"Blacking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he carried into effect one morning, as Clem was blacking his boots. Perhaps he had made private calculations on a blacking-brush hitting a man with less damage ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... soapsuds off the decks, and in a short time had a new supply of clear rain water, in which we had a grand rinsing. It was surprising to see how much soap and fresh water did for the complexions of many of us; how much of what we supposed to be tan and sea-blacking we got rid of. The next day, the sun rising clear, the ship was covered, fore and aft, with clothes of all sorts, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... was some distance in advance of it, up the slope by this time. As he approached the auto, containing the three disconcerted cronies, something bounded out of Tom's pocket. It was the bottle of stove blacking he had purchased for Mrs. Baggert. The bottle fell in the soft dirt in front of his forward wheel, and a curious thing happened. Perhaps you have seen a bicycle or auto tire strike a stone at an angle, and throw it into the ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... words addressed to him, but they had the desired effect, and he waited patiently until his turn came to be shaved. He was a dark-complexioned seafaring man, and had evidently just returned from a long sea voyage, as the beard on his chin was more like the bristles on a blacking-brush, and the operation of removing them more like mowing than shaving. When completed, the barber held out his hand for payment. The usual charge must have been a penny, for that was the coin he placed in the barber's hand. But it was now the barber's turn. Drawing himself up to his full ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... studying, the contrast is startling. While Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature, and shielded most tenderly from the hardships of the world, Dickens, a poor, obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his father was confined for debt. In 1836 his Pickwick was published, and life was changed as if ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... lucky, Dick. I don't half the time make enough to live on. If it wasn't for the Newsboys' Lodgin' House, I don't know what I'd do. I need a new brush and box of blacking, but I aint got money ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... except that it is a little warmer in tone, having a reddish or orange tinge, and is a worse drier in oil. Like ivory black, it is very transparent. Immense quantities of bone black are consumed with sulphuric acid in the manufacture of shoe blacking. ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... coating of dyed felt fibre. In the final spells of dyeing in the dye-beck already referred to, tolerably thick with black precipitate or mud, the application of black to the hat-forms begins, I fear, to assume at length a too close analogy to another blacking process closely associated with a pair of brushes and the time-honoured name of Day & Martin. With that logwood black fibre, anyone could argue as to a considerable proportion of the dye rubbing, wearing, or washing off. Thus, then, we have the second cause of the deterioration ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... time that I came in and went out of the room. I at once decided to try him. It was about nine o'clock in the morning, when I, having many people to see, handed Chanden Sing, for that was his name, a pair of shoes and some blacking. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... were blacking their faces for a dress-rehearsal; the turkey hung dead, with opened, speckled wings, in the dairy. The time was come to make ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... children; one was called, "Tom the Bootblack"; the other, "Dan the Newsboy." My chief objection to these stories was the fact that neither of the heroes rejoiced in his work for the work's sake. Had Tom even invented a new kind of blacking, or if Dan had started a newspaper, it might have been encouraging for those among the listeners who were thinking of engaging in similar professions. It is true, both gentlemen amassed large fortunes, but surely the school age is not to be limited to such dreams and ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... seek popularity in London. The very respectable reader probably knows as well as his humble servant, the writer, that in London there is always a social circle just a little lower than one's own which opens its doors with noble, disinterested hospitality, and is prepared to lick the blacking from ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... the lieutenant in a battered old sou'-wester, with a red woollen comforter round his throat; Nettleship had on an equally ancient-looking tarpaulin, and both wore high-boots, long unacquainted with blacking. They carried stout cudgels in their hands, their hangers and pistols being concealed under their coats. In about an hour and a half we reached Passage, when Nettleship and Larry and I ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... cried the Count, giving the man a thousand-franc note. "Take this, but, remember, I give it to you on condition of your spending it at the wineshop, of your getting drunk, fighting, beating your wife, blacking your friends' eyes. That will give work to the watch, the surgeon, the druggist—perhaps to the police, the public prosecutor, the judge, and the prison warders. Do not try to do anything else, or the devil will be revenged on ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... little removed from the lawless, the panic and pandemonium that reigned in the dark was hardly to have been expected on the part of the frequenters of the Elysian Fields. But it was the sudden blacking out of the scene which had wrought on the nerves. It was the doubt, the fear of where the next shots might come, which sent men and women, shrieking and shouting, stampeding for the doors ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... alive. Pay!—pay for that wild plunge into watery depths—the doubt, the fear, the icy terror of hungry monsters around him! Dud Fielding was offering him pay for this, very much as he might fling pay to him for blacking his boots. Ah, it was a fierce, bad moment for Dan! His beacon light vanished; murky clouds of passion were blackening dream and vision; he felt he could cheerfully pitch Dud back to the sharks again. And then, as still ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... more thin, so that the ting'd light, which is made by trajecting those ting'd bodies, does not receive so deep a tincture; but whitening a colour is onely an intermixing of many clear reflections of light among the same ting'd parts; deepning also, and darkning or blacking a colour, are very different; for deepning a colour, is to make the light pass through a greater quantity of the same tinging body; and darkning or blacking a colour, is onely interposing a multitude of dark or black spots among the same ting'd parts, or placing the colour in ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... telegraph operators are limited in several States, but rather for the purpose of protecting the public safety than the employees themselves.[1] The following other trades are prohibited to women or girls: Boot-blacking,[2] or street trades generally;[3] work upon emery wheels, or wheels of any description in factories (Michigan), and in New York no female is allowed to operate or use abrasives, buffing wheels, or many other processes of polishing ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... they were both very pleased. But before long these specimens began to seem less valuable. For the next morning, when the knife-boy was cleaning the doctor's boots, he suddenly dropped the brushes and the boot and the blacking, and screamed out that ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... of large and important shops in central Birmingham has led to the formation of trading establishments and Stores of the latest order of development. There are now large shops of the "universal provider" type, where they sell everything from blacking to port wine, and where you see silk mantles in one window and sausages ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... to the amount of one hundred per cent. The articles enumerated in the resolution were agates, or cornelians; ale and beer; almonds; amber (manufactures of); arrowroot; band-string twist; bailey, pearled; bast-ropes; twines, and strands; beads: coral; crystal; jet; beer or mum; blacking; brass manufactures; brass (powder of); brocade of gold or silver; bronze (manufactures of); bronze-powder; buck-wheat: butter; buttons; candles; canes; carriages of all sorts; casks; cassiva-powder; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... want of it, she lived upon books, and very literally died of them eventually. She was naturally, so to speak, an artificial product of conventional ideas; Beth, on the contrary, was altogether a little human being, but one of those who answer to expectation with fatal versatility. She liked blacking grates, and did them well, because Harriet told her she could; she hated writing copies, and did them disgracefully, because her mother beat her for a blot, and said she would never improve. For the same reason, long before she could read aloud to her mother intelligibly, she ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... thinking of her. She wanted to go on seeing his faults, but in her changing mood she could see only her own. "He is one of the noblest gentlemen in the world," something inside her said. "You aren't worthy to black his boots!" Then the picture of herself blacking them—the shiny ones that were too tight—rose before her eyes, and she was afraid that she was going to laugh—or else to sob. Anyhow, he was gone, and there was ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... activity is only put on till he turns the first corner, for he tries to conceal his lameness and decrepitude, especially from his wife, who strains her gaze after him. Just before starting off he takes the superfluous precaution to put some shoe-blacking on his hair which shows white about the temples. He comes back after a six hours' search, about noon, his neglected dinner still in his pocket. He has tramped ten or twelve miles with no open shop for him. He does not blame anyone, but regards it all as an accident that has happened to him ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... chalk; and that even the water supplied to us by our companies is any thing rather than the real Simon Pure it professes to be. Not less earnestly than benevolently do our quack doctors implore us to beware of spurious articles; Day and Martin exhort us not to take our polish from counterfeit blacking: every advertiser beseeches the "pensive public" to be upon its guard against supposititious articles—all, in short, is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... the present moment is in a blue flannel shirt, a waistcoat, the back of which we are always threatening to renew. Inexpressibles somewhat spotty, darned, and torn, and, thanks to one or two washings, have shrunk, displaying a pair of boots which have not seen a blacking- brush since the day they left England. Coats are put on for meals, to do honour to the ladies, but seldom worn otherwise. The coarser and stronger the clothes are the better. A——'s straw hat is also very lovely, it serves periodically ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... tired, shabby men all jumped up and ran forward to the hill-crest, so as to be ready for the attack; which, however, did not come. As soon as the sun rose the Spaniards again opened upon us with artillery. A shell burst between Dave Goodrich and myself, blacking us with powder, and killing and wounding several of the men ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of delicious fat roly-poly bodies and clumsy baby paws and tails that wagged unceasingly. At sight of the visitors, they deserted the now nearly empty bowl of food and galloped unsteadily towards them, squirming ecstatically over their feet and sampling the blacking on their boots ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... shoulder-bands [epaulettes WITHOUT bush at the end], was old and dusty, the yellow waistcoat covered with snuff;—for the rest, he had black-velvet breeches [and, of course, the perpetual BOOTS, of which he would allow no polishing or blacking, still less any change for new ones while they would hang together]. I thought always he would speak to me. The old woman could not long hold me up; and so she set me down again. Then the King looked at the Clergyman, beckoned him near, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... vinegar Aromatic vinegar Vinegar of the four thieves Lavender water Hungarian water To prepare cosmetic soap for washing the hands Cologne water Soft pomatum To make soap To make starch To dry herbs To clean silver utensils To make blacking To clean ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph
... men down to the wreckage of the masts to cut away a couple of the hempen shrouds and bring them to the camp, and they, appearing about this time, I set to work to unlay the shrouds, so that they might get out the fine white yarns which lay beneath the outer covering of tar and blacking. These, when they had come at them, we found to be very good and sound, and this being so, I bid them make three-yarn sennit; meaning it for the strings of the bows. Now, it will be observed that I have said bows, and this I will explain. It had been my original intention ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... learning that a shapeless fragment of salt was a relic of that victim of despondency and sinful regrets,— Lot's wife. My companion appeared to set great value upon some Egyptian darkness in a blacking-jug. Several of the shelves were covered by a collection of coins, among which, however, I remember none but the Splendid Shilling, celebrated by Phillips, and a dollar's worth of the iron money of ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... jumping with diffidence whenever I pop upon her unpremeditatedly on the stairs, being a nervous girl and unaccustomed to dark-complexioned gentlemen—though her own countenance, from superabundance of blacking and smuts, being of a far superior nigritude, it is I myself who should be ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... some little municipal office; well acquainted with the Crooks, Mrs. Marsden, and others. Had tea with the Masons, and had a good deal of talk about old matters in England. Servetus, a very respectable young man carrying on an extensive blacking trade; the sister a very steady girl had lived some time with Mr. Furness. The old man as eccentric as ever, his ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... slept, and it would seem that he was indeed a "poor Richard." One fortunate day, however, he conceived the idea of buying a cat, and as good luck would have it, he was enabled within a few days to earn a penny or two by blacking the boots of a guest at the house. That day he met a woman with a cat for sale, and after some dickering (for she asked more money for it than the boy possessed in the world), Dick Whittington carried home his cat and put ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... it is; come and find it for me. Everything here is in the vilest mess," cried Carne, growing reckless with wrath and hurry. "I want the despatch of this morning, and I find tailors' bills, way to make water-proof blacking, a list of old women, and a stump of old pipe! Come here, this instant, and show me where ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... gardens, but use its flowers on all occasions of festivity, and even in their sepulchral rites: he mentions also an oeconomical purpose to which the flowers are applied, little consistent with their elegance and beauty, that of blacking shoes, whence their name of Rosae calceolariae; the shoes, after the colour is imparted to them, are rubbed with the hand, to give them a gloss, and which thereby receives a blueish tinge, to discharge which they have ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. V - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... encumbered by faith in my dealings (And that I'm consistent the world will allow, What I was at Newmarket the same I am now). When such are my merits (you know I hate cracking), I hope, like the Vender of Best Patent Blacking, "To meet with the generous and kind approbation "Of a candid, enlightened, and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the feeble light of the match he could see that he was in a sort of a scullery, which bore traces of recent occupation. A bit of yellow soap, some blacking and a couple of brooms in one corner, a pail and a wooden chair in another, were ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... stuffed the empty sack with three rotten vegetable marrows, an old blacking-brush and two ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... Fire and Life were pretty sure to meet her; and then how happily we all trudged off to dinner! Once we came up as a monster of a man, with high heels and a gold-headed cane, and whiskers all over his face, was grinning under Mary's bonnet, and chattering to her, close to Day and Martin's Blacking Manufactory (not near such a handsome thing then as it is now)—there was the man chattering and ogling his best, when who should come up but Gus and I? And in the twinkling of a pegpost, as Lord Duberley says, my gentleman was seized ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... got it all wrong. It wasn't the children, it was Marie. She wanted a box of blacking for the children's shoes. Jean reproved her and said, "Why, Marie, you mustn't ask for things now. The ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... God,' he said, 'I wasn't to blame. I know what you have heard, but if I can't whiten myself without blacking a woman ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... work. I've got the strength, though I shan't have it long at this rate. I only want a job. This is the third night running that I've walked the streets all night; the only money I get is by minding blacking-boys' boxes while they go into Lockhart's for their dinner. I got a penny yesterday at it, and twopence for carrying a parcel, and to-day I've had a penny. Bought a ha'porth of bread and a ha'penny ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations." The baseball, revolving as it flies, may suggest the orbs, or your girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain by the soil; but does the blacking of your shoes suggest anything celestial? Hinges and levers and fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or old boots, have not much poetic significance. An elm tree may suggest a cathedral, or a shell suggest ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... gravities of hunting, and in summer by the gallantries of the Militia training; for, like many of his class, he was a captain in the Militia. He was always neatly dressed; his large moustache looked as if it shared with his boots the attention of the blacking brush. No cavalry sergeant in Ballincollig had a more delicately bowed leg, nor any creature, except, perhaps, a fox-terrier interviewing a rival, a more consummate swagger. He knew every horse and groom in all the leading livery stables, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... himself in some shape that he could grapple with morally, he made an involuntary study of his personal appearance. That morning, before starting from home by the milk-train that left Willoughby Pastures at 4.5, Barker had given his Sunday boots a coat of blacking, which he had eked out with stove-polish, and he had put on his best pantaloons, which he had outgrown, and which, having been made very tight a season after tight pantaloons had gone out of fashion in Boston, caught on the tops of his boots and stuck ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... families of professional men who are afflicted with pretension to fashion, of which we shall give abundant examples when we come to treat of gentility-mongers. But the heavy swell, who is of all classes, from the son and heir of an opulent blacking-maker down to the lieutenant of a marching regiment on half-pay, is utterly destitute of brains, deplorably illiterate, and therefore incapable, by nature and bringing-up, of respecting himself by a modest contented demeanour. He is never so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... habits strictly pure, he had never seen a card or a drop of liquor that he had touched, and he had never seen a dollar that he had not touched. He had organized every industry along his path, from paper-selling, boot-blacking, and so upward to his organized lobby at Washington, through which he had caused a heavy tariff to be put upon every commodity necessary to the American people. It was he who had advised his brother organizers to keep Religion ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... overcoat, long and heavy, with a cape reaching nearly to the waist. On his back he strapped a knapsack containing a full stock of underwear, soap, towels, comb, brush, looking-glass, tooth-brush, paper and envelopes, pens, ink, pencils, blacking, photographs, smoking and chewing tobacco, pipes, twine string, and cotton strips for wounds and other emergencies, needles and thread, buttons, knife, fork, and spoon, and many other things as each man's idea of ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... green-dyed ostrich plumes cascaded down across a cheek enamelled dead white. Her hair was plastered in blue-black waves, parted low on the forehead; her lips were splashed a startling carmine, the eyelids painted blue; and, from between lashes gummed into little spikes of blacking, she favoured her companion with a glance of carelessly simulated tenderness,—a look all too vividly suggesting the ghastly calculations of a cook wheedling a chicken nearer the kitchen door. But I felt no great ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... materials among the debris showed the lading of particular cars. The remains of fruit cans, tin plates, blacking boxes and glassware, told of sutlers who had disposed of their wares at less than the usual exorbitant prices. Heaps of spikes and handleless hammers, and iron bars, reminded us of disconcerted plans in railroad extension, while numberless ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... wheel and go like blazes. Tell 'em to rush answer. This guy here thinks a colored boy is only an animated shoe-blacking outfit; it's up to us to remedy that defect in his education, see!" Thus sang the wires as Durmont paced ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... efforts. John Jacob Astor was a poor butcher's son. Cornelius Vanderbilt was a boatman. Daniel Drew was a drover. The Harpers and Appletons were printers' apprentices. A. T. Stewart was an humble, struggling shopkeeper. A well-known financier began by blacking a pair of boots. Opportunities as good as these men ever had are occurring every day. Those who are competent to seize them may do so, and rise ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... secrets he deals with have come to be things of common knowledge. Nor are his instructions upon the art of making-up to be accounted highly in these times. "Light-comedy calves," he tells us, "are made of ragged silken hose;" and what may be called "Othello's blacking," is to be composed of "burnt cork, pulverised and mixed with porter." Legs coming before the foot-lights must of course be improved by mechanical means, when nature has been unkind, or time has destroyed symmetry; but art has probably ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... to be restrained by the nicest sense of natural propriety. He shaved, and took a cold plunge-bath every day. Not a particle of mud or dust was allowed to remain upon his garments. He always insisted on blacking his own shoes; for it was one of his principles not to be waited upon, while he was well enough to wait upon himself. They were always as polished as japan; and every Saturday night, his silver buckles were made as bright as a new dollar, in readiness to go to meeting the next day. His dress ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... conviction. "What good does it do you to know Greek, anyway? I'll bet you anything that Uncle Sim himself couldn't go to Athens tomorrow and order a cup of coffee and a hard-boiled egg! Or, if he did order them, he'd get a morning newspaper and toothpick. Last Spring I was in the boot-blacking emporium in the village one afternoon and Horace came in to get his shoes ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... corner of the table, beside Perkins Brown, who took an opportunity, while the others were engaged in conversation, to jog my elbow gently. As I turned towards him, he said nothing, but dropped his eyes significantly. The little rascal had the lid of a blacking-box, filled with salt, upon his knee, and was privately seasoning his onions and radishes. I blushed at the thought of my hypocrisy, but the onions were so much better that I couldn't help dipping ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... a half, good measure, from the first tree on the Mill Dam Road, lies the little village (with no refreshments in it but five oranges and a bottle of blacking) of Newton Centre. Here Massachusetts Jemmy and The Gasper had established the turning-point. The road comprehended every variety of inconvenience to test the mettle of the men, and nearly the whole of it ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Messieurs Droz and Lepany had taken a fresh turn, and attracted a little circle of listeners, among whom I observed an eccentric-looking young man with a club-foot, an enormously long neck, and a head of short, stiff, dusty hair, like the bristles of a blacking-brush. ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... ability to write epics and wait at table. The work we should have looked to meet with, emanating from the butler's pantry, was a miscellaneous volume full of religious scraps, essays on dress, receipts for boot-tops, wise cooking cogitations, remedies for bugs, cures for ropy beer, hints for blacking, ingredients for punch, thoughts on tapping ale, early rising and killing fleas. The mischief of the wide dissemination of education is now becoming apparent, for, poor as authors confessedly are, they have generally been gentlemen, even in rags—learned men of some degree, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... whispered, "there's a Boston man down below, blacking my other pair of boots, who'd feel hurt if I should let anybody else ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2., No. 32, November 5, 1870 • Various
... and fish at dinner were excellent; we hardly knew which was best. A peasant boy brought us a bundle of sticks for our fire. The sun became exceedingly hot. Esmeralda and myself went and sat in some shade near our tents." "Noah stood in the shade blacking his boots, and observed to Esmeralda, 'I shall not help my wife as Mr. Petalengro does you.' 'Well,' said Esmeralda, 'what is a wife for?' 'For!' retorted Noah, sharply, giving his boot an extra brush, 'why, to wait upon her husband.' 'And what,' ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... that he was not above his business, that he accepted the bitter with the sweet, Dennis went upstairs to his room, got blacking and brush, and taking his station in a corner where Mr. Ludolph could plainly see him through the glass doors of his office, he polished away as vigorously as if that were his only calling. Mr. Ludolph looked and smiled. His was a nature that could be pleased with a small triumph like this. But ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... characters who delighted in their own eccentricities, and who were always on public view. One individual possessed a remarkably intelligent pony who every morning, without guidance from his master, patronized one of the shoe-blacking stands to get his front hoofs polished. He presented each one in turn to the foot-rest, and stood like a statue until ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... States, television reception was blacking out for hours at a time, with no explanation available. The Civil Aeronautics Administration and the Air Force banned all plane movements under instrument flight conditions, because radar navigational equipment had become so unreliable as to ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... rather have no mustarchers than a couple of blacking brushes under my ears! He's gone now! You'd better look on me with an ...
— Three Hats - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Alfred Debrun
... had gone to the great city, and back had come his star. He wore it secretly at first, but was moved at length to display it to a few chosen friends; not wisely chosen, it would appear, for now there were mockers of Billy among the irreverent of the town. As he sat aloft on his boot-blacking throne, waiting for crime to be done among us, conning meantime one of those romances in which his heroes did rare deeds, he would be subjected to intrusion. Some coarse town humorist would leer upon him from the doorway—a leer of furtive, devilish cunning—and ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... afraid of her, though I DO know the story about the French usher in 1830—but all the rest tremble before the woman, from the Doctor down to poor Francis the knife-boy, whom she bullies into his miserable blacking-hole. ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... timber trees, L25; a fire engine with carriage, &c., L6 15s. (possibly some sort of steam engine, then called fire engines); the total produce, including counting-house, warehouse, casting, tinning, burnishing, blacking, and blacksmiths' shops, a horse mill, scouring mill, and a quantity of wood sheds and palisading, amounted to nearly L1,150. The prosaic minds of the Commissioners evidently did not lead them to value "the apartments where the ancient lords kept ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... completely metamorphosed—partly by his own fault, and partly through the efforts of injudicious friends and ambitious tailors. He was raising (to gratify a very young lady, it is said) a crop of whiskers, of the blacking-brush variety, coarse, stiff, and ungraceful; and in so doing spoiled, or at least seriously impaired, a face which, though never handsome, had in its original state a peculiar power and pathos. On the present occasion the whiskers were reinforced by brand-new ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... except the oldest sister, who was at school, and Charles, went to live in the prison; and Charles was given work in a blacking-warehouse of which a relative of his mother's was manager. The sufferings which the boy endured at this time were intense. It was not only that the work was sordid, monotonous, uncongenial; it was not ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... possessed by all organized power, namely, that it can undergo a good deal of local injury, such as scattered cruisers may inflict, causing inconvenience and suffering, without receiving vital harm. A strong man cannot be made to quit his work by sticking pins in him, or by bruising his shins or blacking his eyes; he must be hit in a vital part, or have a bone broken, to be laid up. The weaknesses of commerce—the fatally vulnerable parts of its system—are the commercial routes over which ships pass. They are the bones, the skeleton, the ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... requesting to be allowed to walk with her, and by offering to carry her basket. This threw Willy's mind into a good deal of a flutter. Why could she not have met this handsomely dressed gentleman sometime when she was not going to the grocery store to buy such things as stove-blacking and borax? ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... Mr. McSwiver, though he had advertised himself as having "no incumbrance," was by no means an ease-taking man. He united in his august person the duties of coachman, butler, waiter, useful man, and body-servant to Mr. Manning. Seeing him at early dawn, blacking his employer's boots, or, later, attending to the lighter duties of the coachhouse (he had a stable-boy to help him), one could never imagine the grandeur of that same useful individual when dressed in ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... the Gilsey House and consulted Henry E. Dixey, the actor, who was living there. Dixey's advice was to get a lawyer. Together they returned to the Daly's Theater Building, where Frohman knew a lawyer was installed on the top floor. They found the lawyer blacking that portion of his white socks that appeared through the holes ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... in the dark boot-hole under the Chief's study on Pack Monday night just before twelve. In stockinged feet he had crept downstairs, opened the creaking door without making any appreciable noise, and then waited in the boot-room, which was filled with the odour of blacking and damp decay. There was a small window at the end of it, through which it was just possible to squeeze out on to the Chief's front lawn. After that all was easy; anyone could clamber over the wall by ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... might be repeated on himself. "Johnnie, my boy, shake hands, I forgive you this once. And you may pass the bottle." Johnnie, who knew himself to be the real offender, made haste to obey. "It's not blacking, of course," continued John, looking at the thick ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... morning at five precisely!!!—a glaring impossibility. We know that in our enterprising country adventures are sometimes undertaken, in the spirit of competition, which are entirely out of the common course of things: thus, one man will sell a bottle of blacking for ninepence with the charitable intention of ruining his neighbour (so think the worthy public) who has the audacity to charge his at a shilling—the intrinsic value of the commodity being in either case, a fraction less than five farthings. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... for he could trust no one in the state of mind which he had reached; even to strangers he was afraid to appeal with overmuch earnestness, lest stories should get about. Still an odd shilling came to him now and then. Poor old fellow, he did sad things. One morning he took the old blacking-brushes which he had used for years for his one boot, and a little pot of blacking, and an old box, and walked far away across the river, to a place where no one could know him, and there tried to earn a little ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... mythical God of Day, and is not to be confounded with a member of a well-known firm of manufacturers of blacking.] ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... creditable to his tailor and his valet, "rather rich than gaudy," (as Miss Byron said of Sir Charles Grandison,) except in the grand article of the waistcoat, a brocade brode of resplendent lustre, which combined both qualities. His shoes were bright with the new French blacking, and his jewellery, rings, studs, brooches, and chains (for he wore two, that belonging to his watch, and one from which depended a pair of spectacles, folded so as to resemble an eye-glass,) were of the finest ...
— The London Visitor • Mary Russell Mitford
... all, Dickens had a successful and a happy life. He was born in 1812 and died in 1870. His boyhood was hard because of his father's thriftlessness, and it always rankled in his memory that at nine years of age he was placed at work pasting labels on boxes of shoe blacking. But he had many chances in childhood and youth for reading and study, and his keen mind took advantage of all these. He was a natural mimic, and it was mere blind chance that kept him from the stage and made him a great novelist. He drifted into ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... fare made out for a fortnight in summer and a fortnight in winter. In winter the Hausfrau may spend about 17s. a week on her food and in summer 19s. That leaves only 2s. a month for the extra days of the month, and for small expenses, such as soda, matches, blacking, and condiments. Breakfast may cost sixpence a day, and for this there is to be 3/4 litre of milk, 4 small white rolls, 1/2 lb. rye bread, 2 oz. of butter, 1 oz. of coffee. Nothing is set down for sugar, and I think ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... can, if you've got money enough to buy a stock of papers to start with. You'll be your own boss. Then there's boot- blacking; but ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... went into a cheap eating-house and saloon, through the "Ladies' Entrance," and while they sat at a table there, she learned by means of resolute and patient questions that the boy earned his living by blacking shoes now and then, and that he did not know who his parents were, as he had been "put" with a family whose ill-usage he had fled from to live in the street. He began to melt under her manifestations of interest in him, and with ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... SINENSIS.—The flowers of this malvaceous plant contain a quantity of astringent juice, and, when bruised, rapidly turn black or deep purple; they are used by the Chinese ladies for dyeing their hair and eyebrows, and in Java for blacking shoes. ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... the address of three clergymen and told him to call on them for help if he had any trouble. He looked everywhere for these cards. They couldn't be found. He had been so cocksure of himself he had lost them. He couldn't make up his mind to stoop to blacking boots and cleaning spittoons. He had always lived with aristocrats. He felt himself one ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... threw some light upon the size of the heap in front of my trunk. A dress-hat and its case, when their natural relationship is dissolved, occupy nearly twice as much space as before, even if the former contains a blacking-box not usually kept in it, and the latter contains a few cigars soaking in bay rum. The same might be said of a portable dressing-case and its contents, bought for me in Vienna by a brother ex-soldier, and designed by an old continental campaigner to be perfection ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... stranger's name. "Can't possibly tell," was the Beau's answer. "But he is evidently a gentleman—his perfumes are good." He objected to country gentlemen being introduced into Watier's, on the ground "that their boots always smelt of horse-dung and bad blacking." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... boots, putting them on hurriedly.) They're very good. (Wipes his brow, drawing hand across leaving mark of blacking.) ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... rejoined, tapping the floor impatiently with her boot, whose shabbiness French blacking could not wholly conceal, "I shall be civil to him, of course, as Neil's friend, but I would rather he did not come, spoiling everything. I see Neil so seldom that I want him all to myself when he is here. He is the only cousin I have, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... starve. If I can't get anything better to do, I can buy a box of blacking and a brush, and set up ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... small foot-rug in case the ground should be damp; some paint-boxes of the little boys'; a box of fish-hooks for Solomon John; an ink-bottle, carefully done up in a great deal of newspaper, which was fortunate, as the ink was oozing out; some old magazines, and a blacking-bottle; and at the bottom, a sun-dial. It was all very entertaining, and there seemed to be something for every occasion but the present. Old Mr. Bromwick did not wonder the basket was so heavy. It was all so interesting that nobody but the Tremletts went ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... after we parted last night, to look for a piece of mine that had not been taken to my room, and I found the porter there, with his wrist bound up. He said he had strained it in handling a lady's Saratoga—he said a Saratoga was a large trunk—and I begged him to let me relieve him at the boots he was blacking. He refused at first, but I insisted upon trying my hand at a pair, and then he let me go on with the men's boots; he said he could varnish the ladies' without hurting his wrist. It needed less skill than I supposed, and after I had done a few pairs he said I could black ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... to see what changes the new occupant had made. The only unfamiliar thing he saw was a large sheet of brown paper tacked up at the end of the hogshead. On this paper was printed the following notice, the letters having evidently been made by a chewed stick, with liquid blacking considerably ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... hotels. The main street is pervaded by small boys selling Russian newspapers or making a good thing out of cleaning the high Russian military 'sapogee' (top boots). They get five cents for a penny paper and ninepence or a shilling for boot-blacking, but considering the mud of Galicia (I have been up to my boot tops—that is, up to my knees—in it), the charge is not too heavy, especially if the unusual dearness of living be taken ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... they loudly expressed their admiration. "What a capital idea the Prince had had! How well the thing had been managed! This was much better than flying the country, by Dieppe, like D'Haussez; or by Membrolle, like Guernon-Ranville; or being captured, disguised as a footboy, and blacking the boots of Madame de Saint Fargeau, like poor Polignac!" "Guizot was no cleverer than Polignac," exclaimed Persigny. Fleury turned to Morny: "Your theorists would not have succeeded in a coup d'etat." "That is true, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... accessories is nothing; if only I could give an idea of the air of immense importance that Contenson contrived to impart to them! There was something indescribably knowing in the collar of his coat, and the fresh blacking on a pair of boots with gaping soles, to which no language can do justice. However, to give some notion of this medley of effect, it may be added that any man of intelligence would have felt, only on seeing Contenson, that if instead of being a spy he had been a thief, all these odds and ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... of a physician whose consulting room was crowded with patients needing help which he alone, of all men living, could give, spending the precious morning hours in the minutiae of household arrangements, blacking his boots, or preparing his food! Let these things be left to those who cannot do the higher work to ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... set out upon some bombardment, but her eyes were steadfast. She never refused a duty, nor failed in a charge. Every ounce of her was devoted to the work of the moment and to her own improvement for the future. She gave herself to every duty as it arose—boot-blacking, scrubbing, or scullery work—as readily as to her ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... of age, Charles Dickens was pasting labels on blacking-boxes; his father was in prison. At sixteen, he was spending odd hours in the reading-room of the British Museum. At nineteen, he was Parliamentary reporter; at twenty-one, a writer of sketches; at twenty-three, he was getting ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... heels, with her blacking-brush in her hand, and laughed, without seeming the least ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... but sealed—"chopped" it is called—and much importance is accordingly attached to the official seals or chops, which are large circular metal stamps, and the chop is affixed by oiling the stamps, blacking it over the flame of a candle and pressing it on the document to be sealed. The chop bears, in Arabic characters, the name, style and title of the Official using it. The Sultan's Chop is the Great Seal of State and is distinguished by being the only one of which the circumference ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... said he, sitting down and sulkily drawing on his foot-gear, "why this piece of punctiliousness should have made any more difficulty about bringing me my boots than about blacking them." ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... hours had commenced. He had no office to open. His little blacking-box was ready for use, and he looked sharply in the faces of all who passed, addressing each with, "Shine yer ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... she wouldn't mind darning even my stockings," he said. "And I'm sure she'd do them well. Just as I wouldn't mind blacking her boots ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... for a moment they smiled at each other over the prostrate figure of a child, who was cuddling Mr. Pembroke's boots. "She's after the blacking," he explained. "If we left her there, she'd ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... up the Forge to repair the Iron Work; the People employed in Heeling and Boot Topping the Larboard side, Blacking ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... green-grocer's; although the stock comprised, besides a respectable skew of cabbages, carrots, lettuces, and other things in season, a barrel of small beer, a side of bacon, a few red herrings, a black looking can of 'new milk,' and those less perishable articles, Warren's blacking, and Flanders' bricks; while the window was graced with a few samples of common confectionary, celebrated under the sweet names of lollypops, Buonaparte's ribs, ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... said did not quite match what we saw. They later used the recording of his voice together with an affidavit sworn to by a technician that our receiver was operating perfectly, as evidence in my hearing. They proved, in their own way, that Lynds had suffered continual delirium after blacking out. The speed, they said, was the cause. It became known as Danger V. Nobody ever bothered to explain why I never encountered the phenomenon of Danger V. It became official record, and my experience was the deviant. It was ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... to work up through the tannery they'll likely look the part more by the time you've got a few coats of lime and blacking on them," was Carmachel's dry response. "Now we'll let the others finish this work. You come inside and you shall have a new job. You've done enough unloading for ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... Ellen, for he had been long intimate with the family.) "If you can't get on without the boy's earning something, why don't you do as white women and men do? Do you ever find them sending their boys out as servants? No; they rather give them a stock of matches, blacking, newspapers, or apples, and start them out to sell them. What is the result? The boy that learns to sell matches soon learns to sell other things; he learns to make bargains; he becomes a small trader, ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... dust, leather, and blacking, we will now reascend to the higher localities of the human person, and will fasten ourselves round the reader's neck. Do not be alarmed, we only want to catch your attention; we will not extend the word to any thing else. Here, too, ladies are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... next morning. Now the next day was Sunday, and at the farm Mrs. Ford had of late insisted on the excellent rule of getting all done that could be done on Saturday night, so as to leave the Lord's day as free as possible from secular duties; so Nelly, sleepy as she was, took up her blacking brushes, and proceeded to rub and polish with all her might. But fatigue was too strong for her, and before she had got through the third pair, her head sank down and she lost all consciousness, till she suddenly started up, thinking Mrs. Ford was calling ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... was a little flurried by Mr. Britling's too detailed examination of her haul. "What good is blacking?" he asked. She would not hear him. She felt he was trying to spoil her morning. She declared she must get on back to her home. "Don't say I didn't warn you," she said. "I've got no end of things to do. There's peas! I want to show cook how to bottle our peas. For this year—it's ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... said the wounded sergeant faintly, as we went to his side, and he smiled up at me. "I heard you blacking my character behind my back. Never mind about the ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... to school both ways, saving a dollar and a quarter a month. Have found a cheaper laundry; one dollar more saved. Cut down fruit bill; one dollar more. Blacked my white straw sailor with shoe-blacking, trimmed it with two neckties and an old blackbird badly molted; result perfectly hideous, but the sugar-bowl, clothing, and sundry fund are out of debt and doing well. Had my faded gray dress dyed black, and trimmed the jacket with ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... would ask his little white friends in the street how to spell certain words and the meaning of them. In this way he soon learned to read. The first and most important book owned by him was called the "Columbian Orator." He bought it with money secretly earned by blacking boots on the street. It contained selected passages from such great orators as Lord Chatham, William Pitt Fox, and Sheridan. These speeches were steeped in the sentiments of liberty, and were full of ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... and interesting scene from our window. Besides the motley crowd of passers-by, there are booths and tables stationed thick below. One man in particular is busily engaged in selling his store of blacking in the auction style, in a manner that would do credit to a real Down-caster. He has flaming certificates exhibited, and prefaces his calls to buy with a high-sounding description of his wonderful qualities. He has a bench ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... stimulate customers—for he dealt in gentlemen's outfitting. His golf cap, which was also from stock and aslant over his eye, gave his misery a desperate touch. He wore brown leather boots—because he hated the smell of blacking. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... emotions, the old man rushed headlong, with as much rapidity as his age permitted, from the bed-chamber, shut the door behind him, and, purple, choking and foaming at the mouth, his eyes starting from his head, he found himself nose to nose with honest Basque, who was blacking boots in the anteroom. He seized Basque by the collar, and shouted full in his face in fury:—"By the hundred thousand Javottes of the devil, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... came in, blinking at the sudden change from bright light to half twilight, and Charming Billy took the opportunity to kick a sardine can of stove-blacking under the stove where it would not be seen. Some predecessor with domestic instincts had left behind him half a package of "Rising Sun," and Billy had found it and was intending to blacken the stove just as soon as he finished the dishes. That he had left it ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... is level and good, and the yadoya people see that I am provided with a substantial breakfast in good season. My boots, I find, have been cleaned even. They were cleaned with a rag, O-hanna apologizing for the absence of shoe-brushes and blacking in pidgeon English: "Brush ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... was nine years old his family moved to London. There the father fell into debt, and by the brutal laws of the period was thrown into prison. The boy went to work in the cellar of a blacking factory, and there began that intimate acquaintance with lowly characters which he used later to such advantage. He has described his bitter experience so often (in David Copperfield for instance) that the biographer may well pass over ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... dramatic quality of his own temperament and which always continued to be the second moving force of his life. When he was ten years old his father was imprisoned for debt (like Micawber, in the Marshalsea prison), and he was put to work in the cellar of a London shoe-blacking factory. On his proud and sensitive disposition this humiliation, though it lasted only a few months, inflicted a wound which never thoroughly healed; years after he was famous he would cross the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... aroused, and the next morning, early, he was in the menagerie. The first sight that struck his eye was the elephant, keeled over on one side, and weaving his trunk about, evidently as a signal of distress; while his keeper and another man were—blacking-pot and shoe-brushes in hand—going all over ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... through the town in good time for the recommencement of business, when he came upon a little boy, at the corner of a street, blowing his fingers, and stumping up and down the pavement to keep his blood moving while he waited for a job: his brushes lay on the top of his blacking-box on the curbstone. Clare saw that he was both hungry and cold—states of sensation with which he was far too familiar to look on the signs of them with indifference. To give him something to do, and so ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... everywhere along the wayside were improvised camps, with tents made of waggon-covers, where the ceaseless indomitable work of cleaning was being carried out in all its searching details. Shirts were drying on elder-bushes, kettles boiling over gypsy fires, men shaving, blacking their boots, cleaning their guns, rubbing down their horses, greasing their saddles, polishing their stirrups and bits: on all sides a general cheery struggle against the prevailing dust, discomfort and disorder. Here and there a young soldier leaned against a garden paling to talk ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... in greenhouses here, eclipse it in the beauty of the individual blossom. This latter flower, whose superb scarlet corolla stains black, is employed by the Chinese married women, it is said, to discolor their teeth; but in the West Indies it sinks to even greater ignominy as a dauber for blacking shoes! ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... and shifts for himself by blacking boots, selling papers, and "swiping" fruit often appears much smarter than a boy of the same age who is going to school all the time and does not see so much of the world. A boy of twelve who has lived by his wits is often keener than a boy of the same age who has ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... Grandma—can I throw this away?" the girl said over and over, displaying a nearly empty box of blacking, a moist bag tightly rolled over perhaps a pound of sugar, a broken egg beater, a stopped alarm clock, a bottle of toothache drops, a dog's old collar, a cracked saucer with a cake of brown soap tightly adhering to it, a few dried onions, a broken comb, ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... your blacking; I have to lead the attack on the 'Pigeon Feet' at eight precisely. It is now half-past seven," said the General, consulting a large kitchen clock that stood in the corner of ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... how difficult servants are. Mrs. Twiss makes a grievance of it. They won't drink the tea in the kitchen; the currants are not so good. She always gets the matches there, and the blacking. Everything else Mrs. Twiss finds ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... of ballads, and crying of news, With whitening of buckles, and blacking of shoes, Did Hartley set out, both shoeless and shirtless, And moneyless too, but not very dirtless; Two pence he had gotten by begging, that's all; One bought him a brush, and one a black ball; For clouts at a loss he could not be much, The clothes on his back as being but such; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... adepts at deception in the sale of their commodity as the most knowing down-easter, or tricky horse dealer. William's occupation on board the steamer, as they steamed south, was to prepare the stock for the market, by shaving off whiskers and blacking the grey hairs with ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... watching the blue smoke drifting and thinning away on the air. While he stood a man drove up with a horse and car. The car was laden with groceries—packets of somebody's tea, boxes of somebody's chocolate, bottles of beer and of mineral water, tins of boot blacking, and parcels of soap; confectionery, and tinned fish, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... boast of being neat seamstresses do confess to a certain degree of pride in the boast. But the satisfaction arises from the well-doing, and not from the fact that it is Sewing well done; for anything well and thoroughly done, even if it be only boot-blacking on a street corner, or throwing paper torpedoes in a theatre orchestra to imitate the crack of a whip in the "Postilion Galop," gives to its doer the same sense of self-satisfaction. It would be folly now, as it may ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... accusingly on Lloyd. "Didn't you know better than to put stove-blacking on that stove? When it gets het up, it will smoke to fare-ye-well, and start my asthma to going again full tilt. Some folks are mighty thoughtless, never have ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... recollect what you are saying. I would not, for the custom of his Majesty's Lord High Admiral, have any discouraging words be uttered in my house against the reputation of any virtuous and fair-dealing slavers! The Lord protect me from blacking the character of any honest subject ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... off the down, and towards Banstead village. He is on the watch for characteristic objects of the countryside, and rustling through the leaves beneath a chestnut avenue he comes upon an old boot. It is a very, very old boot, all its blacking washed off by the rain, and two spreading chestnut leaves, yellow they are with blotches of green, with their broad fingers extended, rest upon it, as if they would protect and altogether cover the poor old boot in its last resting-place. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... little rosettes of red and white wafers; but none of these being applicable to his present case, she sits gazing in resigned imbecility, till finally she desperately resolves to improvise him some gruel, and, after a laborious turn in the kitchen,—after burning her dress and blacking her fingers,—succeeds only in bringing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... hand-glasses were borrowed, and hair cut, and chins shaved, until we feared our Christmas guests would look like convicts. Then the Dandy producing blacking brushes, boots that had never seen blacking before, shone like ebony. After that a mighty washing of hands took place, to remove the blacking stain; and then the Quarters settled down to a general "titivation," Tam "cleaning his ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... introduced me to one gentleman, I forget his name now, as the patron of the shoeblacks. On my inquiring what that meant, he said that he had started the idea of providing employment for poor street boys, by furnishing them with brushes and blacking, and forming them into regular companies of shoeblacks. Each boy has his' particular stand, where he blacks the shoes of every passer by who chooses to take the trouble of putting up his foot and paying his twopence. Lord Shaftesbury also presented ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe |
