ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... again. But her tone was flat and hesitating. Her ever-present fear was very little comforted by prayer. But she found comfort in Mrs. Grayson. She liked to stay on in the old kitchen, watching Mrs. Grayson's household ways, making friends with the stolid tabby cat, or listening to stories of Jim as a child. Sometimes she would read parts of George's letters to this new friend. Bridget never cared to hear them; and she was more completely at ease with the farmer's wife even than ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... woman of fine appearance, and high standing in society, the pride of her husband, and the mother of an infant daughter, only a few miles from us, ay, in D- County, too, was actually beating in the skull of a slave-woman called Tabby; and not content with that, had her tied up and whipped, after her skull was broken, and she died hanging to the bedstead, to which she had been fastened. When informed that Tabby was dead, she answered, 'I am glad of it, for she has worried my life out of me.' But ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... which the children were wont to climb up to inspect their kittens. Here Rose was for a moment startled by a glare close to her of what looked like two fiery lamps in the darkness, but the next instant a long, low, growling sound explained it, and the tabby stripes of the cat quickly darted across her lantern's range of light. She heard a slight rustling above, and ventured to call, in a ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... height above the basement, and from cellar-stone to eaves was forty-five feet. There were four chimneys and sixteen fireplaces, and twenty rooms above the first floor. The walls at the base were six feet in thickness, and above the ground four feet. They were composed of the material known as "tabby," a mixture of shells, lime and broken stone or gravel with water; which mass, being pressed in a mould of boards, becomes when dry as hard and durable as rock. The walls are now as solid as stone itself. The second story above the terrace contained ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... value the birds that have been reared in the house you have built you may need to get up early more than one morning when the youngsters leave the nest to protect them from the highly respectable (?) tabby that lives possibly next door if not at your own house. It often comes to a choice between cats and birds: and the cats may be disposed of in two ways—the right kind of box traps for the homeless and unknown robbers, and an air rifle with sufficient ...
— Bird Houses Boys Can Build • Albert F. Siepert
... allotment of this money she gave to me one day on my return from school, and sent me to Mr. Blodget, the grocer, to purchase some supplies. After giving my order to one of the clerks I immediately turned my attention to renewing my acquaintance with Tabby, the ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... visitor, "suppose this Mrs. Billings wasn't happy at home? We'll say she and her husband didn't gee worth a cent. They've got incompatibility to burn. The things she likes, Billings wouldn't have as a gift with trading-stamps. It's Tabby and Rover with them all the time. She's an educated woman in science and culture, and she reads things out loud at meetings. Billings is not on. He don't appreciate progress and obelisks and ethics, and things of that sort. Old Billings is simply a blink when it comes ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... little kitten, My name is Tabby Gray, I live out in the country, Some twenty miles away. My eyes are black and hazel, My skin is soft as silk; I'm fed each night and morning With a ...
— The Nursery, May 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... foolish enough to cross them. Dress, Mrs. McArdle declared, was now a real trial. The girls had to be "in trim all the time," and the boys were as violently in contrast to their fellows as a litter of brindle barn-kits beside a well-groomed tabby-cat's family. "I'm clean worn out with it, Mart," she confessed. "We've been here two weeks the day, and the children howlin' the whole time to go back and McArdle workin' himself to the figger of ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the latter stood his ground with arched back and snarling face, for all the world like a great, spotted tabby. ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sister tabby saw the cord, And interposed a happy word: "In every age and clime we see Two of a trade cannot agree; Each deems the other an encroacher, As sportsman thinks another poacher. Beauty with beauty vies in charms, ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... Catch was only "full of fun and with nobody to play with him," like Peter Mooney's goose, and had only chased pussy in the natural exuberance of his spirits, having no "hard feelings" towards her, or any desire, I know, to injure her soft tabby fur. ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... doubt not but it is so in their native deserts. Let it once become a fashion for sovereigns and other great men to keep and to caress them, we shall see camels as variegated as cats, which in the woods are all of the uniformly-streaked tabby—the males inclining to the brown shade—the females to blue among them;—but being bred down, become tortoise-shell, and red, and every variety of colour, which ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... and Engines, and Springs, that were devised by Humane wit. To this end, he hath made a very curious Survey of all kinds of bodies, beginning with the Point of a Needle, and proceeding to the Microscopical view of the Edges of Rasors, Fine Lawn, Tabby, Watered Silks, Glass-canes, Glass-drops, Fiery Sparks, Fantastical Colours, Metalline Colours, the Figures of Sand, Gravel in Urine, Diamonds in Flints, Frozen Figures, the Kettering Stone, Charcoal, Wood and other Bodies petrified, the Pores of Cork, and of other substances, Vegetables growing ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... masculinity are expressions of the interplay of all the internal secretions. It used to be said by smart cats and accepted by the tabby cats, that a woman was a woman because of her ovaries alone. It is being said by some great discoverers of the day that man is a man because of his testes alone. Neither of these dogmas is true. There are individuals with ovaries who show ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... cleans the fish, or cuts the necks of hens, ducks, or geese which struggle and gurgle in their own blood; when pretty Fridoline, with her rosy little mouth and her long fair hair, leans out of her window to tend the honeysuckle, and over her head the neighbour's tabby cat is gently swaying her tail and watching, with her cunning green eyes, the swallow circling in the deepening purple—I do assure you that a man must be utterly devoid of taste for the picturesque not to stop and contemplate in ecstasy ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... one of the five might face a peril greater than that which now confronts him. Conceivably he might flop into a swollen river to save a drowning puppy; might dive into a burning building after some stranger's pet tabby cat. But this prospect which lies before him of ambling across a field with death singing about his ears, is a thing which tears with clawing fingers at the tuggs and toggles of his imagination until his flesh revolts to the point where it refuses the dare. It is such a man that ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... period, little can be said in their favour at the present day, and I feel therefore less scruple in dilating on the elegance of my figure, and the taste of my toilette, as, when speaking of them, I seem to be referring to another individual Puss, with whom the actual snuffy old Tabby ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... a flowered silk tabby sacque, on band days,' said Toole, who had an eye and a corner in his memory for female costume, 'a fine showy—I remember.' ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... noticed but undoubtedly beneficial part in the education and life of children. Which of us does not remember powerful but magnanimous dogs, lazy lapdogs, birds dying in captivity, dull-witted but haughty turkeys, mild old tabby cats, who forgave us when we trod on their tails for fun and caused them agonising pain? I even fancy, sometimes, that the patience, the fidelity, the readiness to forgive, and the sincerity which are characteristic ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... pets. One is a little black dog named Aristotle. We call him Tot for short. I have a little kitty named Malty, and an old cat named Tabby. They play very pretty together. I have two nice dolls. One is very handsome. My papa brought her from Paris, and I called her Rosa Bell. The other ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and shortly afterwards he remarked that he wrote English "surprisingly well." In the next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languages encouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic, "Tabby in Elysium." The erratic character of the punctuation may be said, with perfect impartiality, to be the only distinguishing feature of the style of the original ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... a lofty vase's side, Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow, Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima, reclined, Gazed ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... swimming and flying monsters and sirens, and no Mexican would pass in hearing of the yells and screams and strange songs without crossing himself and begging the captain to give the rock a wide berth. But the noise is all the noise of cats. A shipwrecked tabby peopled the place many years ago, and her numerous progeny live there on dead fish and on the eggs and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... folks," said Fido to himself, "for their feather-beds look big and comfortable, and their baskets are all ample and generous,—and see, there goes a bright gilt cage, and there is a plump yellow canary bird in it! Oh, how glad Mrs. Tabby will be to see it,—she so dotes on ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... the shower of kittens began. Some were white and some were tabby, and all were about the same loathsome age. Three were on his hearth-rug, three in his bath-room, and the other six turned up at intervals among the visitors who came to see the prophecy break down. Never was a more satisfactory Sending. On the next day there ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... he had reached his destination, and made sure that his dreaded stepfather was away, he entered the living-room. To his great surprise it was dark and cheerless, and his blind mother sat alone in the midst of it shivering with cold. By way of warming herself, she had taken the sleek tabby cat into her lap and folded her chilled hands over pussy's warm fur. The whole scene sent a pang through the boy's warm and ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... you. So we came about and headed for Denboro. Next thing we had to haul up abreast of that old tumbledown shed at the end of Tabby Crosby's lot there by the meetin'-house while Mr. Phillips hopped out and got a couple of great big satchels he'd left there. Big as trunks they was, pretty nigh, and time he got them stowed in here there wan't no room for knees nor feet nor ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... there, and what everybody wore and said. I was told that Lady Caroline Lamb was there, enveloped in the folds of an ermine cloak, which she called a 'cat-skin,' and that she talked a great deal about a periodical she wished to get up, to be called 'Tabby's Magazine'; and with her was an exceedingly haughty, brilliant, and beautiful girl, Rosina Wheeler,—since well known as Lady Bulwer Lytton,—and who sat rather impatiently at the feet of her eccentric 'Gamaliel.' Miss Emma Roberts was one of the favored ladies, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch occurred ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... each side of a narrow, flagged path, and honeysuckle all over the house right up to the thatch, which is quite a yard thick. I have a water-colour of her, sitting outside her door, with the Royal Arms and Georgius Rex just showing over her cap, and a fat tabby cat asleep on the threshold. It was late summer when I did it, and the air was warm gold with purple shadows. I know it is a detestable trick to talk painter's shop, but I can't help it sometimes. I am reminded of this ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... lay my old tabby cat, who had just lost her kittens, and there were the little ducklings ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... house negroes stood in mortal dread of Blue Dave, and their dismay was not without its effect upon Mrs. Kendrick and her daughter. Jenny, the house-girl, refused to sleep at the quarters; and when Aunt Tabby, the cook, started for her cabin after dark, she was accompanied by a number of little negroes bearing lightwood torches. All the stories and legends that clustered around Blue Dave's career were brought to the surface again; and, as we have seen, the great majority ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... they stood quite still while she milked them, and did not play any of the tricks on her that they had played on other dairymaids who were rough and rude. And when she had done, and was going to get up from her stool, she found sitting round her a whole circle of cats, black and white, tabby and tortoise- shell, who all ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... heard Abner singing, as she knelt in front of the basket where the mother cat lay with her four blind kittens. "You see, Tabby," she said, "people still sing. A lot of them learned to sing in the war, and now they're home, they may as well sing as cry. Oh, Tabby, I wanted to sing, too . . ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... myself will gnaw the beard from the old curmudgeon who thinks he sleeps here safely. Is the degradation of effeminate land rats, cheese-eaters, wharf robbers, stable vermin, to come upon us? Fates forbid it! Soon, perhaps, some fierce tabby may come to make our once brave hearts tremble. Then, then,"—but I imagined the eloquence broken off there and giving place to a furious scamper, as perhaps old Captain Mugford, arrayed in a long nightshirt ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... "'Tabby,' says he, 'you would have your way and I'm takin' the bath. But you can see for yourself that we'll have to cart water from now on. However, I ain't responsible; throw me ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... said the Englishman, "that the lions of the Wamabo country were about the most ferocious in existence, but they are regular tabby cats by comparison with these big black fellows. Did you ever see anything more utterly fearless or more terribly ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pending. The Allies were allied only in name; they gnashed their teeth at one another across the council-table in Paris. The lying game of diplomacy had been revived. Poison-notes were being exchanged. The tabby-cat statesmen who had been too old to fight, were busy sowing the seeds of future wars. The politicians who had nailed mankind to the cross, were casting lots for the raiment which had survived the sacrifice. No one asked, "Is this righteousness?" ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... celebrated throughout the world for its brilliant-coloured textile fabrics. So famous was the silk of Bagdad, manufactured in the Attabieh quarter (named after Attab, a contemporary of the Prophet), that the place-name passed over into Spanish, Italian, French and finally into English in the form of "tabby," as the designation of a rich-coloured watered silk. Depending on coloured tiles and gorgeous fabrics for their rich effects, nothing of the buildings of the times of Harun al-Rashid or Mamun, once counted so magnificent, have come down to us. All have perished in the numerous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... admitted to have been more remarkable for frankness than civility, made, however, no ill impression on Mrs. Sally. To the farmer's she went, and at his house she lives still, with her little maid, her tabby cat, a decrepit sheep-dog, and much of the lumber of Court Farm, which she could not find in her heart to part from. There she follows her old ways and her old hours, untempted by matrimony, and unassailed (as far as I hear) by love or by scandal, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... Primrose to exhibit to Thekla the tame menagerie, where a mungoose, called of course Raki raki, was the last acquisition. She was also shown the kittens of the beloved Begum, and presented with Phoebus, a tabby with a wise face and a head marked like a Greek lyre, to be transplanted to the ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... in which the sparrows were busy washing, sending up tiny iridescent jets and fountains from their swiftly fluttering wings. It was delicious to Dominic. He felt very safe, very gay. Only a heavy ill- favoured tabby cat came from nowhere. It had designs upon the sparrows. Twice it climbed stealthily up the broken bricks and gas clinkers. Twice the little boy drove it away. It was not a nice cat. It had a broad white face, deceitful little eyes, and grey whiskers. It declared ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... him a sack—the same he had used to transport Satan's corpse—and from out of it he produced a half-starved tabby, that obviously could harm no one, owing to the fact that its head was tied up in a muslin bag and its four legs ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... your visitors, Mrs. Sharpe, if that be your name," said the irascible patient. "You're all a set of old tabby cats together, and if you don't clear out, I'll fling something ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... wig. The parson in his silk cassock, and his helpmate in brown damask. Old General Atkinson in scarlet velvet, and his wife and daughters in white damask. The Governor in black velvet, and his lady in crimson tabby trimmed with silver. The ladies wore bell-hoops, high-heeled shoes, paste buckles, silk stockings, and enormously high head-dresses, with lappets of Brussels lace hanging ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... not observed it?) I am altered of late!—I, that was ever light of heart, the very soul of gayety, brimfull of glee, am now demure as our old tabby—and not half as wise. Tabby had wit enough to keep her paws out of the coals, whereas poor I have—but no matter what. It will never come to pass, I see that. So many reasons for every thing! Such looking forward! Arthur, are not men sometimes too ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... old half-crown was coaxed well into sight and forced flat against the knife-blade. The boy then began to manipulate the knife with extreme caution as he kept on making a soft purring noise, ah-h-h-h-ha! full of triumphant satisfaction, while a big curled-up tabby tom-cat, which had taken possession of the fellow chair to that occupied by Aleck, twitched one ear, opened one eye, and then seeing that the purring sound was only a feeble imitation, went ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... profession, some women find the highest pleasure. But you and I, dear aunt, who are directed by even higher and purer motives than these women, scorn the pursuits of the arts and sciences, the professions and trades, and lay our hearts as willing sacrifices upon the altars of a tabby cat and a bassoon. What could be purer or more exalted than ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... Lady Harriet Wentworth and footman Sturgeon over again. She had come back in a Flemish hat and a white cloth Joseph with black facings; she had come back in her night-rail; she had come back in a tabby gauze, with a lace head and lappets. Nor were there wanting other rumours, of an after-dinner Wilkes-and-Lord-Sandwich flavour, which we refrain from detailing; but which the Castle Inn, after the mode of the eighteenth ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... the meadow-brook Reading, and oh, it was too lovely; I never saw such a charming book." The charming book must have pleased her, truly, There's a happy light in her bright young eyes And she hugs the cat with unusual fervor, To staid old Tabby's ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.
... of the church appearance of the Puritan goodmen and goodwives. Priscilla Alden in a Quakeress' drab gown would doubtless have been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote," a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with "Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... best bow, and advanced to Mrs Lambert's chair, unhappily treading as he did so on the paw of a tabby cat, who resisted the indignity by a very prolonged yell and an angry ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... interviews; and towards the end of the afternoon was exasperated to tears. Sally could tell this from the sniffs and nose-rubbings that became more and more frequent. Miss Summers's eye-rims were quite pink, and her funny eyes were moist. She looked more than ever like a disconsolate tabby, and her hands were restless and clumsy. She had to ask Sally to thread her needle, and even to finish work that she was doing badly because of ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... her anything as to washing her kitten, or keeping it warm. She can even play with it and so educate it, in so far as it needs education. There are mothers in all classes of the community who should be ashamed to look a tabby cat in the face." ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... fogs of November are succeeded by the snowstorms and high, piercing night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced. A long pause succeeded, which was at last broken by Branwell saying in a lazy manner, 'I don't know what to do.' This was echoed ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... momentary view of a tabby-cat and kitten, a volume of poetry, a wiry-haired terrier, and Gilbert, all lying promiscuously on the hearth-rug, before the two last leaped up, the one to bark, and the other to come forward with outstretched ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... follow in secret the example of the cat, which (seeing its master come home from the hunt with a string of birds, and displaying, with much pride and satisfaction, the results of his prowess), conceived the idea that it would also be a fine thing for her to go forth and kill the canary. But to tabby's surprise, her ability was rewarded with chastisement; whereupon she pondered the question over and over: "How can it be, that what is virtue in man ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... wandered, and under a beam of yellow light might be seen the calm and handsome profile of Madame Vedrine, nursing her youngest, while the eldest threw stones at the numerous cats, grey, black, yellow, and tabby, which might be called the tigers ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Bumpus could tell, still he felt far from satisfied about it. What if the sly old cat was at that very moment creeping up on them? For all they knew, it might be close by just then, "inching" its way along, just as he had watched a tame Tabby do at home, when trying to steal upon a sparrow it wanted for ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... and her curiosity was aroused. What was there in the mere mention of a laboratory that could so transform a humdrum little rector into a thing of fire? That it was the laboratory, Olive never stopped to question. She was far too sane, too used to the tame-tabby-cat propensities of youthful rectors, to imagine for a moment that the enthusiasm had come out of the chance to escape from her society. Therefore she decided that, for the present, she would keep this particular rector to herself, on the off-chance of discovering ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... scholar and fine gentleman. Deborah, clear away this trash. Lay out my books, fetch a bottle of Canary, and give me my Sunday coat. Put flowers on the table, and a dish of bonchretiens, and get on your tabby gown. Make your curtsy at the door; then ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... again: Now she works with three or four, Like an Indian Conjuror; 30 Quick as he in feats of art, Far beyond in joy of heart. Were her antics play'd in the eye Of a thousand Standers-by, Clapping hands with shout and stare, What would little Tabby care For the plaudits of the Crowd? Over happy to be proud, Over wealthy in the treasure Of her own exceeding ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... to howl for all deaths in the family above the degree of second cousin; to post letters, and refuse them when they have been insufficiently stamped; and last, and most intolerable, to show a tender solicitude when tabby is out of sorts." The dog, indeed, for the most part, has become as sentimental and conventional a figure in current fiction as the ghost who haunts the ouija board or the idealistic soldier returned from the wars to reconstruct his ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... a new area in London, appears to me to be obliged to fight till he gains undisturbed possession of it; at least so it has been the case with my cats. A very fine, bold, powerful tabby, did this twice with perfect success; but after repeated combats, although victorious, the struggle made him fierce and occasionally sullen. Another who was a very beautiful creature, but much weaker, used to come in with ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... and whites, of heroes and heroines, of villains and adventuresses, until the grateful discovery of the realistic school of fiction permitted him to believe that men and women were for the most part neither good nor bad, but tabby. Moreover, the leisurely reading of many sentences had given him some understanding of the elements of style. He perceived that some combinations of words were illogical, and that others were unlovely to the ear; and at the same time he acquired a vocabulary ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... see what you get when Tabby finds out what you have been doing," threatened the girl; and the little name slipping inadvertently from her tongue gave the ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... of water, in which the sparrows were busy washing, sending up tiny iridescent jets and fountains from their swiftly fluttering wings. It was delicious to Dominic. He felt very safe, very gay. Only a heavy ill- favoured tabby cat came from nowhere. It had designs upon the sparrows. Twice it climbed stealthily up the broken bricks and gas clinkers. Twice the little boy drove it away. It was not a nice cat. It had a broad white face, deceitful little eyes, and grey whiskers. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... tone was flat and hesitating. Her ever-present fear was very little comforted by prayer. But she found comfort in Mrs. Grayson. She liked to stay on in the old kitchen, watching Mrs. Grayson's household ways, making friends with the stolid tabby cat, or listening to stories of Jim as a child. Sometimes she would read parts of George's letters to this new friend. Bridget never cared to hear them; and she was more completely at ease with the farmer's wife ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dawned, the shower of kittens began. Some were white and some were tabby, and all were about the same loathsome age. Three were on his hearth-rug, three in his bath-room, and the other six turned up at intervals among the visitors who came to see the prophecy break down. Never was a ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... and, laying the skein and the ball of wool on the window-sill, I went into the drawing-room and stood still, hesitating. In the middle of the room, a tabby kitten was lying with outstretched paws; Zinaida was on her knees before it, cautiously lifting up its little face. Near the old princess, and filling up almost the whole space between the two windows, was a flaxen curly-headed young ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... sternsheets; and most unfortunately Old Vro selected this moment to thrust off from shore with his paddle. The impetus took her at unawares, and she fell forward; her basket struck against the boat's gunwale, its cover flew open, and forth from it, half-demented with fright, sprang her tabby cat, Methuselah. The poor brute lit upon the parrot's cage, which happened to be balanced upon an unstable pile of cooking utensils at the end of Nicky Vro's thwart. Cat, cage and parrot, a gridiron, two cake tins, a bundle of skewers, and a cullender, went overboard in one rattling avalanche, ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... parson in his silk cassock, and his helpmate in brown damask. Old General Atkinson in scarlet velvet, and his wife and daughters in white damask. The Governor in black velvet, and his lady in crimson tabby trimmed with silver. The ladies wore bell-hoops, high-heeled shoes, paste buckles, silk stockings, and enormously high head-dresses, with lappets of Brussels lace hanging thence ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... desperate flirtation with a brilliant society queen full of tyrannical whims and capricious demands. When this was commented on as surprising, he explained that after playing with a squirrel one likes to take a cat in his lap. Really, it is so restful that the building suggests a big yellow tabby purring sleepily in the sunshine. I sat on the veranda, or piazza, taking a sun-bath, in a happy dream or doze, until the condition of nirvana was almost attained. What day of the week was it? And the season? Who could tell? And who cares? ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... his best bow, and advanced to Mrs Lambert's chair, unhappily treading as he did so on the paw of a tabby cat, who resisted the indignity by a very prolonged yell and an angry spit ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... "Partner, if it wasn't for something funny about his eyes, I wouldn't be no more afraid of that gunman than I am of a tabby-cat. And me a weak woman. The quietest lookin' sort that ever come to Brownsville. But there's something queer about him. He knows that Mac Strann is here in town. He knows that Mac Strann is waiting for Jerry to die. He knows that when Jerry ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... old gentleman. 'Puss, Kit, Tit, Grimalkin, Tabby, Brindle! Whoosh!' with which last sound, uttered in a hissing manner between his teeth, the old gentleman swung his arms violently round and round, and at the same time alternately advanced on Mrs Nickleby, and retreated from ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Dulcie being a practical woman, a needle in innocent sharpness, had peeped about the waggon to inspect their luggage, and had found to her horror that one of her boxes had burst its fastenings—that very box with her respected mother's watered tabby, and her one lace head on the place of honour on the top. So she and Cambridge had an earnest consultation on the accident, which resulted in their proceeding to tuck up their skirts, empty the receptacle with the greatest care ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... French," and shortly afterwards he remarked that he wrote English "surprisingly well." In the next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languages encouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic, "Tabby in Elysium." The erratic character of the punctuation may be said, with perfect impartiality, to be the only distinguishing feature of the style of ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... 1860 A Call for Help to Garibaldi Lines suggested by New York Tribune's Account of Lincoln's Departure from Springfield for Washington "Sumter has Fallen, but Freedom is Saved!" Song, "My Love is no Gay, Dashing Maid" The Sewing Machine Tabby and Tibby Lines Composed at Mr. McLarty's, ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... unseen sources. Under other circumstances any one of the five might face a peril greater than that which now confronts him. Conceivably he might flop into a swollen river to save a drowning puppy; might dive into a burning building after some stranger's pet tabby cat. But this prospect which lies before him of ambling across a field with death singing about his ears, is a thing which tears with clawing fingers at the tuggs and toggles of his imagination until his flesh revolts to the point where it refuses the dare. It is such ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... laid the volloms down before him, and as he berried his head in his nicely brushed hat, before service began, that such a pious, proper morl, young nobleman was not to be found in the whole of the peeridge. It was a comfort to look at him. Efry old tabby and dowyger at my Lord Bobtail's turned up the wights of their i's when they spoke of him, and vowed they had never seen such a dear, daliteful, exlent young man. What a good son he must be, they said; and oh, what a good son-in-law! He had the pick of all the English gals ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... under the side of the wood. Upon our first entering Sir ROGER winked to me, and pointed at something that stood behind the door, which, upon looking that way I found to be an old broomstaff. At the same time he whispered me in the ear to take notice of a tabby cat that sat in the chimney-corner, which, as the old Knight told me, lay under as bad a report as Moll White herself; for, besides that Moll is said often to accompany her in the same shape, the cat is reported to have spoken twice or thrice in her life, and to have played several pranks ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... the North American flowers into her stories. The Tabby-striped Arum, or Jack-in-the-Pulpit (as it is called in Mr. Whittier's delightful collection of child-poems[30]), appears in "We and the World," where Dennis, the rollicking Irish hero, unintentionally raises himself in the estimation of his sober-minded Scotch companion Alister, by betraying that ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... skunk was a wise and good animal, really a gentleman, if treated politely. He appreciated my efforts on his behalf. He forbearingly lowered his tail, composed his fur, and walked out of the cage and into the near-by woods as tamely as a house tabby ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... edge, cleans the fish, or cuts the necks of hens, ducks, or geese which struggle and gurgle in their own blood; when pretty Fridoline, with her rosy little mouth and her long fair hair, leans out of her window to tend the honeysuckle, and over her head the neighbour's tabby cat is gently swaying her tail and watching, with her cunning green eyes, the swallow circling in the deepening purple—I do assure you that a man must be utterly devoid of taste for the picturesque not to stop and contemplate ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... let drowsing dogs lie, he'll stir up the tabby sleeping Tom— In fact, he is the model of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... or for a man with blood and muscle to pat his nose and ponder. If I left my Lorna so; if I let those black-soul'd villains work their pleasure on my love; if the heart that clave to mine could find no vigour in it—then let maidens cease from men, and rest their faith in tabby-cats. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... close the outer door softly behind her, the girl's heart throbbed in response to the old woman's sorrow. While she sat on the bench to lace her shoes the cat, old Tabby, came rubbing and purring about her skirts. Muffled, as though from a great distance, a rooster vented a questioning crow as though he doubted that it was yet time to announce ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... The Allies were allied only in name; they gnashed their teeth at one another across the council-table in Paris. The lying game of diplomacy had been revived. Poison-notes were being exchanged. The tabby-cat statesmen who had been too old to fight, were busy sowing the seeds of future wars. The politicians who had nailed mankind to the cross, were casting lots for the raiment which had survived the sacrifice. No one asked, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... very familiarly by his Name, and turning immediately to the Knight, she said, she supposed that was his good Friend, Sir ROGER DE COVERLY: Upon which nothing less could follow than Sir ROGER'S Approach to Salutation, with, Madam the same at your Service. She was dressed in a black Tabby Mantua and Petticoat, without Ribbons; her Linnen striped Muslin, and in the whole in an agreeable Second-Mourning; decent Dresses being often affected by the Creatures of the Town, at once consulting Cheapness and the Pretensions ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... I received. The two antiquities only bowed their tabby heads; making longer faces than ordinary; and all the old lines appearing strong in their furrowed foreheads and fallen cheeks; How do you, Cousin? And how do you, Mr. Lovelace? looking all round at one another, as who should say, do you speak first: and, do you: for they seemed ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... am not going to marry any woman inferior to the type I have created with my pencil—what the public calls the 'Carden Girl.' And now you see that your discovery of this living type comes rather late. In two days I must be legally married if I want my Aunt Tabby's legacy; and to-day for the first time I hear of a girl who, you assure me, compares favorably to my copyrighted type, but who has a mission and an aversion to men. So you see, Mr. Keen, that the ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... trotted lordly down the path, waving his tail. He was an ordinary tabby with white paws, a slender young gentleman. A crouching, fluffy, brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence. The Mino walked statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance. She crouched before him and pressed herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... her reverie, and gathered in all her self-possession. The estate, the household, the parish, the county: there was no mistaking his interest in these matters. He was interested in the smallest particulars: her broods of young chicks, her pigeons, the tabby cat's kittens, the Rector's baby. He asked searching questions. How many cows were in milk just now; when would Menzies have asparagus fit to eat? The servants—was all well there? Their young men? Nothing escaped him. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... a champagne-glass, bottle in hand, and was priming the successor to it. He cocked his eye at Mr. Redworth's quick stare. 'Malkin!' And now we'll see whether the interior of him is grey, or black, or tabby, or tortoise-shell, or any other colour of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I got all these ideas from books, and great trouble I found myself in one day for playing at tiger-hunting in the garden at home with Buzzy, my aunt's great tabby tom-cat; and for pretending that Nap was a lion in the African desert. But I'll tell you that in a chapter to itself, for these matters had a good deal to do with the alteration in my mode ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... artful devices of glass traps and scarlet wafers. Such persons will probably form their ideas of Typee's cockroaches from their own domestic opportunities of observation. That were unjust to the crew of the Julia, and would give no adequate idea of their sufferings. As a purring tabby to a roaring jaguar, so is a British black-beetle to a cock-roach of the Southern Seas. We back our assertion by a quotation from our lamented friend Captain Cringle, who in his especially graphic and attractive style thus hits off the peculiarities of this graceful insect. "When full grown," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... flowered silk tabby sacque, on band days,' said Toole, who had an eye and a corner in his memory for female costume, 'a fine showy—I remember.' ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and bridegroom were both clothed in white tabby, his suit laced with a very broad gold and silver lace. The bride had on her head a coronet set full of diamonds, with a diamond collar about her neck and shoulders, a diamond girdle of the same ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... right that for every glass, A tune you should take that the water may pass; So while little Tabby was washing her rump, The ladies kept drinking it out of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... she gave Shock cream; and she often made me carry him when I went out a-walking. For this reason I hated him, and when we were out of my aunts' hearing I used to pull his tail and his ears and make the poor little thing howl sadly. My Aunt Penelope had a large tabby cat, which I also hated and used ill. I remember once being sent out of the dining-room to carry Shock his dinner, Shock being ill, and laid on a cushion in my aunts' bedroom. As I was going upstairs I was so unfortunate as to break the plate, which was fine blue china. I gathered ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... ordinary yacht at sea is about the meanest habitation between Heaven and earth. But it was at Monte Carlo I got the cable from Uncle Carlton telling me the Chilean revolution had wiped out our nitrate mine concessions and that your poor Tabby's last little nest-egg had been smashed. In other words, I woke up and found myself a beggar, and for a few hours I even thought I'd have to travel home on that Monte Carlo Viaticum fund which so discreetly ships away the ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... element in his soubriquet is not so easy to say. There is a Cornish (and probably British) word “Tab,” which means turf (“Archæol. Journ.” vol. ii., No. 3, p. 199), and that would suit this dweller on the heath; but it is more likely that “Tab” had a reference to the cat, “Tabby” being the term for a brindled cat. And Bishop Harsnet, in his curious book on “The Superstitions of the Day” (1605), says a witch, or elf, “can take the form ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... fond of cats, although I admit they are well enough in their place, and I can worry along comfortably with a nice, matronly old tabby who can take care of herself and be of some use in the world. As for Ismay, she hates cats and ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not only the souls of the departed who are supposed to be hovering unseen on the day "when autumn to winter resigns the pale year." Witches then speed on their errands of mischief, some sweeping through the air on besoms, others galloping along the roads on tabby-cats, which for that evening are turned into coal-black steeds. The fairies, too, are all let loose, and hobgoblins of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... when this letter was written, both Tabby and the young servant whom they had to assist her were ill in bed; and, with the exception of occasional aid, Miss Bronte had all the household work to perform, as well as to nurse ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... rats, and loaned him the cat. The rats disappeared so rapidly that the Dey wished to buy the cat, but the captain would not sell until a very high price was offered. With the purchase-money was sent a present of valuable pearls for the owner of Tabby. When the ship returned the sailors were greatly astonished to find that the boy owned most of the cargo, for it was part of the bargain that he was to bring back the value of his cat in goods. The London merchant ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... solid pieces of real estate that his frugality had enabled him to accumulate. The passing of the flood left him low and dry. One month after his dishabilitation a saloon-keeper plucked him by the neck from his free-lunch counter as a tabby plucks a strange kitten from her nest, and cast him asphaltward. This seems low enough. But after that he acquired a pair of cloth top, button Congress gaiters and wrote complaining letters to the newspapers. And then he fought the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... A venerable signor of a cat. Tabby. Cat's no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know. Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the shop, sun streaming ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... he was Jane's nicest kitten. Jane was half-Persian, white with untidy tabby patterns on her. Jerry was black all over. Whatever attitude he took, his tight, short fur kept the outlines of his figure firm and clear, whether he arched his back and jumped sideways, or rolled himself into a cushion, or squatted with haunches spread and paws doubled in ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... remedied. A house like this can be kept in order by a very inferior cat to yourself; and after all, you are cherished here chiefly because it was Lily's wish. Peggy can easily find another kitten; and you know she has often said that white cats were not to her taste, and she should much prefer a tabby." ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... write by return of post and tell me how you are getting on and how you are. Give my kind regards to Tabby and Martha, and—Believe me, dear ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... mod'rate, he quits winner. He travels back to Sni-a-bar as tame as tabby cats in persooance with Enright's commands, an', once thar, old man Parks an' the rest of 'em whistles him through the marital chute a heap successful. When he shows up among us, his blushin' Peggy bride on his arm, he's wearin' all the brands an' y'ear marks of a thor'ughly married ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... deserts. Let it once become a fashion for sovereigns and other great men to keep and to caress them, we shall see camels as variegated as cats, which in the woods are all of the uniformly-streaked tabby—the males inclining to the brown shade—the females to blue among them;—but being bred down, become tortoise-shell, and red, and every variety of colour, which domestication ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... him in, introduced him to her mother, and ran off in search of the cat, returning in a few minutes with a very playful-looking tabby. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... which had grown up out of common report. The house negroes stood in mortal dread of Blue Dave, and their dismay was not without its effect upon Mrs. Kendrick and her daughter. Jenny, the house-girl, refused to sleep at the quarters; and when Aunt Tabby, the cook, started for her cabin after dark, she was accompanied by a number of little negroes bearing lightwood torches. All the stories and legends that clustered around Blue Dave's career were brought to the surface again; and, as we have seen, the great majority of ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... need of them to think of parting, she said, in a more contented tone than he had heard her speak in since it had been settled that he was to be married, "Eh, my lad, I'll be as still as th' ould tabby, an' ne'er want to do aught but th' offal work, as she wonna like t' do. An' then we needna part the platters an' things, as ha' stood on the shelf together sin' ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... world that pleases an eagle better at dinner-time than a prime piece of cat. Charley tells me that, upon the whole, he prefers a good, plump, mouse-fed tabby; he adds that he never yet heard of a tame eagle being kept at a sausage shop, though he would like a situation of that sort himself, very much. The stoop of a free eagle as it takes a living victim is, no doubt, a fine thing, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... made a charming little savage severely repent the delight she took in seeing her tabby favourite make cruel sport with a pretty sleek bead- eyed mouse, before she devoured it. Egad, my love, said I to myself, as I sat meditating the scene, I am determined to lie in wait for a fit opportunity to try how thou wilt like to be tost over my head, and be caught again: how ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... makes insanitary. In the open it crouches among dead leaves which have gathered in the fork of a tree, and will construct a web which spans the coconut avenue with its stays. From one aspect its rotund body invites a good-humoured smile, for the marking exactly simulates the features of a tabby cat, well fed, sleepy, and in placid mood. Venom of virulence to kill a bat almost instantly would be severe enough to a human being. This dirty, obese spider deserves little consideration at the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... it seem thy tabby grace, The woes of London streets to face, Cold glances, or a kick for thy fur, And none to list to thy murmuring purr. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... he should have become in life if this or that crucial event had not occurred to set his destiny. It seems to me that if it had not been for the sudden death of my father I, too, might have found our jungle beast a domestic tabby, and have fed it its prey without realizing what I was about. I should have been a lawyer, I know; for I had had the ambition from my earliest boyhood, and I had been confirmed in it by my success in debating at school. (Once, at Notre Dame, I spoke for a full hour in successful defence ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... the window, dreamily stroking a tabby kitten, who, purring and blinking, nestled on her lap, and with great satisfaction held up her little nose into the rather hot spring sunshine. Olga Ivanovna was wearing a white morning gown, with short sleeves; her bare, pale-pink, girlish shoulders and arms were a picture ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... dangerous man. He was thin and pale, with light blue eyes and sleek fair hair; and as weak physically as he was strong mentally. In his neat clerical garb, with a slight stoop and meek smile, he looked a harmless, commonplace young curate of the tabby cat kind. No one could be more tactful and ingratiating than Mr Cargrim, and he was greatly admired by the old ladies and young girls of Beorminster; but the men, one and all—even his clerical brethren—disliked and distrusted ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... peck upon the head, whereupon he resigned his place, into which the other immediately settled, with a soft, complacent, cooing note, as expressive of perfect content as the purring of a well-fed tabby, stretched cosily upon the earth-rug before a cheerful winter evening fire. This transfer was effected so quickly, that Johnny was baffled in an ill-bred attempt which he made to pry into the domestic concerns of the affectionate pair, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... long-haired Persian cats, the burak, are brought down to the Gulf, and from there to India, but the Kerman cats are said by the Persians themselves to be the best. The white ones are the most appreciated by the Persians; then the blue (grey) ones with differently coloured eyes, and the tabby ones. Mine were, one perfectly ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... I am, that the ould craythur is fairly off—for divil a bit of comfort did she give the laste of us with her time-saving orderly ways. And it's not an owld maid ye must ever be, darlint Miss Enna, or ye'll favor the troublesome aunty with her tabby notions." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... acquaintance I have not been at much pains to cultivate, taking umbrage at my supposed disrespect, has contributed not a little towards the confirmation of this opinion, by dropping certain hints to my prejudice among the vulgar, who are also very much scandalised at my entertaining this poor tabby cat with the collar about her neck, which was a favourite of my ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... hear it," replied he. "What is it? and whom threatens it? The red cow or the tabby cat? Poor puss!" and he stooped down and stroked her as she ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... stroke her soft, confiding face, Who gave her food and shelter from her birth, Who joined in all her harmless youthful mirth; But, when they went for holidays to roam, Shut-to the door of what had been her home, And thoughtless left to die upon the mat, Their faithful but forgotten Tabby-cat." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 6, 1892 • Various
... his own. When Martha wanted money she applied to him for it. Now and then in his cash memorandum books we come upon such entries as, "By Cash to Mrs. Washington for Pocket Money L4." As a rule, if there were any purchases to be made, she let George do it and, if we may judge from the long list of tabby colored velvet gowns, silk hose, satin shoes, "Fashionable Summer Cloaks & Hatts," and similar articles ordered from the English agents she had no reason to complain that her husband was niggardly or a poor ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... only looks like an ordinary, sleek, well-fed, tabby cat. But then, you see, you don't know Thomas' Private History. Thomas himself is usually too sleepy to think about his early adventures now, but time was, when the mere mention of the Queen's name, would start him off purring at the thought of what ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... most beautiful time of the year, The days were now long, and the sky was now clear, And May, that fair lady of splendid renown, Had dressed herself fine, in her flowered tabby gown, When about some two hours and an half after noon, When it grew something late, though I thought it too soon, With a pitiful voice, and a most heavy heart, I tuned up my pipes to sing 'loth to depart;' The ditty concluded, I called for my horse, And with a good pack did ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... mamma, but looking traverse at the elderly lady, 'Law mamma, you are so teazing! We have made up a little conversazione party of our own, and you want to spoil it by taking Mr. Trevor from us! I declare,' continued she, turning her back on the card tables and lowering her voice, 'that old Tabby is never contented but when she is at her honours and her tricks! But let her alone! She never goes away a loser! She has ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... railed-in run attached he must needs be chained up. The dog that is kept on the chain becomes dirty in his habits, unhappy, and savage. His chain is often too short and is not provided with swivels to avert kinks. On a sudden alarm, or on the appearance of a trespassing tabby, he will often bound forward at the risk of dislocating his neck. The yard-dog's chain ought always to be fitted with a stop link spring to counteract the effect of the sudden jerk. The method may be employed ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... gangway trooped the men, and I noticed that two of them walked slowly and cautiously. The boat safely out of harbour, one of them produced from his chest a large tabby cat, whilst the other placed a fine cock on the deck. It was a cock with the true Gallic spirit, before the cat had time to consider the situation it had sprung on its back. The cat beat a hasty retreat into the arms of its protector ...
— The White Road to Verdun • Kathleen Burke
... half-ticket was stuck. His eyes remained mostly fixed on the back of the seat opposite, and never turned to the window even when a station was reached and called. On the other seat were two or three passengers, one of them a working woman who held a basket on her lap, in which was a tabby kitten. The woman opened the cover now and then, whereupon the kitten would put out its head, and indulge in playful antics. At these the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... creaking, groaning, dismal old house. I shall feel like a younger man when we get into my splendid brick mansion, as, please Heaven, we shall by this time next autumn. You shall have a room on the sunny side, old Tabby, finished and furnished as best may suit ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch occurred ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... was soon seated in a large cushioned chair, a fat tabby cat on her lap, and while Sir Edward was occupied with his keeper she was making fast friends with ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre
... know when they are well off. It is a complaint which afflicts cats, you may have noticed, and gets them into much trouble that their contemptuous temper might otherwise leave them free from. The silver tabby would have done better if she had remained asleep upon Miss Somebody's arm-chair, instead of squatting, still as marble, out in a damp field on a damp night, watching a rabbits' "stop"—which is vernacular for a bunnies' nursery—and thinking how nice raw, pink baby-rabbit would taste if she ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... a sack—the same he had used to transport Satan's corpse—and from out of it he produced a half-starved tabby, that obviously could harm no one, owing to the fact that its head was tied up in a muslin bag and its four legs ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... they walk round the prostrate carcase of their prey, growling and spitting like 'tabby' cats. They begin their operations in earnest, invariably on the buttock. A leopard generally eats the inner portion of the thigh first. A wolf tears open the belly, and eats the intestines first. A vulture, hawk, or kite, begins on the eyes; but ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... calamity! Why? Read, and you will be as wise as myself. In the middle watch of this night, our two cats—have I told you that we brought two cats from England with us?—as was their wont, were skylarking and cutting capers on the hammock nettings and davits, when tabby the lesser, instead of jumping on something palpable, made a leap on space with the natural result, for he lighted on water and was rapidly whirled astern by the inky waters of the Tartar gulf. Poor pussy, little did ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... sufficient will be left at night. 'Tis but a just and rational desire To light a taper at a neighbour's fire. There's danger too, you think, in rich array, 140 And none can long be modest that are gay. The cat, if you but singe her tabby skin, The chimney keeps, and sits content within: But once grown sleek, will from her corner run, Sport with her tail, and wanton in the sun: She licks her fair round face, and frisks abroad To show her fur, and to ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... determined on some kind of storm, but had not yet made up its mind for snow, rain, or hail. Now the wind roared in the chimney, and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her. Tabby opened her yellow eyes suddenly, and erected her smellers, but finding it was only the wind and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and yawned, and then cuddled her head down so as to show her white throat, ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... pretty little kitten, My name is Tabby Gray, I live out in the country, Some twenty miles away. My eyes are black and hazel, My skin is soft as silk; I'm fed each night and morning With a ...
— The Nursery, May 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... lounging at every turn, their delicate paws proving how little they were used to labour. On one side Bruin observed a gracefully-proportioned white cat, veiled, gliding demurely along, whilst a strong tabby, her nurse, purred behind, with three little kittens in her arms, mewing to their hearts' content; and on the other several huge mastiffs, stalking gravely in a row, like policemen in our London streets going to their beats, the animals to which they have been compared being ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... are cleaning their rifles. The proceedings are superintended by a contemplative tabby cat, coiled up in a niche, like a feline ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... that ribbon—I was playing out in the yard— She said to me most expressly: "Here's a ribbon for Hildegarde." And I went and put it on Tabby, and Hildegarde saw me do it; But I said to myself, "Oh, never mind, I don't believe she ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... a journey long enough to give him a good appetite, which made him draw near the table, where the very smell of such viands was agreeable and refreshing. The princess had a curious tabby-cat, for which she had a great kindness. This cat one of the maids of honor held in her arms, saying, "Madam, Bluet is hungry!" With that a chair was presently brought for the cat; for he was a cat of quality, and had a necklace of pearl about his neck. He ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... It is no wonder that she was anxious about Sandy and Peter and Pan, for, to begin with, she had had four fine children, and the very first night they were out of their nest, the darlings, a terrible prowling animal named Tom or Tabby had ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... they come, gliding, graceful shadows, approaching circuitously, and halting occasionally to reconnoitre—tortoiseshell, tabby, and black, all domestic cats, but all transformed for the nonce into their natural state. No longer are they the hypocritical, meek creatures who an hour ago were cadging for fish and milk. They are now ruffling, swaggering blades ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... Mexican would pass in hearing of the yells and screams and strange songs without crossing himself and begging the captain to give the rock a wide berth. But the noise is all the noise of cats. A shipwrecked tabby peopled the place many years ago, and her numerous progeny live there on dead fish and on the eggs and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... all over the house right up to the thatch, which is quite a yard thick. I have a water-colour of her, sitting outside her door, with the Royal Arms and Georgius Rex just showing over her cap, and a fat tabby cat asleep on the threshold. It was late summer when I did it, and the air was warm gold with purple shadows. I know it is a detestable trick to talk painter's shop, but I can't help it sometimes. I am reminded of this by the experiences I've had recently with my ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Lucie came into the farm-yard crying— oh, she did cry so! "I've lost my pocket-handkin! Three handkins and a pinny! Have YOU seen them, Tabby Kitten?" ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... perfume tear the soul In wish of the not unpotatoed stew, They float and fade and flutter like morning dew. And all the copper pots and pans in line, A burnished army of bright utensils, shine; And the stern butler heedless of his bunion Looks happy, and the tabby-cat of the house Forgets the elusive, but recurrent mouse And purrs and dreams; And in his corner the black-beetle seems A plumed Black Prince arrayed in gleaming mail; Whereat the shrinking scullery-maid grows pale, And flies for succour to THOMAS of the calves, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 4, 1892 • Various
... Boone's treatment of the Misses Perley was not imitated by them. They never alluded to their affluent neighbor, never suffered gossip concerning the Boones in what Olympia humorously called the "Orphic adytum," the "tabby-shop," as Wesley named the Perley parlors. Young Dick, however, had none of the scruples that kept his aunts silent. One dreadful day, when he had been nagged to fisticuffs with Wesley, whose dudish dignity exacted a certain restraint with the hot-headed youngster, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Snookers and that gang. Pick out the fellows that count, as you go along, and just remember this, if you forget the rest: if you want to put ducks in Tabby's bed or nail down his desk, do it because you want to do it, not because some other fellow wants you to do it. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... brought the tears to his eyes. He thought of everything connected with his hallowed home: of the good-natured spinster who was his housekeeper, and of the ten-acre lots upon his farm; of the red steers and the gray mare; of the shaggy watch-dog and the tabby-cat; of home in all its minutiae. Its familiar scenes visited him with a vividness which added ten-fold to their influence. He was as far abstracted as the mosquitos, which gathered in swarms upon every tenable spot ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... her solicitude should be introduced into the world, or, probably, that the kitten had attained an age when it could protect itself, she took advantage of a dark and silent night, when cat-worrying dogs and boys were reposing, to convey it safely to Truro, where tabby and her ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... beast, with arched back and purring like a contented tabby, rubbed his sides against the ape-man, and then at a word from the latter sprang lightly to his former place in the bow of ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with drab moreen. Sir George's servant had brought her back; he was the rogue in the play; it was Lady Harriet Wentworth and footman Sturgeon over again. She had come back in a Flemish hat and a white cloth Joseph with black facings; she had come back in her night-rail; she had come back in a tabby gauze, with a lace head and lappets. Nor were there wanting other rumours, of an after-dinner Wilkes-and-Lord-Sandwich flavour, which we refrain from detailing; but which the Castle Inn, after the mode of the eighteenth century, discussed with ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... scarlet tabby negligee,—a sort of undress, or sack, then much in vogue,—which suited her to admiration, and upon her head had what was called a fly-cap, with richly-laced lappets. Mrs. Maggot was equipped in a light blue riding-habit, trimmed with silver, a hunting-cap and a flaxen peruke, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... like to bear a hand, too, in the work of demolition! But I never shall forget Liszt's look as he so lazily proposed to "pitch everything out of the window." It reminded me of the expression of a big tabby-cat as it sits by the fire and purrs away, blinking its eyes and seemingly half-asleep, when suddenly—!—! out it strikes with both its claws, and woe to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... away for a bit. I'll find the money somehow. I won't have you baited by all the old tabby-cats ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... think last Tuesday I'd be begging to-day, Emma," interrupted a young man from across the stream of water which ran down the centre of Main Street. "I'm sitting on your aunt Tabby's trunk." The girl gave a cry, half of pained remembrance, half of pleasure. "Oh, my dear Aunt Tabby!" she cried, and, rushing across the rivulet, she threw herself across the battered leather trunk—sole surviving relic of Aunt Tabby; but Aunt Tabby and the finding ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... general untidiness of her surroundings, while the woman hastily cleared the table and set out a teacup and saucer, a huge loaf, butter, and a pot of tea. The dog had made friends, and crept up to Honor, snuggling his nose into her hand; and a tabby cat, interested in the preparations, came purring eagerly to join the feast. Honor did not know whether to call it late breakfast, dinner, or tea, but she told Janie afterwards she thought she must ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... we came about and headed for Denboro. Next thing we had to haul up abreast of that old tumbledown shed at the end of Tabby Crosby's lot there by the meetin'-house while Mr. Phillips hopped out and got a couple of great big satchels he'd left there. Big as trunks they was, pretty nigh, and time he got them stowed in here there wan't no room ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... had bound by Lortic, by Trautz-Bauzonnet or Chambolle, by the successors of Cape, in irreproachable covers of old silk, stamped cow hide, Cape goat skin, in full bindings with compartments and in mosaic designs, protected by tabby or moire watered silk, ecclesiastically ornamented with clasps and corners, and sometimes even enamelled by Gruel Engelmann with silver oxide ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... coldly at Akulina, and then looking at his cigarette. Akulina is a broad, fat woman, with a flattened Tartar face, small eyes, good but short teeth, full lips and a dark complexion. She reminds one of an over-fed tabby cat, of doubtful temper, and her voice seems to reach utterance after traversing some thick, soft medium, which lends it an odd sort of guttural richness. She moves quietly but heavily and has an Asiatic second sight in the ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... discussing the probabilities of the case, a young woman of fine appearance, and high standing in society, the pride of her husband, and the mother of an infant daughter, only a few miles from us, ay, in D- County, too, was actually beating in the skull of a slave-woman called Tabby; and not content with that, had her tied up and whipped, after her skull was broken, and she died hanging to the bedstead, to which she had been fastened. When informed that Tabby was dead, she answered, 'I am glad of it, for she has worried my life out ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... lofty vase's side Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow, Demurest of the tabby kind The pensive Selima, reclined, Gazed ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... "possession" (as it were), those who survive, of her daily and household companions, are clear in their testimony, that never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant. It had become necessary to give Tabby—now nearly eighty years of age—the assistance of a girl. Tabby relinquished any of her work with jealous reluctance, and could not bear to be reminded, though ever so delicately, that the acuteness of her senses was dulled by age. The other ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... with easy step and shining, rosy face, rejoicing at once in the odor of sanctity and of a good dinner. The sight of this placidly lazy and provokingly comfortable churchman had upon the man of law the same effect that the sight of a sleek tabby has upon a terrier. In two minutes Master Geoffrey has jostled against the friar and contrived to pick a quarrel with him. Hereupon followed a lively game at single-stick, in which, no doubt, Chaucer's fellow-students backed loudly the law against the church. At first ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... declaration, which must be admitted to have been more remarkable for frankness than civility, made, however, no ill impression on Mrs. Sally. To the farmer's she went, and at his house she lives still, with her little maid, her tabby cat, a decrepit sheep-dog, and much of the lumber of Court Farm, which she could not find in her heart to part from. There she follows her old ways and her old hours, untempted by matrimony, and unassailed (as far as I hear) by love or by scandal, with no other ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... white cat with a pink nose and pink lips and pink pads under her paws. Her tabby hood came down in a peak between her green eyes. Her tabby cape went on along the back of her tail, tapering to the tip. Sarah crouched against the fireguard, her haunches raised, her head sunk back on her shoulders, and her paws tucked in ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
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