"Cast-off" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me, George," he said piteously. "I don't ask you much—a crust of bread, a corner to sleep in, and a cast-off suit of clothes: that's not much for one brother ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... be appreciated only by those who come face to face with the facts. While some of the best patriots of the North went down with the right motives to mingle in the reconstruction of the State governments of the South, many of these pilgrimists were the cast-off and thieving politicians of the North, who, after being stoned out of Northern waters, crawled up on the beach at the South to sun themselves. The Southern States had enough dishonest men of their own without any ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... tall, ragged yellow birch, its partially cast-off bark hanging in crisp sheets or ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... tree, and afraid to use more of my own clothes, I went over to Mrs. Walters, and got from her an old bonnet and veil, a dress and cape, and a pair of her cast-off yellow gaiters. These garments I strung together and prepared to look life-like, as nearly as a stuffing of hay would meet the inner requirements of the case. I them seated the dread apparition in the fork of a limb, and awaited results. ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... swallowed nor his wisdom inly digested. Probably the highest, ripest, and most acceptable form of worship is that performed with a knife and fork; and whosoever on the resurrection morning can produce from amongst the lumber of his cast-off flesh a thin-coated and elastic stomach, showing evidences of daily stretchings done in the body, will find it his readiest passport and best credential. We believe that God will not hold him guiltless who eats with his knife, but if the deadly steel be always ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... the colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was a lady's waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery: his prose is a beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook, looks round her, abashed at the admiration her charms ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Fellow, keep the cash, that clears To-day of unpaid debts and future fears. To-morrow! Why, to-morrow, you may be, Yourself, with Yesterday's cast-off millionaires. ...
— The Rubaiyat of a Bachelor • Helen Rowland
... "there are tears enough in this world, and we need not deposit a few more in the heart of man. These," said he, showing the verses, "are the cast-off, useless feathers of my soul; it has moulted since then, and spread its bolder wings for eternity!" He then continued to burn and destroy, while I looked out of the broken window ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... says that the judge of the peace sent him to request me to call on him. I went to his office in a lemon grove on a hill at the edge of the town; and there I had a surprise. I expected to see one of the usual cinnamon-colored natives in congress gaiters and one of Pizzaro's cast-off hats. What I saw was an elegant gentleman of a slightly claybank complexion sitting in an upholstered leather chair, sipping a highball and reading Mrs. Humphry Ward. I had smuggled into my brain a few words of Spanish by the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... the new God done for him? Was his work lighter? No! Was the food not the cast-off's still, fouled by the touch and the tongues of others and by the dirt of the pen? Yes. If the new God was good, why had He not saved ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... sooner than have other people's cast-off sticks in my house. Where's your pride gone ...
— Hobson's Choice • Harold Brighouse
... occasionally include them, the author has a passion for circumstantiality, and, like the average Russian, such a desire for accuracy as even a German could not rival. To what the reader already knows concerning the personages in hand it is therefore necessary to add that Petrushka usually wore a cast-off brown jacket of a size too large for him, as also that he had (according to the custom of individuals of his calling) a pair of thick lips and a very prominent nose. In temperament he was taciturn rather than loquacious, and he cherished a yearning for self-education. That is to say, he loved ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... simple forms of government, nor any combination of them. The attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of government recognized by political writers, is an attempt to clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past. The American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy, better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better than any possible combination of these several forms, because it accords more nearly with the principles ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... just the finest hole to serve as the bed of his cooking fire, where a body of red embers would after a little while invite them to place their frying-pan and coffee-pot on the iron grating they carried for the purpose, and which was really the gridiron-like contrivance belonging to a cast-off stove's oven. ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... fritillary!" said she. "I hope you care for butterflies, Mr. Pellew. I simply dote on them." She was conscious of indebtedness for this to her sister Lilian. Never mind!—Lilian was married now, and had no further occasion to be enchanting. A sister might borrow a cast-off. Its effect was to make the gentleman clearly alive to the fact that she knew exactly why ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... at length a gentle rap on the door, and Brutus, with high standing collar, wearing a cast-off coat given him by his master, his round-bowed spectacles on the tip of his nose, entered the room, bowing very low. He took his stand in one corner and tuned his violin. The chairs and light-stand were removed to ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... it in, and hide it as if it were some necessary sewer; for the only course for a free community to pursue is to foresee evil and grapple with it, and destroy it in the bud. To diminish the number of cast-off children one must seek out the mothers, encourage them, succor them, and give them the means to be mothers in fact as well as in name. At that moment, however, Mathieu did not reason; it was his heart that was affected, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... you set them on by rejecting them. They run about like blind, mad oxen till they bump their stupid heads against somebody that will have them. I shouldn't wonder if I got a second-hand husband one day, taking up with some cast-off of yours." ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... grace, flourishes for elegance, and exaggeration for merit, Annette soon acquired a reputation in her circle, as a woman of more than usual claims to distinction. Her attire was in the height of the fashion, being of Eve's cast-off clothes, and of the best materials, and attire is also a point that is not without its influence on those who are unaccustomed to ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Dante we are walking in Hell; see, there is a form, half human and half animal, creeping towards us with lewd look and suggestion. Yonder is an old hag fearful to look upon. Here a group of cast-off wives, whom the law has allowed outraged husbands to consign to this perdition; but who, when sober enough, come back to the upperworld and drag others down to share ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... Pleasure inseparable. My greatest Delight has been in being imploy'd about her Person; and indeed she is very seldom out of Humour for a Woman of her Quality: But here lies my Complaint, Sir; To bear with me is all the Encouragement she is pleased to bestow upon me; for she gives her cast-off Cloaths from me to others: some she is pleased to bestow in the House to those that neither wants nor wears them, and some to Hangers-on, that frequents the House daily, who comes dressed out in them. This, Sir, is a very mortifying Sight to me, who am a little ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... corselets and helmets. But as helmets, corselets and even kilts wore out or lost their freshness more slowly than tunics, there were many imitation kilts and corselets of sheepskin painted, and many cheap, light helmets of willow-wood, covered with dogskin. But all these had genuine plumes, as cast-off plumes were even more plentiful ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Buddhist occultism has found congenial fellowship in American spiritualism. Of late we hear less of spirit-rappings and far more of Theosophy. But this is only the same crude system with other names, and rendered more respectable by the cast-off garments of old Indian philosophy. There is a disposition in the more intellectual circles to assume a degree of disdain toward the crudeness of spiritualism and its vulgar familiarity with departed spirits, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... he will, perhaps, get a little cast-off clothing, good sir," said the grandmother; "a shirt, or a waistcoat, just ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... as a bigot, or shunned as a nuisance. But the overbearing minister of nature, who snaps you with unphilosophical as the clergyman once frightened you with infidel, is still a recognized member of society, wants taming, and will get it. He wears the priest's cast-off {195} clothes, dyed to escape detection: the better sort of philosophers would gladly set him to square ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... coarsest materials, generally hung in tatters about his tall spare figure, and he had been known to wear the cast-off shoes of a beggar; yet, in spite of such absurd acts, he maintained a proud and upright carriage, and never, by his speech or manners, seemed to forget for one moment that he held the rank of a gentleman. His hands and face were always scrupulously clean, for water costs nothing, and time, to him, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... badly-shaven beards, and by their voices and gait.[1431] No difficulty has been found in obtaining men and women among the prostitutes of the Palais-Royal and the military deserters who serve them as bullies. It is probable that the former lent their lovers the cast-off dresses they had to spare. At night all will meet again at the common rendezvous, on the benches of the National Assembly, where they are quite as much at home as in their own houses.[1432]—In any event, the first band which marches out is of this stamp, displaying the finery and the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the feet; the chitoniskos, a shorter and more ornamental garment worn over it; and the mantle, himation. Pieces of cloth or rags are also mentioned among the entries; these were probably the remnants of cast-off garments dedicated by their wearers. Some of the dresses are described as embroidered with ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... been giving me trouble. The spokes that I made of green oak, having become dry and wobbly, I had been on the outlook for a cast-off wheel, that I might appropriate the spokes. Hence it was, that, after luncheon I took my rifle, and started out across the bottom, where, within a few rods of the river, and about a half a mile off the road which turned close along the bluff, I came upon an old broken-down ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... we have a wholesome fear of criticism,—that, if we make blunders in our seamanship, even though professedly land-lubbers, some awful Knickerbocker stands by with the Marine Dictionary in hand to pounce upon us. But for the poor little innocents at home any cast-off rags of knowledge are good enough. We hand down to them the worn-out platitudes of history which we have carefully eschewed. We humbug their inexperience with the same nursery fables beneath whose leonine hide our matured ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... as in a stupor. Could it be that he was dead! If he had been less of an object of her thoughts, less of a motive for her labours, she could sooner have realized it. As it was, she followed his poor, cast-off, worn-out body as if she were borne along by some oppressive dream. If he were really dead, how could ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... bummer, while, of course, rarely of the latest fashion, is still generally sound and whole, except when on an expedition in pursuit of a wardrobe. This he obtains by 'asking,' though sometimes he will buy cast-off garments in Baxter street, but in general he prefers to beg for it. Some keep dilapidated clothing expressly to wear when begging, and even lend it to others to use for the purpose. Some also make a ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... this godly jewel, this treasure, the fear of the Lord. Poor vagrants, when they come straggling to a lord's house, may perhaps obtain some scraps and fragments, they may also obtain old shoes, and some sorry cast-off rags, but they get not any of his jewels, they may not touch his choicest treasure; that is kept for the children, and those that shall be his heirs. We may say the same also of this blessed grace of fear, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Ishmael, the screwtwar, as you call it, was among the old furnitur' sent down from the mansion-house here, to fit up this place when I first came into it; you see, the housekeeper up there sends the cast-off furniture to the overseer, same as she sends the cast-off ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... replied Father Kit-chee, "I found that skin over yonder in the pasture. You know that A-tos-sa the Snake sheds his skin when it grows old and stiff, and grows a new one that fits him better. We just pick up the cast-off skins and build them into ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... orangeade, Thus heaping honors on two noble men. (Exit muchacho) Quezox: But thought hath strayed like an unbridled steed, And I must harness it to work my will. This Bonset: Francos seems to love him well And may him thrust in Carpen's cast-off shoes; My bowels gripe me with suspicion dire That plans are rip'ning to this very end; Hence we must pour in an unwilling ear A weighty protest ere the scheme matures. An open opposition were not wise For Francos hath, I ween a stubborn streak Which ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... broadest merriment was excited by a group of figures ridiculously dressed in old regimentals which seemed to have been purchased at a military rag-fair or pilfered from some receptacle of the cast-off clothes of both the French and British armies. Portions of their attire had probably been worn at the siege of Louisburg, and the coats of most recent cut might have been rent and tattered by sword, ball or bayonet as long ago as Wolfe's victory. One of these worthies—a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whether the hypothesis of "cast-off films" is more absurd when we make the films come from things to us as spectral effluxes, or go from us to them in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture—types of cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to preserve—we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its more solemn ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Emma Taylor's voice was at this moment heard so distinctly, from the other side of the boat that Mr. Wyllys looked up from his paper, and Mr. Ellsworth smiled. It was very evident the young lady had inherited the peculiar tone of voice, and all the cast-off animation of her ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... "full fig." With one officer, Colonel William Levy, since a member of Congress from Louisiana, I made my appearance on a hand-car, the motive power of which was two negroes. Descendants of the ancient race of Abraham, dealers in cast-off raiment, would have scorned to bargain for our rusty suits of Confederate gray. General Canby met me with much urbanity. We retired to a room, and in a few moments agreed upon a truce, terminable ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... service, there were six couples married. Some of the dresses were unique. One was particularly fine,—doubtless a cast-off dress of the bride's former mistress. The silk and lace, ribbons, feathers and flowers, were in a rather faded and decayed condition. But, comical as the costumes were, we were not disposed to laugh at them. We were too ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... exclaimed, "Bernadine has scored, indeed! Your friend has a sense of humor which overwhelms me. Imagine it. He has delivered the two heads of our great Society into the hands of one of its cast-off branches! Bernadine ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... woods, And decked with flowers and rich with rare perfumes, And when the queen was gently laid thereon, As in sweet sleep, and the pile set aflame, The king cried out in anguish; when the sage Again appeared, and gently said, "Weep not! Seek not, O king, the living with the dead! 'Tis but her cast-off garment, not herself, That now dissolves in air. Thy loved one lives, Become thy deva,[9] who was erst thy queen." This said, he vanished, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... in the street of the clothes-merchants; there are more second-hand dealers than tailors in China; one has no repugnance for another's cast-off raiment, and frequently one does not deign even to clean it. I enter a fashionable shop: the master is a natty little old man, his nose armed with formidable spectacles which do but partly conceal his dull, malignant eyes. Three young people in turn exhibit to the passer-by his different ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... without any heart to keep a military prison. I have several times asked to be relieved and sent to the front." An officer of forceful executive ability might have procured for us lumber for benches, more coal or wood for the stoves, some straw or hay for bedding, blankets or cast-off clothing for the half naked; possibly a little food, certainly a supply of reading matter from the charitably disposed. Single instances of his compassion I have mentioned. I shall have occasion to speak of another. But the spectacle of the hopeless ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... a minute and guess. Can not? Try it again! Not yet? No—nor could you, were you to try from New Year's morn to New Year's eve. Wonderful, as you may think it, Sprigg saw there on the ground, not a dozen paces from him, his cast-off moccasins, coming slowly toward him—first the right foot, then the left—without so much as a pair of knee buckles to show for legs, till they had set their toes within easy speaking distance, squarely confronting him. The boy stood stock still, staring ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... surgery door and could see nobody. I dried my tears and looked all round the room—it was empty. I ran upstairs again to Uncle George's garret bedroom—he was not there; his cheap hairbrush and old cast-off razor-case that had belonged to my grandfather were not on the dressing-table. Had he got some other bedroom? I went out on the landing and called softly, with an unaccountable terror and sinking ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... by the Pandava in that assembly of Rishis, the worshipful Markandeya of high ascetic merit replied, 'Agneya (Son of Agni), Skanda (Cast-off), Diptakirti (Of blazing fame), Anamaya (Always hale), Mayuraketu (Peacock-bannered), Dharmatman (The virtuous-souled), Bhutesa (The lord of all creatures), Mahishardana (The slayer of Mahisha), Kamajit (The subjugator of desires), Kamada (The fulfiller of desires), Kanta ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... fellows thinks they've got a great chance wit' our cast-off, Diablo," volunteered Mike. "I had a peep at him in the stall, an' he's ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... It was a very simple matter. A foreign family, finding themselves in straitened circumstances, were desirous of parting with various things, consisting for the most part in articles of female attire. They were anxious, therefore, to meet with a dealer in cast-off clothes, and this was one of Elizabeth's callings. She had a large connection, because she was very honest and always stuck to her price: there was no higgling to be done with her. She was a woman of few words ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... a thing could be, in her finger-ends. All that she touches falls at once into harmony and proportion. Her eye for color and form is intuitive: let her arrange a garret, with nothing but boxes, barrels, and cast-off furniture in it, and ten to one she makes it seem the most attractive place in the house. It is a veritable "gift of good faerie," this tact of beautifying and arranging, that some women have; and, on the present ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a number of his tenants from the Helderberg, a mountain region famous for the hardest heads and hardest fists in the province. Nicholas Koorn, a faithful squire of the patroon, accustomed to strut at his heels, wear his cast-off clothes, and imitate his lofty bearing, was established in this post as wacht-meester. His duty it was to keep an eye on the river, and oblige every vessel that passed, unless on the service of their High Mightinesses, to strike its flag, lower its peak, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... good and wholesome food, clean and comfortable quarters. Once in a while give them a holiday, or an evening off, a cash remembrance at Christmas, and from time to time some part of your wardrobe or cast-off clothing. They are just like children, and must be treated with the rigor and mild discipline which a schoolmaster uses toward his pupils. In all their movements they should be noiseless and as automatic as possible in ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... They were the cast-off eccentricities of the fashions of six years ago, and had drifted from the Rue de la Paix to this obscure Serbian shop which was selling them as serious articles of clothing. Jo tried them on, and one of the nurses became so weak with laughter that she tumbled ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... ill-regulated midshipman's berth—more oceans, seas, bays, and promontories, than nature ever gave to this unhappy globe. Beneath these were discovered a pair of dark blue worsted stockings, terminated by a pair of purser's shoes—things of a hybrid breed, between a pair of cast-off slippers and the ploughman's clodhoppers, fitting as well as the former, and nearly as heavy as the latter. Now, this costume, in the depth of winter, was sufficiently light and bizarre; but the manner in which I had contrived to decorate my countenance soon riveted all attention to that specimen ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Could I not be happy dissevered eternally from billiard-room and kursaal, race-ground and dancing-rooms? Yes, completely and unreservedly happy—happy as a village curate with seventy pounds a year and a cast-off coat, supplied by the charity of a land too poor to pay its pastors the wage of a decent butler—happy as a struggling farmer, though the clay soil of my scanty acres were never so sour and stubborn, my landlord never so hard about his rent—happy as a ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... at once, but I sat still for a moment. Why had I asked him? Of course it was Leah. I could see her strange light-coloured eyes glancing up in my direction. What was she doing in London? I wondered. She was dressed well, evidently in her mistress's cast-off clothes, for she wore a handsome silk dress and mantle. Had they quarrelled and parted? I felt instinctively that it would be a good day for Gladwyn if Leah ever shook off its dust from her feet. Gladys regarded her as ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... abroad, whose shoes he had had the honor of polishing. The only person in whose presence he restrained his braggadocio style was Phillis. Her utter contempt for nonsense was too evident. Bacchus was the same size as his master, and often fell heir to his cast-off clothes. A blue dress-coat and buff vest that he thus inherited, had a great effect upon him, bodily and spiritually. Not only did he swagger more when arrayed in them, but his prayers and singing were doubly ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... lastly, there was the bottle broken into fragments and thrown to the dust heap; but, without doubt, the counterpart of the one found at Miss Wardour's bedside on the morning of the robbery; while, among some cast-off garments, had been found the half of a handkerchief, that matched precisely the one found over the face of the heiress. All these facts Mr. Belknap had laid before her with elaborate explanations, and "notes by the way," but instead of drawing from her the expected indignant demand ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... usual run of those dignitaries, who differed chiefly from their uncrossed comrades and brethren in having no wife to be unfaithful to. He is never false to Manon—the incident of one of Manon's lovers trying vainly to tempt his rival, with a pretty cast-off mistress of his own, is one of the most striking features of the book. He positively reveres, not his mother, who is dead, and reverence for whom would be nothing in a Frenchman, but his father, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... shortly after MRS. KRAUSE. She is small, slightly deformed and gotten up in her mistress's cast-off garments. While MRS. KRAUSE is speaking she looks up at her with a certain devout attention. She is about fifty-five years old. Every time she exhales her breath she utters a gentle moan, which is regularly audible, even when she speaks, as ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... out his own magnificent project. That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to whose personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom history knows few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the son of an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of Macedon. There were those who said that he was in reality a son of Philip himself. However, he rose at court, became a private friend of young Alexander, and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of the Life Guards. And from thence ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Smith, "that Powhatan hath a sense of humor and doth wish to show us that his coronation hath so increased his importance that his cast-off garments have perforce won ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... "and this is the sum and substance of her offence! And all these witnesses," pointing to a group, who had pushed themselves forward, "have been brought into this honourable court, to affix the ownership of the high and mighty noble Duke and Duchess to these cast-off, worn-out clothes! And here comes this fine gentleman to swear to the robber of that," holding up the garment, "which he himself would not accept as a gift! Shame, say I; and I am certain every one of your hearts, Gentlemen of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... quotation is peculiar to literature. We do not glory to quote our costume, dress in cast-off court robes, or furnish our houses from the marine store. Neither are we proud of alien initials on the domestic silver. We like things new and primarily our own. We have a wholesome instinct against infection, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... revenge he did everything with blood and fire. The younger, who was by nature kind-hearted, resigned himself to his shameful fate along with his mother, and they lived on what the woods afforded, clothing themselves in the cast-off rags of travelers. She had lost her name, being known only as the convict, the prostitute, the scourged. He was known as the son of his mother only, because the gentleness of his disposition led every one to believe that he was not the son of the incendiary and because any doubt ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... than that of the richest peasant women. On fete-days they appeared in dresses that were really pretty, obtained, Heaven knows how! For one thing, the men-servants at Les Aigues sold to them, at prices that were easily paid, the cast-off clothing of the lady's-maids, which, after sweeping the streets of Paris and being made over to fit Marie and Catherine, appeared triumphantly in the precincts of the Grand-I-Vert. These girls, bohemians of the valley, received not one penny in money from their parents, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... into MacMaster's book. James had so long been steeped in that penetrating personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his very phrases, mannerisms, and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter's discarded coats. If the painter's letters were formal and perfunctory, if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory, and often apparently insincere—still, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... all is done and in the oozing clay, Ye lay this cast-off hull of mine away, Pray not for me, for, after long despair, The quiet of the grave will ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... oats, and barley were added to our battle-honours. But if the spirit was willing, our reaping implements were correspondingly weak. The Corps 'Agricultural Officer' had collected from surrounding farms a fantastic assortment of cast-off scythes, jagged hooks, and rusty sickles, which fell to pieces 'in the 'ands' and refused to do more than beat down the crops to which they were opposed. The scythes seemed hardly able to stick their points, in the approved ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... with wide-open eyes. They had dirty faces, the smallest one dirty legs also, for he or she wore nothing but a small shirt. The next in size had a shirt supplemented with a trousers-like garment reaching to the knees; and so on, progressively, up to the biggest boy, who wore the cast-off parental toggery, and so, instead of having too little on, was, in a sense, overdressed. I asked this youngster for a can of water to quench my thirst and a stick of fire to light my cigar. He ran into the kitchen, or living-room, and by and by came out ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... principal favourite. It makes the young Jew ashamed of the young Jewess; it makes her ashamed of the young Jew. The young Jew marries an opera dancer, or if the dancer will not have him, as is frequently the case, the cast-off Miss of the Honourable Spencer So-and-so. It makes the young Jewess accept the honourable offer of a cashiered lieutenant of the Bengal Native Infantry; or if such a person does not come forward, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... now, since you haven't your rope along. Here's just the ticket—some old fence rails lying in a heap. Cheer up, comrade, we'll have you out of that in a jiffy now," sang out Frank, seizing one of the long, cast-off rails, and dropping it on the surface ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... changing under our eyes. It was only yesterday that the worker in literature, sculpture, painting, or music was a sickly, morbid, anaemic, peculiar specimen, distrusted at sight by the average man, and a shining mark for all the cast-off wit of the world. Gilbert never tired of describing him in "Patience." He was a "foot-in-the-grave young man," or a "Je-ne-sais-quoi young man." ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... a good humor. The sight of his darling of yesterday, dressed in such magnificence to celebrate the day on which her poor wretched cast-off lover was to blow his brains out, roused such a joy in his heart that it was impossible not to show it in ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... life," she said; "and I was so young, so ignorant, and loved you so. You betrayed me, and left me mocking me and trampling me into the dust, a soiled cast-off. You might better have killed me then. Then I should ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... gave her a long look from head to foot The dress was a poor enough velveteen and had a cast-off air, but it clung to her figure finely, and its sleeves were picturesque with puffs at the shoulder and slashings of white,—indeed the moonlight made her all black and white; her eyes, which were tawny brown by day, were black as velvet now under the straight lines ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for you! But you know I was always rather vain of my looks, and I do believe that the greatest terror poverty holds for me is the knowing that I must wear seedy hats and threadbare coats, and trousers a year behind. Maybe Grey will sometime send me a box of his cast-off clothes. ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... civilized life, adopts its arts, shaves his poodle, and puts on a black coat.—Hints at the process by which a Cast-off exalts himself ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fork in hand for the sake of a little gentle exercise. One unhappy Jacques Bonhomme made hot and toilsome hay in thick brown clothes, plainly manufactured from a defunct Brother's gown; for, to judge from appearances, a cast-off gown is a thing unknown. It was good to see a Brother, in horn spectacles of mediaeval cut, tenderly chopping a log for firewood, and peering at it through his spectacles after each stroke, as a man examines some delicate piece of ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... relative of the king-bird, the great crested fly-catcher, has one well known peculiarity: he appears never to consider his nest finished until it contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert correspondent one day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin and make off with it, either deceived by it or else thinking it a good substitute ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... it is weak and unmanly, but you don't know anything about it. Time or the fever may cure me, but now I am bankrupt in all that gives value to life. A woman with an art so consummate that it seemed artless, deliberately evoked the best there was in me, then threw it away as indifferently as a cast-off glove." ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... front of the hotel, and the top of the Coustous as well. The first-named is the fruit, flower, and vegetable market; the second, the grain and potato; and the third, the iron and old shoe market. The amount and variety of old iron and cast-off shoes exposed for sale is astonishing. And if the vendors were given to crying their wares they might indulge in something like the ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... replacing it himself against her bosom, where the breath seemed to struggle with such panting haste and fear— "Thou art welcome to the dead leaves sanctified by song, if thou thinkest them of value, but I would rather see the rosebud of love nestled in that pretty white breast of thine, than the cast-off ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... every conceivable attitude, and, uncovering their feet, commenced pelting each other with the cast-off leathers. When the sport had lasted a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... rattling of trunks, a jangling of keys, a thousand good-byes, a cast-off season, and the Deppinghams were racing away for the island of Japat somewhere in ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... can often find dozens of the cast-off skins of the stone flies along the brook sides in the month ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley
... retired shelf, and in many an odd corner, too, I saw neglected cartridge boxes, cast-off belts, discarded caps, etc., which told, not of the careless and heedless soldier, who had lost his accoutrements, but of the dead soldier, who had gone to a land where it is to be hoped he will have no further use for Minie rifle ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... center stood the deaf and dumb child, dressed in a white frock, with a little silk mantilla over it, made from a cast-off garment belonging to one of the ladies of the circus. She wore a plain straw hat, ornamented with a morsel of narrow white ribbon, and tied under the chin with the same material. Her clear, delicate complexion ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... hour at which letters were distributed. In order to be able to spy at his ease and hang about the house, he had followed the example of those police officers who seek a good disguise, and bought up cast-off clothes of an Auvergnat, the appearance of whom he sought to imitate. When the postman, who went the round of the Rue Saint Lazare that morning, passed by, Laurent feigned to be a porter unable to remember the name of a person to whom he had to deliver a parcel, and consulted the postman. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... her on the shoulder or put his arm about her and kissed her. Until she died years later she was truly his uppermost thought, crying with her at times over her troubles and his. He contributed regularly to her support and sent home all his cast-off clothing to be made over for the younger ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... while she awaited him in a little wood close by. The good man was overjoyed to be of use, and started at once for the nearest town, where he soon discovered a shop where the court lackeys were accustomed to sell their masters' cast-off clothes. The princess dressed herself at once in the disguise he had brought, which was of rich material and covered with precious stones; and, putting her own garments into a bag, which her servant hung over his shoulders, they both set ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... as if they belonged to nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness, promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. He was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother's heels, equipped in a pair of his father's cast-off galligaskins, which he had much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her train in ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... pale and haggard; for he had passed through three judicial ordeals since the last sunset, besides being scourged with the flagellum horrible and exposed to the rude buffeting of the midnight guard. He had been clothed in the cast-off purple of the Roman procurator and wore a derisive crown of thorns. But, as he issued from the Hall of Judgment, such was his commanding presence that the multitude was hushed ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... of a street pedlar of sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off finery of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... which is our life, is a complex fluid. It contains the materials out of which the tissues are made, and also the debris which results from the destruction of the same tissues,—the worn-out cells of brain and muscle,—the cast-off clothes of emotion, thought, and power. It is a common carrier, conveying unceasingly to every gland and tissue, to every nerve and organ, the fibrin and albumen which repair their constant waste, thus supplying their daily bread; and as unceasingly conveying away from every gland and tissue, from ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... Ireland, as though he had the entree of them all; which it was palpable to the most superficial observer he never could have had, except possibly when, armed with a dingy bag on his shoulder and an "Ol clo'" on his lips, he sought an investment in cast-off garments. He was taking cigars, which, from their quantity, were evidently for sale; and as the American Government is very liberal in allowing passengers to enter cigars, never—I believe—refusing any one the privilege of five hundred, he ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... to the child that he was to live among orphans or cast-off children, and would be himself as much cast off as if he had come from ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... tremendous purple. It springs upon you, as you turn from Old Street, and envelops you. There are high, black tenement houses. There are low cottages and fumbling passages. There are mellow fried-fish shops at every few yards. There are dirty beer-houses and a few public-houses. There are numerous cast-off clothing salons. And there are screeching Cockney women, raw and raffish, brutalized children, and men who would survive in the fiercest jungle. Also there is the Britannia Theatre and Hotel. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... grass-grown now, and is full of small dingles covered with hawthorns. It is a great place for tramps to camp in, and half the dingles have little grey circles in them where the camping fires have been lit. I did not mind that evidence of life, but I did not like the cast-off clothing, draggled hats, coats, skirts, and boots that lay about. I never can fathom the mystery of tramps' wardrobes. They are never well-dressed exactly, but wherever they encamp they appear to discard clothing enough for two or three persons, clothing which, though I should not personally ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... only to the deep disgrace of the freest and happiest country on earth. A poor orphan girl, like many of her class in our hospitable slave world, had been a mere cast-off upon the community. She knew nothing of the world, was ignorant, could neither read nor write,—something quite common in the south, but seldom known in New England. Thus she became the associate of depraved negroes, and again, served Romescos as a victim. Not content ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... berth. He placed the trunk and some other articles there so as to form a sort of breast-work, behind which he carefully bestowed himself. It was not an uncomfortable position, for the floor was carpeted and an old satchel filled with his cast-off garments furnished him a pillow sufficiently soft for ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... time prescribed and limited by God himself for the expiation of some of his greatest judgments," passed by, and the ex-chancellor died at Rouen. He had begun his history in exile as the faithful servant of a dethroned prince; he ended it in exile, as the cast-off servant of an ungrateful monarch. As a writer of contemporary history, Clarendon has given us the form and color of the time. The book is in title and handling a Royalist history. Its faults are manifest: first those of partisanship; and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... of some of this class to knock at the doors of those thought to be better off, on the evening before, begging "something for Thanksgiving;" and, by way of a joke, the children of comfortable neighbors and friends would often array themselves in cast-off bizarre habiliments, and come in bands of three or four to the houses of those whom they knew, preferring the same request. Ordinarily, the disguise was readily detected. Sometimes the little mimics would come in, and keep up the show and the fun ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... question an epoch, and a prolonged one, when the mill shared with household demands an immense quota of the cast-off literature of these islands. One of our early collectors of Caxtons, Ratcliff, whose books were sold in 1776, acquired his taste (one in a thousand) through his vocation as a chandler or storekeeper ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... whom the most romantic love could attach to the apron-strings of any woman. And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what he would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace. The condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife and family and the legal and moral responsibilities of ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... wriggled like living vermin, and ankles covered with vermicelli dipped in ink; then the most impossibly threadbare and discoloured coats, made, as it seemed, of old billiard cloths, of tarpaulin worn to the canvas, of cast-off awnings; overcoats of cast iron, the surface worn off the back-seam and sleeves—glaucous waistcoats, sprigged with flowers and furnished with buttons of dry brawn-parings; and all this was as nothing; what was prodigious, beyond the bounds of belief, fabulous, positively insane, was the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... was a tiny hut, hardly big enough for a shepherd's shelter. It looked as if it had been built of discarded things, scraps and fragments of other buildings, put together with care and pains, by some one who had tried to make the most of cast-off material. There was something pitiful and shamefaced about the hut. It shrank and drooped in its barren field, and seemed to cling only by sufferance to the edge of the ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... impression. Let the reader imagine to himself, if he can, the effect of a sudden transition from the pomp and splendour of a great capital into a suburb of mean and narrow streets, choked up with the litter of old rags, broken furniture, and cast-off clothes hung out for sale; where are aged women asleep in their chairs,—young ones nursing infants, or, it may be, perfecting their own unfinished toilets; men, squalid and filthy, with long beards, flowing robes, and all the other appurtenances which usually belong to their race; children ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... might say, we had thus fifty extra infantry, ten of them neither uniformed nor armed as yet, but all of them at least afraid to run away. Tugendheim looked doubtful for a minute, but he was given his choice of that, or death, or of wearing a Syrian's cast-off clothes and driving mules. He well understood (for I could tell by his manner of consenting) that Ranjoor Singh would send him into action against the first Turks we could find, thus committing him to further treason against the Central ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... example, where once stood the royal kraal, Duguza, and watches men and women of the Zulu blood passing homeward from the cities or the mines, bemused, some of them, with the white man's smuggled liquor, grotesque with the white man's cast-off garments, hiding, perhaps, in their blankets examples of the white man's doubtful photographs—and then shuts his sunken eyes and remembers the plumed and kilted regiments making that same ground shake as, with a thunder of salute, line upon ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... courage. Thereupon he crushed and killed his companion with a shower of flints, and flung his bloodless corpse into the waves, having dressed it in his own clothes; which he stripped off, borrowing the cast-off garb of the other, so that when the corpse was seen it might look as if the king had perished. He further deliberately drew blood from the beast on which he had ridden, and bespattered it, so that when it came back into camp he might make them think he himself was dead. Then he set ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned") |
