"Snuffy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for an elaborate parterre of flowers, or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one side of his head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled in anapaestics about kids and shepherds' crooks. Only fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with his hair-powder whitening half his shoulders, led up before some charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein all the nymphs are simpering marchionesses, with rosettes on their high-heeled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... in the most careless dishabille, wigless and unpainted, and rolled up comfortably in an old wadded morning-gown that had seen years of snuffy service. But she had out-lived her vanity. Hyde had chosen the very hour in which she had nothing whatever to amuse her, and he was a very welcome interruption. And, upon the whole, she liked her ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... when about a hundred yards from the inn, she stopped at the door of a small house, and called to Mrs Meshin, to 'go up and tell old Roberts that one of his grandsons is here.' A snuffy old woman made her appearance, peered at me through her spectacles, and then stumped up a pair of stairs which faced the door. Shortly afterwards I was desired to come up, and did so. I found an old man with silver hair lying in bed, and the said ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... the civil congratulations of that other Moses, and the scorn of his eye. But I was so nervous that my fellow-traveller transacted my business for me, and when the oil-lamp flared and I caught Moses Cohen looking at me, I jumped as if Snuffy had come behind me. And when we got out (and it was no easy matter to escape from the various benevolent offers of the owner of ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... was not even to deny his guilt she hid herself in her bedroom, and lay there for hours, face downwards upon the floor. The carpet was wet with her tears, its scent in her nostrils. For all her life that snuffy, stuffy smell brought back to her the time of her uncontrolled, rebellious anguish ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... and O, I would be cheated to the bone, if only I might look out again from some such windows as were there, upon some such damp, mouldy, broken-statued, ruinous, enchanted garden as lay below! In that room sat the advocate's mother and hunchback sister, with their smoky scaldini and their snuffy priest; and there the wife of the foreigner, self-elected the taste of his party, inflicted the pang courted by the advocate, and asked if you were for sale. And then the ruined advocate clasped his hands, rubbed them, set his head heart-brokenly on one side, took you down, heaved a sigh, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... created for themselves an image, that they might retain vivid and lasting the memory of young love, bearing the sign and stamp still, and breathing the fragrance, of Spring!"—"But," Walther objects, suspicious of that whole tribe of snuffy masters, for whom Sachs has the same charity of a broad understanding which he has shown in Walter's own case, "however can he for whom Spring is long past fix the essence of it in an image?"—"He recreates it as well as he can," Sachs sums with sudden curtness, recognising perhaps the futility ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... it is impossible," said Monsieur Mutuel,—a spectacled, snuffy, stooping old gentleman in carpet shoes and a cloth cap with a peaked shade, a loose blue frock-coat reaching to his heels, a large limp white shirt-frill, and cravat to correspond,—that is to say, white was the natural colour of his linen on Sundays, ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... elated with her successful firm. The prestige of the elder Henry dropped its mantle over them. And as for Polly, there could not be a wiser, sweeter wife. Then Aunt Lois was so tranquilly happy, and Faith growing brighter, yes, prettier, and buying grays with a peachy or lavender tint instead of that snuffy yellow, or dismally cold stone color, and coaxing Andrew, sometimes, to go to Christ Church to hear the singing or the tender prayers where the people could all ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... these terrible papers?" "Very little," replied he. "They were, I believe, in circulation about two years ago, in Mr. Pitt's time, and they were called his projects, for he loved Napoleon with all his heart." "Pray," said I, turning to the commissioner who had the longest and most snuffy nose, and who had translated the paper, "in what part of the vessel were these projects found?" "In the second cabin," was his answer. He meant the gun-room, where the officers slept and messed. "What is their date?" "1808." "Come," resumed I, "I think you will not shoot ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... snuffy man, now full seventy years of age, who passed seven hours of every week-day of his life in the dark back chamber behind the banking-room of the firm, and he had so passed every week-day of his life for more years than ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope
... with a proper philosophy, go to the fore-cabin of the ship, and you see them on the fore-deck (is that the name for that part of the vessel which is in the region of the bowsprit?) lowering in huge cloaks and caps; snuffy, wretched, pale, and wet; and not jabbering now, as their wont is on shore. I never could fancy the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... nuisance had become so great that the occupants of the adjacent chambers had sent for a policeman to move the curious away, and when Spargo and his companion presented themselves at the entry this policeman was being lectured as to his duties by a little weazen-faced gentleman, in very snuffy and old-fashioned garments, and an ancient silk hat, who was obviously greatly ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... sniffling; hiding their little faces in their little useless pocket-handkerchiefs; and heaving, old and young, with emotion. When my friend, the fashionable John Pimlico, married the lovely Lady Belgravia Green Parker, the excitement was so general that even the little snuffy old pew-opener who let me into the seat was in tears. And wherefore? I inquired of my own soul: she was not ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Indian episodes, little was done until 1710, when a large fleet left Boston and again captured Port Royal, to which the name of Annapolis was given as a compliment to the snuffy little woman who sat on the English throne. This success was made the basis of a proposition to put an end to the development of the French settlements west of the Alleghanies. It was represented to the English government that the entire Indian population in the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... evening, Lynde offered no very lucid reason for curtailing his vacation. Travelling alone had not been as pleasant as he anticipated; the horse was a nuisance to look after; and then the country taverns were snuffy and unendurable. As to where he had been and what he had seen—he must have seen something and been somewhere in eight days—his answers were so evasive that Miss Mildred was positive something distractingly romantic had ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... receive her benediction. She mistakes herself, she mistakes us. If there was a casket of uncouth old diamonds, or some marvellous old point lace to grace the occasion, we might play our parts with a certain decorous hypocrisy; but to be stared at through a double eye-glass by a snuffy old woman in black mittens, is more than one is called ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... accumulation of years, was enveloped in a cloud of dust. Down in the corral a dozen horses were circling, with Applehead moving cautiously about in the middle dragging his loop and making ready for a throw. There was one snuffy little bay gelding that he meant to turn over to Luck for a saddle horse, and he wanted to get him caught and in the stable before showing him to Luck. Happy Jack was wobbling up the path with an oversized ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... hear the steel hawser ping as it surged across the Diana's forecastle, with the hands on board of her bolting away from it in all directions. It was a near thing. Hermann, with his hair rumpled, in a snuffy flannel shirt and a pair of mustard-coloured trousers, had rushed to help with the wheel. I saw his terrified round face; I saw his very teeth uncovered by a sort of ghastly fixed grin; and in a great leaping tumult of water between the two ships the Diana whisked past so close that I could ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... become of all that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on the high tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very balance of repose in beauty that is most lacking in the modern world? The very Greek language that they loved has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, and a mere cock-shy for cheap and half-educated utilitarians, who make it a symbol of superstition and reaction. We have lived to see a time when the heroic legend of the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to Jefferson the eternal ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... a list of a few of the various words and phrases which have been in use, at one time or another, to signify some stage of inebriation: Over the bay, half seas over, hot, high, corned, cut, cocked, shaved, disguised, jammed, damaged, sleepy, tired, discouraged, snuffy, whipped, how come ye so, breezy, smoked, top-heavy, fuddled, groggy, tipsy, smashed, swipy, slewed, cronk, salted down, how fare ye, on the lee lurch, all sails set, three sheets in the wind, well under way, battered, blowing, snubbed, sawed, boosy, bruised, screwed, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... lay hold of. This lasts till twelve o'clock. Sometimes old women collect together, and then woe be to the person who does not present them with a trifle, and thus stop their proceedings; for if not, their snuffy beaks might come in contact with their prisoners' lips. They often collect 10 or 12s. and spend it in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... supporting life, viz., a good fit of crying, my husband made his appearance, with a most triumphant air, at the door. "There, Margaret, I have got you a couple at last—cook and chambermaid." So saying, he flourished open the door, and gave to my view the picture of a little, dry, snuffy-looking old woman, and a great, staring Dutch girl, in a green bonnet with red ribbons, with mouth wide open, and hands and feet that would have made a Greek sculptor open his mouth too. I addressed ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of money imparts to its possessor a feeling of independence, but one who is quite penniless feels helpless and apprehensive. Frank was unable even to purchase an apple from the snuffy old apple-woman who presided ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... him a bath—I don't mean I washed him—an india-rubber thing, that he could pack in his portmanteau. I thought he would find it useful for travelling. Would you believe it, he took it as a personal affront, and wouldn't speak to me for a month, the snuffy old idiot." ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... when I was quite a little thing; and what I hear, especially if I'm not intended to hear it, I never forget. There were three Miss Horsinghams, all with white hands—poor mamma, Aunt Deborah, and Aunt Dorcas. Now Aunt Deborah wanted to marry old David Jones (John's papa). I can just remember him—a snuffy little man with a brown wig, but perhaps he wasn't always so; and David Jones, who was frightened at Aunt Deborah's black eyes, thought he would rather marry Aunt Dorcas. Why the two sisters didn't toss up for him I can't think; but he did marry Aunt ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... Thornton was a jolly old soul. All my babies, she said. The spoon of pap in her mouth before she fed them. O, that's nyumnyum. Got her hand crushed by old Tom Wall's son. His first bow to the public. Head like a prize pumpkin. Snuffy Dr Murren. People knocking them up at all hours. For God' sake, doctor. Wife in her throes. Then keep them waiting months for their fee. To attendance on your wife. No gratitude in people. Humane doctors, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... he had to stand just twice the number of treats in return for the compliments paid him as a man and a Christian. It was noticed, also, that the Dominie took tea more frequently at Hanz's table; and that Critchel, the little snuffy doctor, who had practised in the settlement for a quarter of a century, and, indeed, assisted in bringing at least one-half of its inhabitants into the world, and of course was considered very safe in such cases, had increased his ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... years being educated, and not able to repine because it was a friend and she'd taken me cheaply. Perhaps you'd say that was luck, and an advantage, and it was, but all the same it's hard on a young thing to have to enjoy herself in a foreign language, and spend the holidays with a maiden lady and a snuffy old Pere, because there wasn't enough money to come home. Yes," concluded Pixie, with a smirk of satisfaction, "I've had my trials, and now I'm to be crossed in love, and have my young lover rent from me. ... You couldn't have the audacity to ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... has made the Park a haven of refuge where no wild thing may be harmed. They have accepted man's peace-offering, and many of them have become so well known to the Hotel men that they have received names suggested by their looks or ways. Slim Jim was a very long-legged thin Blackbear; Snuffy was a Blackbear that looked as though he had been singed; Fatty was a very fat, lazy Bear that always lay down to eat; the Twins were two half-grown, ragged specimens that always came and went together. But Grumpy and Little Johnny were the best ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... games,—fighting especially,—had that precedence among them which appeared to him inseparable from the personality of Tom Tulliver. Mr. Jacobs himself, familiarly known as Old Goggles, from his habit of wearing spectacles, imposed no painful awe; and if it was the property of snuffy old hypocrites like him to write like copperplate and surround their signatures with arabesques, to spell without forethought, and to spout "my name is Norval" without bungling, Tom, for his part, was glad he was not in danger of those mean accomplishments. He was ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... and fifty-five, Georgius Secundus was then alive,— Snuffy old drone from the German hive; That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible earthquake-day That ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... that he would make an example of himself and come to some untimely end. What would the Apollo Bundar say? What would the Bengali Baboo say? What would the sea-aye-ees say? Yes, our hunter affects coarse and snuffy clothes; they carry with them suggestions of hardship and roughing it; and his hat is ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... what nonsense!" She looked lightly round the room. "I always think it's living, not dying, that counts. I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who's gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know heaps like that—well, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... was hardly less wonderful than his wonderful epoch. Here is the same convent, the same city; while instead merely of the works of Cimabue, Giotto, and Orgagna, there are masterpieces by all the painters who ever lived to study;—yet imagine the snuffy old monk who will show you about the edifice, or any of his brethren, coming out with a series of masterpieces! One might as well expect a new Savonarola, who was likewise a friar in this establishment, to preach against Pio Nono, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... I confess I can do no- thing with works of art of which the badness is of receat origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused light, the musty odor, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the snuffy custodian in a black skull cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain to show you the lustreless gem of the museum, - these things have a mild historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate something. Many of those ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... other and whispered now and then, during the reading of the indictment; but among Lady Fareham's friends, and the quality in general, there was a breathless silence and expectancy; and Lady Sarah would gladly have run her hat-pin into a snuffy old Serjeant close beside her, who must needs talk behind his hand to his ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... particularly unpleasant situation for artillery. But we tried to forget all this, and be as happy and seem as careless as we could. And we would have gotten along very well if let alone. But, there was a dreadful, dirty, snuffy, spectacled old Irishman, named Robert Close, a driver, who took this interval to amuse himself. He would ask us "how we felt," and he came around to most of us, young fellows, and asked us to let him feel our pulse, and see if we were at all excited, or scared; and he would put his hand on our ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... and hope that she might be in that yellow postchaise coming swinging up the hill, or one of those three girls in beaver bonnets in the back seat of the double gig, which the fat old gentleman in black was driving, at four miles an hour. The postchaise contained a snuffy old dowager of seventy, with a maid, her contemporary. The three girls in the beaver bonnets were no handsomer than the turnips that skirted the roadside. Do as he might, and ride where he would, the fairy princess that he was to rescue and win, had not ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... announcements, such as the approach of a flying stationer, the roup of a deceased weaver's loom, or the arrival in Thrums of a cart-load of fine "kebec" cheeses, he treated as the merest trifles. I see still the bent legs of the snuffy old man straightening to the tinkle of his bell, and the smirk with which he let the curious populace gather round him. In one hand he ostentatiously displayed the paper on which what he had to cry was written, but, like the minister, he scorned to "read." With the bell carefully ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... the ignorance of the former, and the dear-bought skill and taste of the latter. When such were mentioned in his hearing, he seldom failed to point out how necessary it was to arrest the object of your curiosity in its first transit, and to tell his favourite story of Snuffy Davie and Caxton's Game at Chess."Davy Wilson," he said, "commonly called Snuffy Davy, from his inveterate addiction to black rappee, was the very prince of scouts for searching blind alleys, cellars, and stalls ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... sat at their desks, and observing the visitors as they paced up and down, while waiting their turns to have an interview with the principal of the establishment. This impressed Owen with the idea that the brown, snuffy old gentleman was a far more important personage than he had at first supposed. Several of the clerks who were moving about with papers in their hands frequently passed the young stranger, but no one spoke, or bestowed even an inquiring glance at him. Owen, who was tired with his journey and ...
— Owen Hartley; or, Ups and Downs - A Tale of Land and Sea • William H. G. Kingston
... his notebook. A day pipe, box of snuff, and handkerchief fall to the floor. The snuff falls on the handkerchief. He replaces the snuff box and the pipe in his pocket, and wipes his face with the snuffy handkerchief. He then opens his notebook for reference and begins) On the night of December third sneezes and says: God bless us!) I was on me rounds doin' beat duty in Market Square in the town of Ballybraggan (Sneezes)—God ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... wars and the troubles of the Fronde, it is probable that few people gave much time to the collection of books. The illustrious exceptions are Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin, who possessed a "snuffy Davy" of his own, an indefatigable prowler among book-stalls and dingy purlieus, in Gabriel Naude. In 1664, Naude, who was a learned and ingenious writer, the apologist for "great men suspected of magic," published the second edition ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... note farther, is getting decidedly deep into snuff; holds by SPANIOL (a dry yellow pungency, analogous to Lundy-foot or Irish-Blackguard, known to snuffy readers); always by Spaniol, we say; and more especially "the kind used by her Majesty of Spain," the now Dowager Termagant: [Orders this kind, from his Ambassador in Paris, "30th September, 1743:" ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... nodded to de Sourdam of the Austrian embassy and had his word with Pluyvis, and rejoiced to have impressed me—I could see him bubble with happiness and purr. He proposed that we should stroll as far as the paper kiosque that he patronised habitually—it was kept by a fellow-Israelite—a snuffy little ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... and is constantly endeavoring, however unfitted for it, to get possession of the air,—the melody being, for all Italians, the principal object. The violin, however, weak of voice as it is, always carries the day, and the other instruments steal discontentedly back to their secondary places, the snuffy old violone keeping up a constant growl at its ill luck, and the trombone now and then leaping out like a tiger on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... I had an absurd desire to take her at her word, not for the sake of constituting myself her amant en titre, but so as to dispossess the poor boy who was clamouring wildly for her among his mother's snuffy colleagues ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... too tedious to mention, depicting me sometimes as a lovely blonde, writing graceful tales beneath a bower of roses in the warm light of June; sometimes as a respectable old maid, rather sharp, fierce, and snuffy; sometimes as a tall, delicate, aristocratic, poetic looking creature, with liquid dark eyes and heavy tresses of raven hair; sometimes as a languishing, heart-broken woman in the prime of life, with auburn curls and a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Mergwain in antiquated dress, not a little worn, and neither very clean nor in very good condition—a snuffy, dilapidated, miserable, feeble old man, with a carriage where doubt seemed rooted in apprehension, every other moment casting about him a glance of enquiry, as if an evil spirit came running to the mouth of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... impatiently protested the nephew. "In your eyes I am still the urchin who came out from England clinging to his dear mother's skirts. Would ye have me pass my time with girls or have no other friends than snuffy old Parson Throckmorton, my tutor, who tries to pound the Greek and ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... brown, sandy loam, like snuff; while the scuppers aft, where everything had been washed by the deluge that had descended on the decks, were choked up with a muddy mass of the same stuff, forming a big heap over a foot high. I could see, too, that the snuffy dust had penetrated everywhere, hanging on the ropes, and in places where the rain had not wetted it, like powdery snow, although of a very ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... had never thought about, the effect of The Captive upon commonplace people. I was so full of my own rapture—I made my audience out of my own fancy. And now these snuffy little ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... is the arch-deacon of the eternal proprieties and pieties. Purity of morals. Hearth and home. Faithful unto death, and so on. Under that sign he conquers—a million pious and snuffy readers, per book. Well, when he gets himself spread in the Amalgamated Wire dispatches, by a quick divorce and a hair-trigger marriage, puff goes his piety—and his hold on his readers. We just ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the "Antiquary" will remember the anecdote told with so much effusion by Jonathan Oldbuck. '"Davy Wilson," he said, "commonly called Snuffy Davy, from his inveterate addiction to black rappee, was the very prince of scouts for searching blind alleys, cellars, and stalls, for rare volumes. He had the scent of a slow-hound, sir, and the snap of a bull-dog. He would ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... dad," said Al, reining up beside Tom. "We had to ride some to get 'em in—they're sure snuffy. What you going to do with 'em? ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... decent word I had spoken to me after that for months came from my turnkey at Newgate. It was when he welcomed me back from my examination before the Thames Court magistrate. The magistrate, a bad-tempered man, snuffy, with red eyes, and the air of being a piece of worn and dirty furniture of his court, had snapped at me ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... courage to move one step toward her. Something must be done, so Ser Giacomo he runs and fetches the sindaco from inside the recesses of the cafe, where he is playing dominoes under a lighted lamp. The sindaco must give the marchesa a formal welcome. The sindaco, a saddler by trade—a snuffy little man, with a face drawn and yellow as parchment, wearing his working-clothes—advances to the carriage with a step as ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... miscomprehended name; so, with a pang, the young surgeon had put his degree in his pocket, and put up with the inferior distinction. Of course, Dr Marjoribanks had all the patronage of Grange Lane. The great people were infatuated about that snuffy old Scotchman—a man behind his day, who had rusted and grown old among the soft diseases of Carlingford, where sharp practice was so seldom necessary; and no opening appeared for young Rider except in the new district, in the smug corner house, with ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... saw: lots of Champang (and I didn't mind drinking it), and plenty of laughing and fun. Afterwards, down we went to billiards. "Is dish Misther Coxsh, de shelebrated player?" says Mr. Abednego, who was in the room, with one or two gentlemen of his own persuasion, and several foreign noblemen, dirty, snuffy, and hairy, as them foreigners are. "Is dish Misther Coxsh? blesh my hart, it is a honor to see you; I have heard so much ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... remembered the fear that would come over her that she was giving herself to the devil in casting from her her obedience on such a subject, and then she became very wretched. She told herself that sooner or later her aunt would conquer her, that sooner or later that mean-faced old man, with his snuffy fingers, and his few straggling hairs brushed over his bald pate, with his big shoes spreading here and there because of his corns, and his ugly, loose, square, snuffy coat, and his old hat which he had worn so long ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... Pelly was also up and ready to start. The air was still cool and the horses were a bit snuffy. Lon mounted and rode toward the west gate where he waited ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... themselves, there is a plan of Bouchain in perfect preservation (and shall be kept so, whilst I have power to preserve any thing), upon the lower corner of which, on the right hand side, there is still remaining the marks of a snuffy finger and thumb, which there is all the reason in the world to imagine, were Mrs. Wadman's; for the opposite side of the margin, which I suppose to have been my uncle Toby's, is absolutely clean: This seems an authenticated record of one of these attacks; for there are ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the Grass was more overt. On the comicpage, Superman daily pushed it back and there was great regret his activities were limited to a fourcolor process, while Terry Lee and Flash Gordon, everinspirited by the sharp outlines of mammaryglands, also saved the country. Even Lil Abner and Snuffy Smith battled the vegetation while no one but Jiggs remained absolutely impervious. The Greengrass Blues was heard on every radio and came from every adolescent's phonograph until it was succeeded by Itty Bitty Seed ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... every week solemnly prates of honesty, sobriety, and their kindred virtues. 'What an excellent man he is,' exclaim the whole tribe of fat, tea-drinking old women in mob-caps, raising their pious eyes and snuffy noses to heaven.—Ha, ha, ha! Why, ladies and gentlemen, that editor is so cursedly dishonest and so im—mensely mean, that his hair wouldn't stay black, but turned to a dirty white before its time—so ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... one from his coat pocket and handing it over to the old man. "The rooms are nominally occupied by a certain Maitre Turandot, maker of violins, and not even the concierge of the place knows that the hunchbacked and snuffy violin-maker and the meddlesome Scarlet Pimpernel, whom the Committee of Public Safety would so love to lay by the heels, are one and the same person. The apartment, then, is mine; one of the many which I occupy in Paris at different times," he went on. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... wine-seller, his eyes fixed on that quaint and snuffy figure. . . "No, senor officer! Decidedly no mule is to be got in ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Georgius Secundus was then alive, Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... "The Grammarians, grim, snuffy and wrinkled though they might be, were no more impervious to his allures than are the rest of us, and in consequence appointed him to an office. This office was, I glean of mediaeval legend, that of teaching dunderheaded mortals the First Conjugation. So Eros donned ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... that my new acquaintance must have had a voice in most of these arrangements: he looked a reliable officer, no longer very active, and he was seamanlike too, in a way, though as he sat there, with his thick fingers clasped lightly on his stomach, he reminded you of one of those snuffy, quiet village priests, into whose ears are poured the sins, the sufferings, the remorse of peasant generations, on whose faces the placid and simple expression is like a veil thrown over the mystery ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to notice her request for correspondence, the basket of strawberries having probably found its way to some snuffy individual at a greengrocer's stall, who took no interest in the loneliness of blue-eyed, fair-haired damsels. As for her volume of Poems of Love, Hermie confiscated it until the end of the term, and recommended a Manual ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... every month, sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the evening, the sacrament is partaken of at St. Mark's church; and, comparatively speaking, the number of participants is considerable. The business is not entirely left, as in some churches, to worn-out old men and sacredly-snuffy old women—to a miserable half-dozen of fogies, nearly as ignorant of the vital virtues of the sacrament as the Virginian old beldame who took it to cure the rheumatism. At St. Mark's the sacrament takers consist of all classes of people, of various ages, and, considering the district, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... fifty-five. Georgius Secundus was then alive,— Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... old functionary, wiping his spectacles with a snuffy handkerchief, as if preparing them to examine an eclipse of the sun, regarded me fixedly for several minutes, and said—"Oh, yes, I perceive ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... bare "lands" and barren class-rooms, in time waxed wearisome to Sylvanus. He grew to loathe the drone of the classes, the snuffy prelections of professors long settled on the lees of their intellects, who still moused about among the dusty speculations which had done duty for thought when their lectures were new, thirty years ago. "A West Indian nigger," said Sylvanus quaintly, ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... parlour-maid, my place was no sinecure, and but few opportunities of observation through the crack of the door were afforded me. All that was clear to me was that the chief guest was a Mr. Teidelmann—or Tiedelmann, I cannot now remember which—a snuffy, mumbling old frump, with whose name then, however, I was familiar by reason of seeing it so often in huge letters, though with a Co. added, on dreary long blank walls, bordering the Limehouse reach. He ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... to little Vanves, with its steep streets and its old gray church, and past the splendid grounds of the Lycee beyond. The fat woman got down, her live fowl shrieking protest to the movement, and the butcher's boy got down, too, so that Ste. Marie was left alone upon the imperiale save for a snuffy old gentleman in a pot-hat who sat in a corner buried behind the day's Droits ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... simple day," and she leaned back and laughed softly at the recollection. "Papa was very hard up at that time, you know, and we were rather poor, so we came as cheaply as we could, Sarah, Clementine, and I, and I remember there were some very snuffy men in the train—we could not go first-class, you see—and one of ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... Georgius Secundus was then alive, - Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... simpler. You should have seen Reggie Byng's wedding. It was over before one realized it had started. A snuffy little man in a black coat with a cold in his head asked a few questions, wrote a few words, and the thing ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... pecked half the bricks out of the foundation, and with them made curious grottoes on the pavement. Disordered and unpainted clapboards spread over the dingy front, which is set off with two upper and two lower windows, all blockaded with infirm, green shutters. Then there is a snuffy door, high and narrow (like the State's notions), and reached by six venerable steps and a stoop, carefully guarded with a pine hand-rail, fashionably painted in blue, and looking as dainty as the State's white glove. This, reader, is the abode of the ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... disappointed, like him. Humbled, he hardly knew why: vague, uncertain in action. Quit dogging old Huff with his advice; trotted about the streets with a cowed look, that, if one could have seen into the jaded old heart under his snuffy waistcoat, would have seemed pitiful enough. He went sometimes to read the papers to old Tim Poole, who was bed-ridden, and did not pish or pshaw once at his maundering about secession, or the misery in his back. Went ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis |
